The crane that snapped back at One57 is still hanging precariously over Midtown, but the city is preparing a plan to secure the boom on the billionaire-beloved building that will commence tomorrow and should be completed by Monday night, Mayor Bloomberg announced at his press briefing this afternoon.
“Tomorrow, work on securing the crane will begin,” he said. “It’s approximately a 36 hour operation, and the goal is to remove the vacate order to allow people in the vicinity to return to their homes and offices by Monday night. We’ve just got to make sure we do this in a way that doesn’t cost any lives.”
It has taken this long to get to taking down the crane because the city was studying the damage from every angle to ensure no further accidents during the recovery procedure.
“We think we have a plan that’s been well studied by everybody,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “We’ve been on the crane with workers, we’ve photographed everything, we’ve studied the blueprints, and we think have a plan that will in 36 hours let us secure the boom to the building and then over the next three or four weeks, we’ll have to build another crane next to it to take down the pieces that are damaged.”
The Journal had some details on just how the crane might be secured this morning, a procedure that can only be described as Rube Goldberg-esque.
The plan calls for a worker to rotate the entire crane using a small hand crank, turning the damaged boom toward the building. Then cables would be used to secure the boom to 10- to 12-foot steel arms installed near the top of the condominium tower on West 57th Street, the people said.
Later, a derrick would be installed near the top of the building, and used to lower the crane boom to the ground. Another boom would be raised so that construction work on the tower could continue, according to a person briefed on the plan.
Ah, the good ol’ hand crank. We’re living by candle light, back to 18th Century technology.
