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"He was pretty much dying"
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
"He was pretty much dying"
Heard about big crane accident in Rittenhouse Square that killed a guy and decimated a building? We did too, and promptly dispatched intern extraordinaire Julia Harte down to the scene. She filed this report (and the pics up top):
A 40-year-old construction worker fell 125 feet to his death today after the crane holding him up toppled over at the intersection of 21st and Walnut. William Walker, 33, a Comcast technician who was working half a block away at the time, saw the whole incident and ran over to help the worker, who fell onto a Verizon truck at the intersection. Walker tried to talk to the guy, but he was unresponsive.
"He was bleeding out of his nose, bleeding out of his ears, partially out of his eye," Walker says. "He was pretty much dying." At 1:42 p.m., about half an hour after the accident, the unidentified worker was pronounced dead, police said.
According to Walker and other eyewitnesses, the crane began to tilt after the crane operator tried to turn it around, inadvertently catching a tire in an open manhole in the process. As the wheel slid firmly into the hole, the crane teetered back and forth three times, and came crashing down on 21st Street, tearing a chunk off the roof of a corner florist shop as it fell. The piece of scaffolding hit an elderly woman passing by, breaking her arm. By all accounts, she got lucky.
"The crane just missed hitting her," Walker tells The Clog.
The construction worker was performing a routine check on the face of the First Presbyterian Church when his crane toppled over. When Walker got to him, the man was hanging off the side of the Verizon truck. He had to be cut out of his harness by Fire Department officials.
A driver was inside the truck, unhurt but "afraid to get out because of the guy hanging outside his window," Walker says.
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