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Window washer falls 29 floors to his death downtown
By adamg on Mon, 10/23/2023 - 9:13am
Update: The Suffolk County District Attorney's office identified the victim as Nicholas Marks, 40, of East Weymouth.
Live Boston reports a window washer fell 29 floors at 100 Summer St. just before 8 a.m. - and that numerous people saw him fall and called 911.
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Comments
How awful.
I cannot imagine the absolute terror he must have experienced. RIP.
Awful
Condolences to his family
No one should die at work.
No one should die at work. This should have never happened with proper PPE an safety precautions. Therefore only person who is possibly to blame for this is the boss. They should face full liabilities and repercussions for this.
Make companies and managers pay
Every few months, a construction worker or similar dies in Boston (I don’t know how to categorize a window washer, but it is similar to construction in risk).
If a cop or firefighter died as often as often as those in construction died, the public would be outraged. There would be massive funerals/parades every time.
Whether it is a ditch in the South End, a garage at Haymarket, or window washing on Summer Street, companies in this region are killing their workers and obviously not learning their lesson.
Make it harder for companies to kill their workers.
OSHA Has Yet to Save a Life
Workers die at the shipyards and the docks too.
By the time OSHA steps in—if they even show—it’s too late. As for those penalties some companies end up paying, where does that money go?
That's quite the claim
There seems to be plenty of evidence that OSHA's activities have saved many, many people from injury or death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administrat...
They should be more aggressive in enforcement, though, and have the ability to set higher penalties.
As for where the penalties go... the point is not where the money *goes*, it's where it comes *from*. They're intended as punishment and incentive, to make flouting the rules less likely to be profitable.
I agree with your sentiment
Just FYI, Kevin Otto was sentenced to two years in prison for those horrific deaths in the South End. And his probation bars him from that occupation.
Sometimes the companies are at fault, although sometimes there are just very risky jobs where no specific person or entity is at fault.
Cops and firefighters close down streets routinely so you could say it’s a job perk when there’s a funeral.
Questions
Truly awful way to die.
I have a few questions about your proposal:
- What was the nature of the fall?
- Was the employee following safety protocols?
- Did he even have the required equipment to follow safety protocols?
- Were workers monitored to make sure they follow safety protocols? If so, how often?
- Were safety protocols often violated?
- What is the company's record for safety?
What I'm trying to get at is, did the worker simply ignore safety protocols on his own, or was this more systemic within the company? People take short cuts all the time on construction sites and get away with it almost all the time. Almost. Crane operators will extend the boom just a bit beyond what the charts say is safe and get away with it - until they don't. Window washers may skip attaching a safety harness just for a minute.
A good friend is a safety officer for a large construction company and actually came to blows one time when a foreman refused put fans up to control the VOC's at a site.
Again, dying on the job is awful. We all want to go to work, earn our pay, then head home at the end of the day.
Fault vs responsibility
It is management’s responsibility to monitor and deincentivize deadly shortcuts. I don’t care if this window washer is 100% at fault for his own death (and I doubt that he is). Workers who take shortcuts are usually incentivized or coerced into doing so by shitty, hostile, and unethical management.
Alas, many workers knowingly
Alas, many workers knowingly engage in unsafe and downright dangerous practices, some get away with it, some don't.
here it is
management always wants the credit but never the responsibility.
by definition management, and in turn corporate leadership, are the ones responsible for ensuring a safe workplace at all times.
Let's not make assumptions
All my questions addressed everything you said, asking what the environment was regarding safety in the company. I prefer not to make assumptions about the company, and would rather deal with facts.
Once the worker is 29 stories up, he's on his own and hopefully follows safety protocols.
Nope
We don't know if there was equipment failure or something similar beyond his control.
I asked that above
In a comment above, I asked "What was the nature of the fall?".
Quite often workers skip safety protocols …
… because they are under pressure from management to work fast and get the job done ASAP or else.
Stop looking for ways to blame the victim here.
I'm not blaming anybody
I'm asking questions to see what the deal is. I have drawn no conclusions, either way.
You and tblade, however, want to blame the company with no facts supporting that claim. Kind of like election deniers.
That's "quite often" and not "always".
We both know there are people who will take shortcuts entirely of their own accord. It can be out of laziness or machismo, for instance.
But I would still agree that responsibility lies with management; the only way to ensure that management does not push people to take shortcuts is to force them to punish shortcut-taking behavior that is done purely out of laziness.
(To be clear: None of this is meant to imply anything about the specific worker who died today. And even if they messed up, no one deserves to die from that!)
“ We both know “
Rather condescending of you.
This turn of phrase always reflects badly on the person using it.
OK
I know it, then, and assume that you do as well because it's a super common trait among people in general.
It’s 2023 why don’t we have
It’s 2023 why don’t we have drones doing this shit
We've had the tech for
We've had the tech for decades - at least for buildings built for it.
Not flying drones - rather, automated rigs that run on tracks along the exterior of the building's frame.
I would never want to take
I would never want to take away a job from humans but this is one of those things where I am shocked some company has not found a robotic solution for. I guess it might be hard with every building having different windows but there are scores of windows in this world and we already have AI and tech from self driving cars and roombas to pull from. It seems like it is something that could be designed if there was a desire to do so.
Same reasons that fast food and harvesting aren't automated
People are cheaper and perform better than tech.
A morbid question...
Was it the Summer Street side or the Devonshire Street side? Devonshire Street is famous as a wind tunnel at street level. I can barely imagine what the wind speeds would be 29 stories up.
Condolences to his family. RIP.