LOWER MANHATTAN (PIX11)—
A place that's always jittery got a major scare just before 10 a.m. Thursday when more than 30 tons of steel came crashing down from a World Trade Center building under construction. An investigation into the incident is underway, but one thing is abundantly clear -- a tragedy of major proportions was avoided."I never heard anything like it," a World Trade Center construction worker who wouldn't give his name told PIX11 News. "My heart came out of my chest. I was standing underneath, about 25 feet away. The sound of it was tremendous."
The worker described what he saw and heard when three I-beams, weighing at least 10 tons each, fell from near the top of 4 World Trade Center, a tower that's now reached 50 stories. The beams landed on the semi that had, minutes before, delivered the beams to the construction site.
Another hardhat who had been right below the falling steel also would not give his name, but video he shot on his iPhone showed how one of the two cranes on top of the tower hoisted the beams up as normal, then, "By the time it gets to the top of the glass [windows covering about 40 stories of the building, the steel] comes down."
"When it hit the floor, you could hear it," construction worker Matthew Killeen told PIX11 News. "It sounded like a bomb went off."
"I heard the building shake," one of Killeen's coworkers said, "And we were like, 'whoa.'" Another coworker added, "It shook for like a minute." The three of them had been working in the upper floors of the 4 WTC tower, and felt the swaying from there.
Glass fitter Carl Steine was on the 42nd floor. "I went to the north side [of the building]," he said, "I looked down and it was a big mess down there. I seen all the cables and the beams on top of the truck, the truck was smashed and all the cables on top of the beams."
That cable had snapped away from the north sector roof crane, and when the dust settled, workers on site were amazed to see that they were all present and accounted for -- including the driver of the truck onto which the I-beams fell. The relief was so great that people in the construction zone, where it all happened, managed to joke about it after they realized that there was no human toll.
"The truck driver needs a new pair of underwear," a construction worker who witnessed the incident said. "Other than that, everybody's okay."
Silverstein Properties, which has possession of the site, won't release the name of the truck driver. It did order an evacuation, that it partially lifted by mid-afternoon Tuesday. What everyone who'd been on site knew and talked about while they waited to go back into their work site, was that they had witnessed an extremely close call.
"It's crazy nobody got hurt," Killeen said, with his fellow worker adding, "A great thing nobody got hurt. It's a miracle."
