Buried alive two years ago, crane collapse victim John Gallego lived to tell the tale to a Manhattan judge today.
“I was watching TV, when I hear a noise — something breaking — I don’t know what it is,” Gallego remembered in gripping testimony at the manslaughter trial of accused killer crane rigger William Rapetti.
“I look out the window, and I see a huge thing coming down,” he remembered of the East 51st St. collapse that killed seven, sparing him — barely.
“I couldn’t do anything,” he said of standing at his living room window and watching the 200-foot-high tower crane fall onto his four-story, E. 50th St. brownstone, where he lived in a one-bedroom apartment.
“I see a huge thing coming down. I couldn’t do anything. I was really scared — just hearing noise. The next thing, I was buried alive,” he said.
“It was very dark. My first thought was, ‘I’m dead.'”
Even a coffin would have afforded more room.
“It was a very tight space,” he said of his pitch black tomb. “I was able to move my left arm and my leg.”
He struggled to fish his cell phone out of his pocket, he said, and made two calls. The first was to his girlfriend.
“I’m barely alive, I need help!” he testified he told her. “Please call 911!”
Then he called 911 himself.
“Please! Help me!” his voice sounds out, plaintively, on a recording played aloud in court.
“Sir, I can’t understand you!” the operator snaps. “Stop crying. A building fell on you? The building is on top of you?”
Gallego’s answer was unintelligible — just moans, high pitched and frantic.
Prosecutors blame the collapse, which killed six workers and Gallego’s friend, who was visiting from Miami, on Rapetti’s decision to flout regulators and manufacturers’ directions in using four old, worn polyester web straps to temporarily suspend an 11,000-pound piece of steel 18 stories up the crane’s mast.
The worst of the straps — so old it was frayed and discolored by sunlight — snapped first, a jolt that broke the other straps and set off a chain reaction of plummeting braces that felled the crane, prosecutors argue.
Rapetti counters that numerous other irregularities well below the 18th floor actually caused the crash — in particular the Department of Building’s decision to approve the engineer’s previously unheard-of cost-cutting decision not to bolt the massive crane into concrete and bedrock, but instead sit it atop two I-beams.
Testimony in the non-jury trial is expected to last more than a month.