$272.5 Million for the Victims of the Tribeca Crane Collapse
Won by Gair, Gair, Conason, Rubinowitz, Bloom, Hershenhorn, Steigman & Mackauf.
A 565-foot crawler crane toppled across a Tribeca street in 2016, killing a young mathematician; the case settled for $272.5 million.
What happened
On the morning of February 5, 2016, a 565-foot crawler crane came down across Worth Street in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. Crews had been trying to lower the rig to the ground as winds picked up during a snow squall, a precaution that went catastrophically wrong. Shortly before 8:30 a.m., the boom toppled along roughly two city blocks, crushing parked cars and sending pedestrians fleeing.
David Wichs, a 38-year-old, Harvard-educated mathematician, was walking to his job at a Lower Manhattan trading firm when the crane fell. He was killed. Several bystanders were hurt, including a man in his seventies who suffered a serious head injury. Wichs left behind a wife, and his death became one of the city's most closely watched wrongful-death cases.
City investigators concluded the collapse was preventable. The Department of Buildings and the Department of Labor found that the crane had been lowered improperly. The boom was brought below the angle the manufacturer's load charts required for the conditions, and crews had not followed the procedures meant to keep the equipment stable in high wind. The operator's license was later revoked, and the city tightened the rules on running cranes in windy weather.
The family and the injured victims were represented by Gair Gair Conason, with Howard S. Hershenhorn leading the case alongside Marijo C. Adimey. The litigation named the companies responsible for the crane and its operation, among them the equipment owner and the rigging contractor whose crew brought the boom down. To recover, the plaintiffs' lawyers had to establish that those defendants were negligent in how the crane was secured and lowered as the weather deteriorated, that the danger was foreseeable and the safeguards were ignored.
The case was resolved in 2025 for $272.5 million. It has been described as the largest crane-accident settlement in New York history and among the largest construction-accident recoveries in the country. For the family of David Wichs and the others injured that morning, the settlement closed a case that began with an ordinary winter commute and a piece of heavy equipment that should never have fallen.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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