Victim impaled at work site was safety consultant

Paterson developer calls incident ‘freak accident’

PATERSON — The man impaled on two steel rods during a construction accident on Saturday was working for a company hired to improve safety while the 138-unit housing complex is being built, said developer Charles Florio.

The victim, a 51-year-old man, somehow survived the horrific incident after Paterson firefighters cut through the metal bars to free him from the frame of the building and took him to the hospital with the two rods still piercing his body, authorities said.

Florio said he retained The Casa Group, a New York-based safety consultant, paying the firm roughly $100 per hour to oversee the construction at the former Paterson Armory site on Market Street in response to a previous accident that happened there during the summer.

In the first incident, something calling shoring — a temporary structure created as part of the construction process — collapsed, Florio said. City officials said one person was injured in that incident.

“We hired a compliance company because we didn’t want this kind of thing to happen,” Florio said of Saturday’s incident. “It was a freak accident.”

Florio said he did not know all the details of what happened Saturday. City officials over the weekend said the man fell through a shaft from the eighth story to the seventh and became impaled and suspended in midair by the metal rods, known as rebar, which are used to reinforce concrete during construction.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration confirmed that it is investigating Saturday’s incident, saying it has up to six months to complete its probe. Florio said he met with an OSHA representative on Monday morning and received permission for construction to resume.

OSHA’s records indicate the federal agency has issued violations against Primetime Contractors, Florio’s construction company, in six other cases in Paterson during the past two years. In four of those cases, Florio faces about $393,000 in possible fines. The OSHA website says the penalties all involve infractions of stairway construction standards, but the agency’s electronic records do not provide additional details.

Florio is contesting those violations, which allegedly happened in construction jobs at 188-200 21st Ave., 73-75 Beech St., 122 Fair St. and 185-189 Broadway.

Two of the six cases have been closed, according to the OSHA website. In one instance, involving citations at 216 Spring St., there was “an informal settlement,” the federal records show. The other case involved violations at 425 11th Ave., but the OSHA website does not say what the outcome was.

Florio said the problems in the six OSHA cases involved work by one of his subcontractors. But he declined to comment further on the pending OSHA penalties, saying he is in litigation with the federal agency.

Florio said it is important to view the six cases in the context of all the work Primetime has done in Paterson during the past 12 years.

“We’ve had over $600 million in construction and no less than 5,000 new units,” the developer said. “We have a pretty good track record.”

Florio, a staunch supporter of Mayor Andre Sayegh, has done far more than simply build apartments in Paterson. He has made numerous donations to local community groups and become a combatant in the city’s bare-knuckle political brawls.

Florio essentially was the man who sent former Mayor Joey Torres to prison. After a dispute with the mayor, Florio hired a private investigator to follow Torres around for many months. That effort produced video recordings of Paterson public works employees on city time doing renovations at a liquor distribution business owned by the Torres family.

After Florio provided those recordings to NBC News, the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office conducted an investigation that resulted in Torres’ pleading guilty in September 2017 to conspiracy to committee official misconduct.

Earlier this year, Florio funded a lawsuit that unsuccessfully tried to keep one of Sayegh’s rivals, Aslon Goow, from running for mayor.