Body recovered after York U. rig collapse
Posted October 12, 2011 6:27 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
After an all-night recovery effort, crews removed the body of man killed when a drill rig collapsed on the York University campus.
Around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, emergency workers recovered the 24-year-old’s body, which had been trapped for about 15 hours. The site’s soft soil made for a difficult operation because the machinery could have shifted further.
The victim had been operating the another machine at the site of a future subway station when the rig collapsed Tuesday afternoon.
One construction worker was pinned for more than two hours before he was freed by firefighters and paramedics.
Another suffered serious but non-life-threatening head injuries, and three had minor bumps and bruises.
The deceased and injured were excavating the ground for the TTC’s Spadina subway line expansion.
“It is a construction site that is part of our future York University station on the Yonge-University-Spadina line,” TTC spokesman Brad Ross said Tuesday.
“The contractor was doing some excavation work on the site – that’s really all I have at this point, other to say that the contractor themselves have ultimate responsibility for safety on the site, and we will be working with them to understand what happened, and of course with the Ministry of Labour.”
Although there’s been no official word on the cause, some workers on the scene speculated the softness of the ground could have made the area unstable.
The ministry is investigating.
York University students are on reading week, but the few classes scheduled were back to normal on Wednesday. Some had been cancelled Tuesday after the accident.
TTC buses are diverting around the area.
