On Saturday, Nov. 6, 1909, just before noon quitting time, my great-grandfather Victor Fullam rode up a scaffold, seven stories on a new 12-story office building, at 40 E. 22nd St. in Manhattan. He was on his way to inspect a bricklayer's work before the half-day ended. Moments later, he died.

A steel pin holding the scaffold in place either worked its way out or was pulled.

Victor Andrew Fullam, 47, plummeted 140 feet to his death on the sidewalk below. The bricklayer, who also fell, was seriously injured but recovered.

Walking up the street to get his father for dinner was Victor's third son, Lawrence, age 17. Lawrence saw his father, his only living parent, in the air. He raced to a spot below him.

Lawrence caught Victor in his arms, but he could not prevent his father's head from hitting the pavement.

A short time before the scaffold collapsed, Victor ordered a second bricklayer to wash down a section of the new building's facade, before leaving work for the day. The bricklayer had urinated on the building, and Victor, the superintendent of the job, was offended.

Whether the chastised bricklayer pulled the steel pin or a tragic coincidence occurred remains a mystery.

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Anne Fullam Goeke is a Capital Region writer.

Victor's older brother, Edward Fullam, president of the family-owned Fullam Construction Co., was taken into custody. He was charged with negligence. What happened with those charges isn't clear; no court record could be found at the Municipal Archives.

Victor Fullam's death underscores one of the realities of New York's Scaffold Law that isn't talked about in the debate over whether it should be changed or repealed: It has not eliminated accidents.

The same year my great-grandfather died, another less tragic accident occurred, this one during the building of the Manhattan Bridge.

Karl W. Koch III relates how his namesake plunged from the bridge's scaffolding through the iced-over East River, but was fortunately fished out by bridge workers. He was dragged to shore and hauled in a horse-drawn wagon to Bellevue Hospital, where the hospital orderly assigned to him went to lunch. He lay shivering.

"They ran and got my grandmother, and she and a neighbor went up to Bellevue," says Koch, whose 40 years in heavy steel construction informed his book, "Men of Steel: The Story of the Family That Built the World Trade Center."

"They found him lying frozen in wet clothes in the bed," he says. "My grandmother, who had never stolen anything in her life, stole a wheelchair from the hospital. She and the neighbor put my grandfather into it and wheeled him home. She took care of him. He was back at work in two weeks."

Adopted in 1885, the state's Scaffold Law was amended in the early 1920s to include a provision that makes construction owners, developers and contractors 100 percent liable for any and all height-related injuries suffered on a site. Owners of one- and two-story dwellings are exempted from 100 percent liability.




Why aren't we talking about doing more to prevent them?

A provision of the law that might help prevent accidents — if it were observed — requires that all scaffolding be designed to bear four times the maximum weight allowed. The records of many cases suggest that the most common error is scaffolding that could not hold the weight of one or more workers.

"It's a critical element in construction that the workplace be made safe," Koch says.

He has an idea to improve the law:

Koch would add an element to existing law: "Contractors, in order to protect themselves and in order to be wise, and not to save money and just grab a scaffolding and throw it up, should hire a professional engineer to inspect the scaffold drawings and put his stamp on it."

That would put the engineer — and the license that is his livelihood — on the hook, Koch reasons.

"Now you can be absolutely certain workers will be protected and the contractor would be protected," Koch says. While he acknowledges his idea "isn't the cheapest" one out there, it is one that's about saving lives, not money.

As for those focused on the high cost of construction, he says, "Shame on contractors who want to get rid of the Scaffold Law."