Don't get yourself killed without company if you want me to write about you on ENR.com.

If you are taking a 17-story plunge on your own, as a 25-year-old immigrant from Ecuador did in New York City the other day, I'm not your guy.

I mean it. I tend not to cover individual jobsite fatalities. With construction deaths in the U.S. averaging between 800 to 1,200 per year, individual fatalities don't rate as news. Construction is an industry with pathology. It can make you sick or kill you and that's the way it's been for a long time.

So if you want to be written about and want us to call your employer and OSHA after you go, you will have to make it part of a group experience and take at least one colleague with you.

Look at the fatality I'm turning down this week, as far as writing, and how the New York Daily News framed it: "Construction Horror: Worker falls 17 floors to his death near Union Square."

There are exceptions to my rules. If a company with a poor safety record and other, prior fatalities, disproportionate for its type of work, losses someone, then I get interested. Or when there is a loss on a prominent project on which you would expect safety practices to be exemplary, that could be news, too.

But I've been covering these accidents for more than 20 years, and there have been so many that we have to filter them so that we can present patterns or themes that make them meaningful to readers. Otherwise it can be like ticking off the honored dead in a war. The effect will be numbing but the story will too often be the same.

January 1, 2007

I find your comments a bit narrow-minded and crass.

I don't believe a headline is the appropriate method to memorialize anyone's given sacrifice no matter how insignificant.

I do however understand that you're perhaps just trying to get the most bang for your journalistic buck…not an uncommon theme in the construction industry.

I challenge you to dig deeper into the next fatality that interests your journalistic curiousity. Find out the real cause.

Did the Owner set it all up with incomplete documents?

Was the general contractor behind schedule or somehow impeded by circumstance?

Was there a business relationship that came before the safety of the employees?

It's time to get into your subject matter….maybe then you'll write something worth reading about that incidental, single fatality.

T. Wilson

December 15, 2006

The profession of engineering has one and only one chief aim -- to protect the public's health, safety, and welfare. Yet, ENR briefly noted in passing the tragic death of Milena Delvalle, a 38-year-old woman, and then continued with "the project is a great success…Boston more livable and triggered billions of dollars" is unconscionable. ENR stated "Some would say that problems should be expected," a limiting-belief that has contributed to other project failures. Rather than argue "One Death Isn't News To Me," ENR might invest some time in searching for the patterns of behavior within the A/E/C industry that allow the insiduous power of traditon to stifle systems thinking.

W.M. Hayden Jr.