A friend of mine commented on a factoid he heard: "The number of construction workers who died in NYC is equal to the number of floors in the buildings." Now I found that to be pretty unbelievable, since I live in a 29 story building and I doubt if 29 people died building it. On the other hand, maybe thousands of people died in building in past years, and with the slow rate of death now, it is about at the level of how many floors there are. I did a rough calculation: that if there are 10 blocks by 100 blocks in Manhattan (=1,000 sq blocks), and on each square block are 3 by 10 buildings at an average height of 5 stories: that would be 150,000 floors. Could that many workers have died? Any comments on this? (or how to research it) (you can send a message to my email)
Pete

• ID# 39.2 (reply to #39.1) - 19 Jun 1998
  To put it short: no -- especially if we talk about workers in New York City only, where there have, moreover, been truly multi-storey buildings for only a century and a half -- and construction safety has improved constantly. Take the last three zeroes off the figure above and you may get nearer the correct number of fatalities -- including also the bridge construction casualties. After all, this is no founding of St. Petersburg or construction of Burma Railway we're talking about here... ED.