Work Zone Dangers Highlighted at News Conference

By MELISSA WALKER

One early morning in Staten Island, before the sun crested the horizon, Nick Antico was manning a jackhammer, doing what thousands of Department of Transportation workers do daily, improving the safety of our streets.

Antico never made it home that day. In 2005 he was stuck by a speeding SUV that fled the scene, he died five days later.

On Tuesday afternoon at the site of a road-repaving project in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg kicked off the first day of National Work Zone Awareness week. She remembered Antico, whose wife and daughter surrounded by DOT workers, looked on.

The Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Emily Lloyd announced the launch of the agency’s new and improved Zone Watch program which introduces nine new camera equipped trailers to deter speeders and document any accidents.

“Together we must do our part to prevent work zone accidents,” Lloyd said, before displaying the new magnetic ribbons that will adorn all DEP vehicles, and bracelets and roadside signs reminding drivers to slow down.

While the numbers of road workers deaths have not increased over the years, Trottenberg and others work daily to ensure they won’t. New initiatives and safety measures are enacted throughout the year in an attempt to bring the number of accidents down.

Denise Richardson, managing director of the General Contractors Association had a simple but serious message: “When you drive through a work zone, turn off the phone, slow down, you may save a life,” she pleaded.

For one young woman who looked on, standing in front of a truck with her picture printed on the side, the sadness of the little girl who lost her father in 2005 was still there, and for her the message was real.