DC 37 Tragedy

NEW YORK CITY

City maintenance worker Archie Tyler drowned in early March in a stunning accident involving a storm sewer.

The 43-year-old Tyler, a member of Local 376 (DC 37), was sucked into the sewer while trying to clean a drainpipe connecting it to a reservoir in the Bronx. He and other maintenance workers were emptying the reservoir of stagnant water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying the West Nile Virus.

Tyler’s death was the third involving a DC 37 member working for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in just over two years. Weeks after the tragedy, both public and union officials remained uncertain about exactly what caused it and the conditions that prevailed at the time.

But available evidence pointed to unnecessarily dangerous working conditions: lack of a grate or cover over the drain opening; lack of a secure fixture near the opening where workers could attach protective harnesses; and poor footing on the algae-covered reservoir bottom.

Bill Fenty, deputy administrator of Local 376, declared that blue-collar members in the DEP "do extremely dangerous jobs, and the agency refuses to recognize this."

At Tyler’s funeral, a police honor guard carried the casket to a hearse as a row of DEP enforcement agents saluted. Among Tyler’s survivors is his fiancée, to whom he had proposed only a few weeks earlier.