Workers Injured In Fall At Hospital

Two construction workers were injured this morning, one seriously, at the new Sonora Community Hospital construction site on Greenley Road.

Details are sketchy at this hour, but hospital construction project superintendent Jerry Newman says a roofer, working for a Livermore roofing contractor, was lowering cutting torch equipment and tanks down the outside of the building from the top floor to a lower roof when the accident occurred. The worker fell 26 feet to the roof below.

“We still don´t know what happened, but evidentally, it (the equipment) got away from him,” Newman said. “We won´t know until we interview all the workers.”

Preliminary reports say he suffered a broken leg, broken arm and head injuries in the fall.

There were eight roofers working on the project this morning, according to Newman.

Emergency crews carried the injured man on a stretcher down six flights of stairs in the under-construction, four-story, 121,000-square-foot hospital to get him to ground level.

The victim was conscious when he was loaded into the air ambulance and flown to Doctors Medical Center in Modesto.

A second man, a foreman for the roofing contractor, was also injured, sustaining a broken ankle in the accident. It´s not known at this time how he was injured.

Newman said this is the second time a construction worker has been injured on the job since the project started in December 2000.