Lawsuit filed in fatal wall collapse

Constuction accident killed two in Dec.

A wall collapse at a construction site in Maybrook in December killed two men.Jim Sabastian/for The Times Herald-Record

Published: 2:00 AM - 06/27/14

MAYBROOK A wrongful-death lawsuit has been filed on behalf of the estate of one of the two men killed in the Dec. 2 collapse of a retaining wall at a construction site in the Village of Maybrook.

The suit was filed Friday in state Supreme Court in New York County (Manhattan) by Doreen Ellen Winkler, as the administratrix of the estate of her husband, Scott S. Winkler.

Winkler was killed Dec. 2 when a retaining wall collapsed while concrete was being poured for a mockup of a planned interconnection of New York City's Catskill and Delaware aqueducts in the Town of Gardiner. The mockup was intended to be used by workers to practice techniques on the actual construction site.

Winkler was taken to Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla and died eight days later. The Winklers, who lived in Monroe, had five children.

The suit names as defendants Halmar International, a general contractor on the aqueduct project, which owns the site where the accident happened at 918 Homestead Ave. in Maybrook, and several of its subsidiaries; the Haks Group and Haks Engineers, Architects and Land Surveyors, firms hired to do certain work on the project; and New York City and its Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP operates and maintains the aqueduct systems that supply New York City and a number of area municipalities with water.

The suit asserts that all the defendants had "a duty to operate, control, supervise, manage and maintain the premises and all structures at 918 Homestead Avenue ... in a safe, lawful and proper fashion such that no person lawfully thereat would be caused to sustain personal injuries and/or death."

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Lawsuit filed in fatal wall collapse