Three-story building in NY City partially collapses

By Laila Kearney NEW YORK (Reuters) - A three-story building undergoing demolition partially collapsed on Manhattan's West Side on Wednesday, injuring a construction worker and raining rubble onto a parked school bus and its driver. Construction crews were using heavy equipment to bring down the brick building at 57th Street near 11th Avenue when the materials between the second and third floors collapsed, City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal told reporters at the scene. Scaffolding around the construction site also collapsed and the refuse cascaded onto the roof of a parked school bus, smashing its windshield. That jolted awake driver Daniel Campbell, who was sleeping inside the bus while awaiting the return of elementary school students on a field trip from Ridgewood, New Jersey. "It was like a nightmare," Campbell said. "It was a whole bunch of things that fell." Demolition permits were properly obtained by the construction company, Rosenthal said. All construction crew members were accounted for, and one suffered minor injuries, she said. Inspectors from the city Buildings Department were checking the safety of the site so that firefighters may conduct searches for anyone who may have been trapped, Rosenthal said. A half dozen firefighters were being lifted by cherry-picker trucks and were using power tools to saw through the collapsed scaffolding. The report of a partial collapse came at 2:37 p.m., a fire department spokesman said. (Reporting by Laila Kearney; Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg and Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Paul Thomasch, Bill Trott and Leslie Adler)