For days I have been blogging about my rock n’ roll experience of being on tour with Iron Maiden.

Just a day after returning to New York, I was back in the newsroom working away on a Barack Obama story when my producer Ellen, said “we’ve got to roll, there’s been a crane collapse a few blocks from here … and it’s bad.”

When we got to the scene, this is what we found. A 130-foot tall section of construction crane leaning up against a high rise brick apartment complex. You can see the building construction crews were working on, on the left hand side, when it fell over.

But this wasn’t the worst of it!

Just beyond this building on the right, one block south, was a four story townhouse, that had four residential units, and a bar on the ground floor, Fubar. The cab of the crane shot off like a rocket and flattened the building in a matter of seconds. Four construction workers died, and when I last left, two more had been found. There is still a missing 28- year-old woman who was here in New York visiting her friend for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities. I can’t imagine what the victims families must be going through right now. It is all just so awful.

Witnesses, who lived on some of the top floors of the first building hit, say they could see construction workers hanging on for their lives as they plummeted to their death. If you look closely at this next picture, you can see where the townhouse once stood.

The gray building to the left, had a big chunk torn off in the incident, creating what I’ve been calling a “doll house” effect. It looks like a grand scale dollhouse, and if you were a giant, you could reach in and move the beds around, and move the pictures off someones wall.

The search and rescue efforts have been heartbreaking, and impressive to watch. Agencies from all over New York came in and brought their most sophisticated equipment, “snake eye pole cameras” to get into the rubble and look in the small areas for signs of life, listening devices, thermal imaging devices.

Big hydrolic cranes were brought in to do the heavy lifting, while stunned neighbors could only look on. Twisted steel that looked like strings of spaghetti were scooped up by forklifts and trucks by the tons.

The question now remains: how could something like this happen? We will find out soon enough if this was a mechanical, or human error. The construction company had been hit with up to 13 violations, but the Mayor of NY says that is not unusual for a project this size.

As far as the owner of the bar that was crushed, and who had employees injured? He says “we are going to sue the hell out of them.”

I’m sure others will too.