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Worker injured in 30-foot fall at South End construction site Thursday, latest in spate of accidents at job sites

A construction crew works at the top level of a construction site at 100 East Canton St. in Boston, where emergency crews responded to an incident earlier on Thursday morning.Erin Clark/Globe Staff

A worker was hospitalized Thursday morning after falling roughly 30 feet at a construction site in Boston’s South End, the latest in a rash of serious injuries at job sites in and around the city, officials said.

Boston police Officer Kim Tavares, a department spokesperson, said officers were called at 10:46 a.m. to the site at 100 East Canton St. for a construction worker injured in a fall.

Brian Alkins, a Boston Fire Department spokesman, said via e-mail that the man had fallen approximately 30 feet. Tavares said the injured man was taken to a local hospital, where he was listed as stable Thursday night. The man wasn’t identified by name.

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A police report said an officer working a detail at the site notified dispatch of a “serious injury” to a construction worker who’d fallen “from the top floor of the construction site.”

Paramedics took him “via one of our advanced life support ambulances to Boston Medical Center,” a Boston EMS spokesperson said in an e-mail Friday.

Police officials said OSHA is investigating the fall.

Ted Fitzgerald, an OSHA spokesman, confirmed Friday that the agency responded to the work site and has “opened inspections of two employers — Suffolk Construction and G&C Concrete.” Fitzgerald said via e-mail that the “inspections are ongoing.”

The Boston police report identified the injured man as an employee of G&C.

Requests for comment were sent Friday morning to representatives of Suffolk and Haverhill-based G&C.

The South End fall came after a catwalk collapsed on three workers at a construction site Wednesday at the old Edison plant in South Boston. All three workers are expected to survive, authorities said Thursday.

The Edison project is also a Suffolk job, and on Thursday the company, which is the region’s largest construction firm, announced it was stopping all its work in Boston for a safety review.

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The voluntary stand-down was scheduled to last through Friday, Suffolk chief executive John Fish wrote in an e-mail to employees Thursday, though he raised the prospect that some projects could stay closed longer if necessary.

“This Safety Standdown will include a comprehensive review and evaluation of existing safety standards and procedures,” Fish’s e-mail said. “In the event this evaluation requires more time for an individual job site, that site may remain closed until the review is complete and prepared to safely re-open.”

The injuries to workers at Boston job sites this week followed the devastating March collapse of part of a nine-story parking deck at downtown’s Government Center Garage, which killed demolition worker Peter Monsini. Construction workers also died on the job at an East Boston apartment building in October and at a Newton home last May.

In remarks at the South Boston site on Wednesday, Mayor Michelle Wu said she was “angry” to be at another major construction accident.

“Every worker, every family member of workers across our city need to know that it cannot be a question whether your family will come home at night, whether they will be safe on the job,” Wu said.

Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report. John R. Ellement of the Globe Staff contributed. This is a breaking story that’ll be updated when more information is available.


Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com. Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com. Follow him @NickStoico.