At least one person killed, two seriously injured when construction crane collapses in lower Manhattan

One person was killed and two more were seriously injured when a construction crane tumbled onto a Tribeca street Friday morning, officials said.

The crane fell on a row of parked cars when it toppled over on Worth St. near Church St. about 8:30 a.m. as heavy snow fell onto the city.

One person died at the scene, officials said. A second person was trapped inside a vehicle and was freed by responding firefighters.

Two people were transported to Bellevue Hospital in serious condition.

Jesse Natale, a 26-year-old civil engineer from Westfield, N.J., said he was waiting at a light at Worth St. and Church St. when the crane came crashing down.

“If I caught that light, I’d be dead probably,” he told the Daily News. “It looked like an avalanche — or that the roof was caving in from the snow”

The massive red crane — which has “Bay Crane” printed on its side — hit a building and leaned on some power lines as it fell, said witness Sean Campbell.

A man who answered the phone at Bay Crane refused to comment and said they are not releasing any information at this time. He would not say if the crane was in operation at the time of the collapse.

Bay Crane, a 75-year-old Long Island City-based company, bills itself as “New York’s leader in crane rental and specialized transportation solutions” on its website.

Multiple ambulances responded to the scene.

Firefighters were also investigating a report that a wrecking ball attached to the crane snapped off the structure and fell through the roof of a building, officials said.

The crane fell in front of a Weill Cornell Medical Associates building.

Blair Steele, 29, was on her way to work when she saw the crane on the ground.

“I couldn’t even see all the way to the other end,” she said about the downed crane. “Everyone was in shock. Even the police that were here were totally shocked.”

The crane has been working in the area for about a week, Steele said.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I remember looking up at it last night and said to myself, ‘This is a huge crane.’”

Express buses 27 and 28 buses to Brooklyn and northbound Staten Island express buses are detoured due to the collapse.

Officials closed a number of streets in the area: Worth St. between West Broadway and Hudson St.; southbound West Broadway from Canal St. to the Battery; and northbound West Broadway from Greenwich St. to the Battery.

Manhattan is no stranger to devastating crane collapses. In November, the steel arm of a balky mini-crane dropped onto a construction safety coordinator on E. 44th St. near Second Ave. in Midtown. The worker, Trevor Loftus, was pinned between the boom crane and his flatbed truck.

In 2008, a crane owned by so-called “Crane king” James Lomma plummeted onto a construction site on East 91st St., taking the lives of operator Donald Leo and construction worker Ramadan Kurtaj. Their families were awarded $48 million each in compensatory and punitive damages after an 11 month trial that resulted, eight years later, in Lomma declaring bankruptcy.