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Worker electrocuted fixing leak in Maspeth

By Dustin Brown

A contractor from a Brooklyn company was electrocuted last Thursday as he worked beneath the surface of a Maspeth street to repair an underground water leak, police said.

Gareth Hunter, 34, was pronounced dead at Elmhurst Hospital Center at 3:45 p.m., only 15 minutes after he hit an underground electrical line at 70th Street and 52nd Drive, police said.

“Some of their equipment comes into contact with some kind of electrical component underneath the street,” said Lt. John Perdoch of the 104th Precinct Detective Squad, who was on the scene investigating the incident. “There’s absolutely no evidence of foul play. It’s an accident.”

Hunter’s colleagues used a rope to pull him out of the hole after one of them felt a jolt while trying to help him out, Perdoch said.

They began administering CPR while neighbors were rapidly summoned to help.

“Someone came knocking on our door and said, ‘There’s a man dying across the street,’ so we called 91 1,” said George McGee, a postal worker who lives down the block from the site.

“He was really bad. He was just lying there with his eyes open,” said Ann Marie McGee, George’s wife.

Hunter’s employer, the Brooklyn-based Alex Figliolia Contracting, had been called to repair a private service line connecting the water main to the house at 52-48 70th St., a spokeswoman for the city Department of Environmental Protection said.

A team from the DEP previously had been at the scene to investigate a street leak and found that the problem was the homeowner’s responsibility to repair, the spokeswoman said.

Hunter had been working in a square hole along the western side of 70th Street, which was surrounded by orange cones, yellow tape reading “Caution” and two mounds of crumbled pavement dug up from the roadway.

The hole dropped about 6 feet to a muddy floor, where a pair of shovels still stood long after the accident.

As police investigated the accident, his two coworkers sat quietly on a small ledge along the opposite side of the road. One said he could not speak English, and the other deferred comment to his boss, Alex Figliolia Jr., who arrived on the scene shortly after police.

Dominick Gullo, the attorney representing Alex Figliolia Contracting in Brooklyn, declined to comment because the investigation still is ongoing.

Chris Olert, a spokesman for Con Edison, which provides electricity service in the neighborhood, also said he could not comment while the case is under investigation.

Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at [email protected] or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.