Search on for Throgs Neck bridge worker

A contract worker for a Long Island painting company is presumed dead after he slipped from a scaffold platform under the Throgs Neck Bridge and fell into the East River on Friday, police and officials said.

Authorities said NYPD harbor units and the U.S. Coast Guard were in "recovery mode" searching the river but had not found the victim 12 hours after his fall.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the bridge, said the accident occurred at 8:12 a.m. and was witnessed by other workers.

An MTA spokeswoman said the missing man worked for the Islandia-based Nuco Painting Corp., a subcontractor hired by El Sol Contracting & Construction of Maspeth, Queens. Judie Glave of the MTA said the worker was presumed dead.

The Coast Guard cutter Ridley suspended the search at 9:24 p.m. Friday night. A Coast Guard official said the search area was about 11 square miles and that various search vessels had logged in about 463 miles.

"They're doing shoreline searches," Petty Officer Erik Swanson, a Coast Guard spokesman, said shortly after 9 p.m. Friday.

The Coast Guard determined that "survivability" of the missing worker was 8 1/2 hours and the search had gone on for 14 hours, Swanson said.

"After so many hours, given the conditions and variables, like what the person may have been wearing, you can come up with an idea of how long someone can survive," he said. "We're absolutely going to search to that point and past it."

This would be the fifth contractor death in the past 10 years on MTA work sites, among them: an electrician killed in a crane collapse on the Throgs Neck in 2009, a worker who died at the RFK-Triborough Bridge in 2008, a construction worker falling from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 2007 and a painter falling from the Throgs Neck in 2003.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating Friday's accident, Glave said.

Meanwhile, a woman who answered the phone at the El Sol office Friday said she could not comment, and a receptionist at Nuco said she was "not at liberty" to discuss the accident.

Glave said a crew of 15 workers was on a platform located about midspan under the bridge when the victim fell.

The clearance between the waterline and road deck is 142 feet at mean high tide, according to records. A fall from under the bridge deck would still be more than 100 feet.

"He slipped and fell," Glave said Friday, adding that she did not have confirmation on the identity of the worker.

With Ellen Yan