The handling of the situation at Barangaroo hours after a crane was left dangling from the 51st floor of a high-rise was poorly managed and serves as an urgent wake-up call, an office worker injured during the incident says.
Neil Richards, a senior business analyst with Westpac, said the incident also raises questions about the risks posed to thousands of office workers at the construction site in Sydney's CBD from cranes operating only metres from their buildings.
"Thousands of office workers [are] working in what is essentially a massive construction site and it is clearly a high risk given the currently questionable standards of safety on NSW building sites, in particular in the area of crane operation," he said.
"It is one of the biggest construction sites in the southern hemisphere. There are two more towers going up, as well as Packer's [casino and hotel tower]. If one of those cranes falls ... it could create enormous injuries."
A 3.9-tonne spider boom crane bolted onto the top of the northern high rise at Barangaroo known as Tower One was damaged while it was lowering a so-called boom lift at about 2pm on Tuesday.
An exclusion zone was later placed around Tower One, which recently had its first tenants move in.
Mr Richards said the neighbouring Tower Two, in which he has worked for the past two months, should also have been evacuated in the afternoon
Yet, he said, office workers in his tower were not told about the incident until they left the building for home in the late afternoon or evening.
"It was a very bad experience. They should have got processes for evacuation in place because they are right next door to a massive building site," he said.
Security had left between 50 and 100 workers to find their own way out of an "underground labyrinth of passages and car park areas" in Tower Two's basement, after they were prevented from exiting onto Hickson Road because police had closed it.
"We were left up to our own devices and there was a bunch of us that immediately got lost. I came across another guy who was wandering and he was getting really upset," Mr Richards said.
"Other people experienced the same chaos. A number of us got lost and disoriented and, while trying to assist a fellow worker who had become confused, I fell heavily over some concrete material that was an unsigned hazard."
Mr Richards, who cycles to work, suffered chips to his teeth, cuts to his lips and chin, and bruising to his shoulder from the heavy fall.
"They really need to manage it. Security really didn't know what they were doing. They were trying but there weren't organised," he said.
Lend Lease, the developer of Barangaroo, said in a statement that it was aware of a cyclist who suffered an injury while leaving the basement carpark through a diverted route following the crane malfunction.
"The cyclist was provided with assistance. Safety is always our number-one priority and we had arrangements in place to assist cyclists leaving the carpark," it said.
Police reopened Hickson Road and Sussex Street between Erskine Street and Towns Place on Wednesday afternoon after the load on the crane which had earlier malfunctioned was lowered to the ground.
The latest incident follows the dramatic collapse of a crane on a Meriton building in north Sydney in September, which left three workers dangling from the high rise.
The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has said it is concerned that too many incidents have occurred during the erection and dismantling of cranes, and it will "be in touch with SafeWork and we will be saying that we will have a blitz".
The union represents construction workers at Barangaroo.
In 2014, an 86-metre-tall crane and huge concrete slabs on the construction site for the southern-most tower at Barangaroo came close to collapse during a large blaze.
The fire caused traffic chaos, forced thousands of people to be evacuated and blanketed central Sydney in a cloud of smoke.
