Stop-work order

A stop-work order is the Department of Buildings' instruction that construction halt — sitewide or limited to specified work — issued for unsafe conditions, work beyond or without permits, or other violations serious enough to pause a job. Work continuing in defiance of one draws escalating penalties, and the order stays until its cause is corrected and rescission granted.

For records reading, stop-work orders are high-signal events: they mark the moments a project's compliance failed visibly enough to halt it. A history of orders on a job — especially with slow rescissions — describes both the work's quality and the operator's practices, and open orders on an active site belong in any current assessment of it.