Is there a term to describe the tendency to attribute the cause of a bad outcome to a recent event?
I don't know of a single term for it, but what you're describing is, in essence, causal inference driven by "statistics", "co-variation", "co-occurrence", or "contiguity" (the terms are largely interchangeable).

If you're interested, there's a quite in-depth discussion review of theories of different theories of causal inference, including statistical models, here.

I think your example can be tied in quite nicely with "dual process" theories too, which propose two kinds of thinking: automatic, intuitive processes, which are sensitive to things like co-variation, and more effortful reflective processes, needed for more abstract relational reasoning. In your case, intuitive thinking easily makes a causal inference based on co-occurance: 


  "Mark touched the tower, and then the tower fell, so the tower must have 
  fallen because Mark touched it"


while more effortful reflection is needed to construct a causal model involving foundational work done months ago. I don't know of any specific application of this intuitive/reflective distinction to causal reasoning, but I'm sure it's been done somewhere.

EDIT: I've just remembered this paper, which discusses a similar idea, but in "multiple
cue probability learning", a specific kind of causal learning. I feel a little obliged to plug this, because one of the authors is my PhD supervisor.