Posted on 02/27/2016 8:09:13 AM PST by PROCON
On February 5, a windy day in Lower Manhattan, a 565-foot crane collapsed and killed a man when it struck the parked car in which he sat. Crews had been planning to secure the Worth Steet crane because the forecast projected sustained winds at stronger than 25 mph, but they were too late.
After the collapse, Mayor Bill de Blasio required crawler cranes, the mobile type of crane that can move around a work site, to cease operation and transition to safety mode anytime there are sustained winds of more than 20 mph or gusts of more than 30 mph forecast in New York City. "No building is worth a person's life," de Blasio says. "We are going to ensure the record boom in construction and growth does not come at the expense of safety."
The fact is, though, that deadly crane crashes are far too common. Some of the largest crane collapses on record have the most devastating effects in big cities, such as a 2008 New York accident that killed seven people and destroyed buildings when a 200-foot-tall crane collapsed. Such events highlight the awesome and scary power of cranes, especially in dense urban areas where these ever-growing machines (record-holders now stand more than 300 feet tall, telescoping to more than 500 feet) work right next to pedestrians and drivers. It's a recipe for danger if crews aren't exceedingly careful.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
LOL!
When people choose to live like ants, getting stomped on is part of the experinece?
This guy would NEVER have succeeded in building the Pyramids.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Then Egypt never would have had sufficient grain storage for a seven year drought and how might that have changed the course of history?
Do you know what the big glove in one hand was for?
Catching hot rivets, when they were passed from an oven to the ironworker.
Oh yeah? catch this!
Fling.
Smack, into the catcher's mitt, and into the hole, then backed up while the other guy swings the sledge to place a lip on the rivet, 45 stories up!
What a living!
Don't forget, the rivet is in fact RED HOT.
I’ve seen a trend in the last 8 years.
More and more outsourcing.
Less and less regard for safety at the tradesman level.
More and more on the job training of personnel without any industry knowledge by apprentice to journeyman level skill level ‘experts’, then changing jobs, believing they can do everything and anything.
No respect for the professions or experience.
Liars get ahead and are given more authority.
More and more accidents without consequence or reporting.
I’m now observing superintendents and foremen balk at safety training because their personnel don’t want to take it.
I’m now witnessing middle level management watching a lonesome high voltage linemen enter substations and switch circuits without any other personnel within 10 minutes of the site, without communications, safety gear, arc flash training, at night, without accurate single line drawings of the system. (NUTS!)
Nobody is holding them accountable because nobody has the skill sets or have built the systems from the bottom up, recognizing the actual risks.
When nobody gets killed, it’s now used as informal justification for the untried procedures to become SOP.
***Of course, the other side of the coin is that taking down a crane proves time-consuming and costly, so operators don’t want to do so unless there is clear and present danger***
I can tell you that this comment is total bs. It’s not the operators that don’t want to take the cranes down, it’s the corporate jerks in the office that don’t want to. They’re constantly trying to rush them so they can get a progress payment. 2 yrs ago they had an accident where one crane pulled another over and then they both crashed because the boss insisted on them making this tandem lift even though one of the cranes was malfunctioning, but he was in a hurry to get that progress payment.
My husband works for a ship yard and operates telescopic boom cranes and crawler cranes. They try to make these operators work in unsafe conditions all the time. They even pay companies to make sure cranes “pass” inspection that shouldn’t even be operating.
My husband went through NCCCO training the proper way, then found out several of the other operators he works with paid a guy that just takes money and mails them their card.
IMHO, budget pressure is the primary cause.
I can hear supervisors saying things like, “It’s not that bad, we’re within limits most of the time. If we don’t do the lift today, it’s going to cost $xxx.”
I’ll never forget when the crane collapsed at Miller Park in Milwaukee. The day was unbelievably windy but they did the lift anyway. I had stopped at a farmers market at lunch and the vendors tents were being dragged off in the wind. I couldn’t imagine they would do a 450 ton lift in those conditions, but they did. ...and three people paid with their lives.
Yup. Saw stuff like that happen all the time with the unions in NYC.
I don’t know why they were moving a crane like that on a week day. Typically things like that are done on a Saturday or Sunday when there isn’t so much vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
Yes but crane jumps are going to happen based upon the placement cycle of the forms for deck pours. If the deck concrete was placed and they could go no further without a jump, might as well do it on straight time.
Jumps, rigging changes and storms are the times when even a safe crane is more likely to have a problem.
I worked in union construction for about ten years. Most of my other union jobs were in NJ. My father was a bricklayer until he climbed the ladder of authority and became a construction project manager for forty years. Trust me it’s far safer and far faster to do it on a Sunday.
I am not disagreeing with you but only pointing out that when you are stopped in placing, either centering or mix, you have nothing else to do but jump. I actually know a real serious, almost disaster thirty stories up a few years ago that had a counter-weight come loose on a Saturday adjustment. Lucky the boom never fell.
Most people understand the danger of a crane collapse, but don’t know that the dropped form or just a 2x4 from a hi-rise is the more common serious mishap. In my experience I have seen jobs shut for a day and a half for a 2x4 into a safety net while everyone does some retraining and serious self examination. Most of my almost fifty years was six stories and under but other projects are good to learn by even when they aren’t your problem.
Never saw a crane go down. Saw a guy floor through a drop ceiling and fall about twenty feet and hit a marble floor. He was out cold and broke his spine. That put him on permanent disability. Almost sixty years ago I lost an uncle, a man who had survived WW2 aboard a Navy cruiser in the Pacific only to be killed in a construction accident at the age of thirty four leaving a young widow with four small boys to raise.
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