This is one of those "Wow that certainly feels like an exotic way to die; clearly, cranes must be more dangerous than cars in St. Louis." sort of situations.
Spoiler alert: they're not. Cranes are industrial equipment. They're getting progressively safer over time, due primarily to the general progress of technology and decreasing reliance on the most error prone component in the crane.
The most common crane-related fatality is not "crane falls over, killing operator and/or people on the ground." It is electrocution when the crane hits a power line. (c.f. OSHA or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) This is almost invariably a consequence of human error and failure to follow well-understood safety procedures rather than "oh noes the software is so complicated these days."
Crane operater tries to drive a crane across a railroad crossing, underestimates the time it takes, passenger train slams into it killing the train driver and injuring a number of others.
Considering the work they do in the places they operate, I'm kind of amazed they manage to kill only 90 people a year. While it certainly is a tragedy, the politicians kind of make it sound like the companies are being purely and unnecessarily penny-pinchy to not have the cranes taken down when things get rough, yet in the same article the author points out that is sometimes a multi day/week process. That doesn't affect just the construction company, it's also a ton of lost productivity for the workers involved, and disassembling the crane during said conditions could be dangerous itself.
I was a kid growing up in Wisconsin when Big Blue fell, I remember the news coverage vividly and we took a drive down to Milwaukee that weekend to see it. Crazy stuff to think a machine that huge could fail (as a kid anyway).
> Statistics from the United States Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the United States suffers nearly 90 crane-related deaths per year
In Europe I almost never hear about crane accidents, either they do not happen as often or are underreported. Anyway, seems me being uncomfortable walking past them is not too much paranoic.
I don't think I've ever seen mobile/crawler cranes here in Paris. All of them seem to be tower cranes and the structures seem quite stable (I couldn't find death by crane stats with a quick google). These tower cranes I see everywhere are on fixed construction sites... I suppose the use of mobile cranes is more for renovations -- and yes they seem very dangerous in comparison to a fixed-base crane. But still, when one is going to the effort of building/renovating something of such magnitude, why can't a fixed-base crane be used ? If done right it shouldn't be too hard to mount and dismount a modular tower crane -- maybe there's a market for this sort of thing...
>yes they seem very dangerous in comparison to a fixed-base crane.
I think this is a rather baseless assumption. Properly engineered and planned lifting from a mobile crawler crane should be inherently no riskier than that from a fixed crane. Lifts from both fixed-base and crawler cranes are subject to operator error and maintenance-related risks.
My experience is limited to very big cranes on ships (both fixed and crawler) where everything is engineered and planned to (speculating here) a much higher degree. Maybe it's not comparable to the typical (smaller) construction cranes you see in cities.
I believe fixed-based cranes in many countries get inspected and certified to a specific job/load after installation while mobile cranes do not have this requirement.
Yeah I very rarely see crawler cranes here in London. The only times I see them are to disassemble tower cranes. I wonder if this has to do with the size of streets in New York vs London. In New York most streets are wide enough to accommodate a crawler crane while in London big crawler cranes have to be disassembled and brought to the building site in pieces and can't site in the street beside usually.
It may also be due to underground structures. Driving a heavy crane over some of the Victorian piping and the Tube (where it's close to the surface) would cause damage, and there may not be a clear route into some parts of London.
Large crawler cranes? There are small ones around London, about the same size as truck cranes but very rarely do I see one the size of these ones on New York.
There was at least one notable incident in the Netherlands last year, where a dual crane lift of a bridge section went horribly wrong and everything came crashing down onto the houses nearby. This is in Dutch, but there's video of the incident: http://nos.nl/artikel/2050161-kranen-met-brugdeel-vallen-op-...
Amazingly there were no fatalities (other than a dog that was in one of the houses that collapsed). When you watch the video of that accident instinctively everything tells you that it is much more than just material damage, and I clearly remember being extremely relieved that nobody died.
Yeah it was really startling to watch it unfold. It's difficult for me to follow since little technical info has been released in English. What I can gather is that they failed to account for the changing stability of the barge, and coupled with a crane that wasn't designed to slew while tilted shit hit the fan.
I can imagine that a dual crane lift introduces a lot of variables that are not nearly as well understood or tested by manufacturers as the parameters on a single-crane lift.
Spoiler alert: they're not. Cranes are industrial equipment. They're getting progressively safer over time, due primarily to the general progress of technology and decreasing reliance on the most error prone component in the crane.
The most common crane-related fatality is not "crane falls over, killing operator and/or people on the ground." It is electrocution when the crane hits a power line. (c.f. OSHA or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) This is almost invariably a consequence of human error and failure to follow well-understood safety procedures rather than "oh noes the software is so complicated these days."