Home > Article

E-mail	Print	Subscribe to magazine		April 16, 2010

Crane Accident Prevention: Training, Maintenance, Regulation

August 12, 2008

By Andrew Baltazar

The construction industry has been plagued by a series of fatal crane accidents in recent months. According to experts, lack of training combined with inadequate safety standards and subpar inspection services are to blame.

“If you think training is expensive, try ignorance,” Bud Wilson, president of The Crane School, writes in his organization’s Web site. It’s a warning to crane managers of the dangers of running a crane fleet without proper operator education.

“I think that’s a good saying,” Wilson says, “because it seems like whenever there’s an accident, there’s always enough time to do it right the second time.”

Wilson’s advice is particularly pertinent today, considering the number of cranes that have toppled so far this year. Crane accidents in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Houston resulted in several deaths in early 2008.

Bloomberg: Crane collapse is unacceptable

Crane trainers, operators and fleet managers argue that several issues have plagued their industry, contributed to this year’s crane mishaps and threaten the safety and lives of workers who operate these complex structures of towering metal and machinery. For one, complete training of an entire crane crew is a rarity. There is also an overwhelming lack of prudence on the part of many third-party vendors that inspect a construction fleet’s cranes.

Bud Wilson explains the importance of federal OSHA guidelines

But perhaps the most infuriating matter for crane experts is that crane safety standards drawn up by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have not been updated in decades.

Training and certification programs are typically designed around OSHA, whose crane regulations haven’t seen a major overhaul since 1971. This is cause for concern in the industry -- even operators who know the standards well are conducting their work based partly on outdated safety information.

In June public policy mediator Susan Podziba wrote about OSHA’s outdated regulations in a New York Times Op-Ed piece that followed a deadly crane accident in New York. She mentions that OSHA hired her in 2003 to organize a team that would revise the federal crane and derrick regulations.

“Everyone agreed that the current regulations are archaic and fail to address the daily hazards faced by construction workers,” Podziba writes. In 2004 the group concurred on a set of revised standards that “would prevent 37 to 48 worker deaths per year,” according to an OSHA analysis. Podziba says that she expected OSHA to make the rules official in 2006.

They have yet to be published. According to Podziba, unless the new crane standards make it into the OSHA books before Nov. 1, it may be years before they can be amended, as White House chief of staff John Bolten announced in March that no proposed rules are to be published after June 1, and no draft rules after Nov. 1 “except under extraordinary circumstances.”  
 
Fortunately, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) update their B30.5 crane regulations on a regular basis. That standard is at the core of some training and certification programs.

Graham Brent dicusses the push to get OSHA to update its crane standards

“Our Certified Crane Operator [CCO] programs are only partly based on the OSHA requirements,” say Graham Brent, executive director of the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators. “CCO is based on the B30.5 standard, which has been updated multiple times since 1968.”

“If we didn’t have a B30.5 2007 standard, there would be nothing to work from. If all we had to work from was the OSHA guidelines on cranes, we would definitely be in trouble,” Brent says.

Throughout 2008 Brent and NCCCO have been pushing OSHA to publish the revised rules. In July, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers also called for timely completion of the standards.

The document recently moved from the House Committee on Education and Labor to the Office of Management and Budget, which has until October to make a decision.

ADVERTISEMENT

---

Related Equipment

All Terrain Cranes
Truck Cranes, Carrier Mounted Hydraulic
Truck Cranes, Carrier Mounted Lattice Boom
Gantry Cranes
Rough Terrain Cranes
Straddle Cranes
Tower Cranes
Truck Mounted Cranes
Lattice Boom Crawler Cranes

E-mail	Print	Subscribe to magazine		April 16, 2010

---

TALK BACK - Let Us Know What You Think!

Post a comment

There are no comments posted for this article.

Click here for current Talk Back discussions