11.04.2007

Boom lift tips

A man was injured yesterday afternoon in Maryland Street, Morgantown, Pennsylvania when the boom lift he was using tipped over backwards.

The basket landed on a parked car causing serious damage but possibly broke the man’s fall.

The operator’s legs were pinned between the guardrail and the car
roof breaking both legs. It took the emergency services over an hour to free him.

It took crews more than a half an hour to free the man from the basket.

Investigators are still trying to figure out what caused the lift, a Genie S40 to tip. The boom was fully retracted and fully raised when the lift tipped over backwards. No details were available on how steep the street is.

Vertikal Comment

Such accidents are extremely rare and usually caused by operator error, such as driving the machine in its least stable position on an excessive slope and then hitting a pothole or jamming the brakes on to create additional dynamic forces.

Even then boom lifts such as this are still very forgiving, hopefully the precise details of what happened will be released in order for the industry to be able to use the findings as examples in its training programmes.