29.05.2008

Another day another outrigger incident

A crane owned and operated by Papillon Crane Service – part of Papillon & Moyer construction of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, tipped over yesterday while helping remove a tree.

The crane’s boom was extended over a garage to reach the tree in the rear garden, of a house in Lower Mount Bethel, when the ground under the outriggers on one side of the crane gave way causing the crane to tip.

Fortunately no one was hurt and two other cranes were quickly called in to upright the first one. The crane company and tree service contractor did not wish to comment.

Vertikal Comment

Rarely a day goes by without some outrigger related accident report coming across our desk. Most are like this one, where no one is hurt and the crane owner simply wants to get the crane out and forget it.

The question is how to the industry should deal with this, if indeed it can. One thing regulators could do is to treat such accidents as seriously as when a crane tips over and kills. At the moment many of these ‘near misses’ are not even investigated.

A case is currently being deliberated by a jury in Washington state where the crane manufacturer is being sued for a $21 million claim for damage and loss of earnings after one of its cranes tipped over in 2001 because the operator did not set up the outriggers on a big All Terrain crane before telescoping its 50 metre boom on ground that was not level.

While this is justice gone mad, perhaps such financial claims will cause manufacturers to look harder at building outrigger beam extension and jack pressure monitoring into the cranes load indication system? The basic technology is perfectly viable now even for smaller cranes, although it might not be the most popular feature.

Such technology however will not prevent all the tip-overs caused by the lack of proper mats, cribbing or the setting up of cranes or lifts over voids.

At the end of the day it is not possible to remove the human factor from the equation, the irritating thing with these types of accidents is that they are usually caused by laziness or ignorance and could be relatively easily avoided. It is exasperating to see so many incidents. Hopefully reporting on them will at least provide a snap shot of the size of the issue?

Your comments would be much appreciated.