CRANE CRITIQUE
Crane Accidents Are your operators doing all they can to prevent one?
A monthly crane and rigging informative column for all personnel directly or indirectly involved with crane safety. Each month we will attempt to explain a different technical issue pertaining to crane operations here on Guam, addressing the sometimes over-looked or misunderstood topics by management and operators alike. By Dave Barnhouse
This month’s topic: Crane accidents, are we doing all we can to prevent one, and are we learning from each and every accident or near miss?
A serious crane accident can be catastrophic and unfortunately they do occur periodically. But the majority of accidents are not the front page news items with fatalities we read about now and then. They are minor accidents with no injuries or property damage. But any crane accident has the potential to injure, cause property damage, or worse. I will discuss a few of these mi-nor accidents I have witnessed here on Guam, what caused them, as well as some disturbing deficiencies noted on cranes that could very well have caused an accident. Most of these items could have and should have been noted by the operator during his daily inspection. An operator must be competent to operate a crane and this includes competent enough to adequately inspect a crane and evaluate if any deficiencies found during this inspection could be considered a safety hazard. All operators must have the authority to stop crane operations if he finds what he considers a safety hazard until a qualified person determines otherwise or the hazard is abated. Some of the deficiencies I have noted during an inspection or accidents resulting from crane operations with deficiencies: Some deficiencies do not appear serious at first glance but when it comes to lifting equipment no deficiency should be taken lightly. Consider the instance when a mechanic plugged a pipe tee in an airline but did not have a pipe plug so he used what he had, a grease fitting. The unknowingly operator who greased this line should have known what he was greasing but apparently did not. The airline was on a lattice boom crane with drum air brakes. Once the line was full of grease and filled the quick re-lease for the brake cylinder it blocked the air and the operator lost control of the load.
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Improper termination, use of wire rope clip Next near miss was comical but could have been disastrous. During a heavy lift and 90 degree swing the riggers thought the Kenworth with a winch would be good tagline control. All went well until the load was in place and a rigger was instructed to stop the winch by pushing in the clutch. Unfortunately he was too short to push the clutch to the floor and the winch came close to tipping the already maxed out crane. One of the most preventable deficiency I see often is the improper wire rope termination at the wedge socket. I try my best to educate operators and riggers alike of the importance to keep wire rope clips off the live end and also
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to re-socket the wire periodically. An example of the importance of this was a dropped load from a crimped line that happen to result in a fatality. The sad part of this is that the wire rope clip that supposedly secures the line is what caused the rope to break. When in reality the clip holds nothing, the wedge is what takes all the weight. Another deficiency noted more than a few times during one of my annual inspections is improper reeving. Namely the hoist wire over top of the sheave keeper pin. This happens now and then to the operator not paying attention when he is installing or re-reeving a wire. When the boom is down, or at zero degrees, often the lower keeper is not removed and the wire is easily reeved over top
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