Construction Site Crane Collapse

On July 30, 2008, while an old bridge was being torn down over the Colorado River in Smithville, Texas (near Austin) a construction crane became overloaded with steel beams and toppled over. The crane then smashed into a manlift basket holding two workers. It killed 47-year-old James Michael Miles of North Richland Hills, Texas, and injured the other worker. Mr. Miles fell approximately 60 feet from the top of the bridge, landed on construction equipment and died.

On July 18, 2008 at a Houston, Texas oil refinery, four workers died and seven others were injured in one of the nation’s largest mobile crane crashes. This crane was massive – a whopping 30 stories tall, and capable of lifting one million pounds. The monster crane fell on top of a smaller crane on the grounds of the LyondellBasell refinery where workers were gathered.

On May 30, 2008, at an Upper East Side construction site in New York City, a crane collapsed, killing two workers and wreaking devastating damage to numerous high-rise apartments. This was the second New York crane collapse in two months, leaving citizens wondering when officials were going to do something about these death machines. On March 15, 2008, a giant crane at a high-rise construction site in Manhattan collapsed across a city block, smashing into an apartment building, breaking into sections, crushing a town house and destroying a tenement facade. Four people were killed and over a dozen were injured. Authorities called this tragedy one of the city’s worst accidents, with damage running into millions of dollars. Residents surrounding the site said they’d been worried for months about a collapse as the crane continued to escalate each week, reaching higher and higher to work on numerous floors of the new high-rise building.

Other horrendous crane accidents have been reported in 2008, including ones in Las Vegas and Miami. In June, 2008, the Associated Press performed an analysis, finding that U.S. cities and states have varying rules and regulations on cranes, with some having no regulations whatsoever. Rather, many cities and states rely on federal guidelines almost 40 years old, which experts say are outdated due to technological advances.

On a national basis, four construction workers are killed every day in the United States in construction site accidents. Texas led the nation in crane accidents, with 26 fatalities between 2005 and 2006. Not surprisingly, cranes in Texas operate under the outdated federal guidelines, with no state or government regulations. Although operating a crane is one of the most highly specialized skills in the construction industry, in early 2008, Dallas officials discovered that 8 of 23 cranes across the city were being operated by uncertified crane workers. But Texas is only one of 35 states that don’t require crane operators to be licensed. Conversely, California employs the most stringent regulations of any state in the country, and as a result, hasn’t had a single fatality from a crane accident since a 1989 crane collapse in San Francisco.

Crane safety is now under scrutiny by the U.S. government. A House Education and Labor Committee hearing is currently examining whether there are adequate safeguards in place for cranes at high-rise construction sites. Crane standards implemented by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is a division of the Labor Department, have not been updated since 1971, and require that cranes be inspected once a year. However, these inspections rarely occur. OSHA inspected approximately 23,000 of the nation’s 4 million+ construction sites in 2007.

Labor Department spokeswoman, Sharon Worth, said that updating these regulations is a “top regulatory priority” for the agency. But initiating new safety policies could take over a year after the Labor Department’s review of proposed regulations. Without new regulations, industry experts predict that deadly crane accidents will continue.

If you or someone you know has been seriously injured or killed in a crane collapse or other construction-related accident, please fill out our questionnaire to the right of this page for a free consultation.

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