A huge crane fail! 60 ton boom snapped like a drinking straw!

Scary situation.

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Reply to
Ignoramus11173
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Sorry, forgot to attach a picture, here goes , see website below.

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Reply to
Ignoramus11173

Wow! It's difficult to tell from the perspective in the picture, but it looks to me like the crane was set excessively far away from the lift point and had the boom at too shallow an angle, looking 45 degrees or so.

A couple years ago I got to play with a 60T Grove moving 40' containers and we had it setup only about 40' from the crane boom pivot point to the lift point and the boom extended to give probably a 60 degree angle with loads of around 12,000# for a container and a small amount of contents.

Reply to
Pete C.

[I added one more picture]

Yes, I agree with that. It was a risky lift and somehow or other, it was riskier than they thought.

I would have expected that commercial crane services , like that one, should have load moment indicators and other tools to prevent such incidents.

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Reply to
Ignoramus11173

Yes, bad angle and probably a lot heavier than the crane operator thought. That's a bad combination!

Yeah, the operator will probably get a heavy fine (if not loss of his license) plus damages. Somebody wasn't paying attention. if the crane owner hadn't maintained the rig, it may fall on him instead, though. The investigation should be interesting. How many cranes now have auto-recording equipment? Probably all the computerized models, wot?

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Ignoramus11173 fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

They do. That doesn't avoid the issue of the operator's ignoring or overriding them. L

Reply to
Lloyd E. Sponenburgh

The crane looks new-ish, I would suppose that it could have a weight reading from the pressure on the hydraulic winch.

I hope that they had all kinds of insurance, now a big battle of insurance companies will begin. I am glad that I am not a party to that.

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Reply to
Ignoramus11173

Look at the retarded moment at 1:27, dumbass trying to forklift up the oxygen tank bank, you can expect anything from a crew like that.

But I am glad that I do not have to deal with such huge tall things. The tallest thing that I handled, was about 25 feet tall.

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Reply to
Ignoramus11173

At least they were wearing hard hats, for all the good that would have done the poor dumb buggers.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Those cranes do have computers monitoring and giving warning alarms, but it's still possible for things to go bad too fast to react or to miscalculate your load. If the computer gave them a load rating based on the boom angle that was just a bit over the presumed weight of the tank, and the tank snagged and added extra load mid lift it could well have been all over by the time the operator recognized the alarm.

Reply to
Pete C.

Maybe someone forgot those last two bolts at the base...

Yeah, at the very least, even if analog.

Verily. Many a business has gone t*ts-up from crane accidents.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

They have load cells up the boom at the top pulley. They have a cable reel on the outside of the boom that reels out cable to that load cell. There is a computer in the operator's cab that give all the relevant information, load ratings based on boom angle, CG calculations, etc.

I'm fairly sure a company that can afford a $750K crane would have insurance on it.

Reply to
Pete C.

Exactly

Reply to
Ignoramus15563

WTF were they thinking? Cutting the brace for the A-frame legs of a fully loaded crane system?

I'll bet that carbon arc wielder had a -large- load in his pants after the thing broke loose. Morons. I doubt there was any salvage after that -except- steel. Everything else was bent, tweaked, or cracked.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

On 11/20/2014 10:27 PM, Ignoramus11173 wrote: ...

As a local in the morning coffee shop is wont to say, "That'll be a two-lawyer deal!" ;)

Reply to
dpb

Union worker, no doubt.

I'll bet!

Wouldn't you have stripped the crane module off the top first, in pieces, so the demo of the frame would have been safer?

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Smart ones would. But I wonder if any of the guys on that job in Oz even spoke English, let along Australian.

It's required by law in many states, if not by fed regulations. OSHA evidently added regs requiring overload protection in 2010, but that doesn't cover Oz. From 3 pages of regulations to 43 pages in one fell swoop. Amazing.

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Reply to
Larry Jaques

It was not loaded. My guess is that they wanted to cut only a few bolts and cut too many.

I am sure that they were scrappers. Otherwise it is hard to explain why they need so many oxygen tanks.

And yes they do look like a team of morons.

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Reply to
Ignoramus15563

I worked on German made Tower Cranes with horizontal booms, twenty years ago, that had a load limiting device on them. They wouldn't pick up a load that was too heavy for them and if you picked a load up close to the tower and tried to move it out the boom to a position where the load was too heavy for the crane the in/out function stopped any further outward movement.

I was told by the crane operator that this feature was common on tower cranes.

Reply to
John D. Slocomb

No, I meant that the crane (perhaps sans boom) motor, winch gear, and ballast (inside the untouched housing) were all there. The only weight they took off were the light(er) booms, and maybe some cabling. The majority of the weight was still up there.

Yes, it seems that way.

Painfully.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

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