These guys got STYLE, wisdom and finesse.

[Burnham]

FORGOT???

 

[MasterBlaster]

Hey, I've done it twice in thirty years. The first time should have killed me: I was might near full up!

 

[thattreeguy]

holly shit these guys are beyond untrained and stupid
gives a bad name to arborculture

 

[treesmith]

Wonder why the crane operator didn't want his face shown???

Would you want to be seen with them, Paul? If I had to work with them, I'd wanna wear a mask! I guess we could all learn a thing or three from them about balance-point rigging with a crane. I was stumped as to why all the overhead chainsaw use whilst standing in a man-basket hanging from a crane? I mean, just raise it a smidgeon...

At the end of the first one, (at his "sissies, crybabies" pitch) I declare he looks like Murph with a mustache and Kojak cut!

 

[woodworkingboy]

I fear for the groundie. He looked a little disoriented at one point, and lack of common sense protective gear.

 

[mistahbenn]

Yeah the GM, the skidsteer nearly ran him over... after he felled the stem.

 

[bonner1040]

I thought i did a good job for my first time running a crane! I only spent about 5 minutes learning how to use it before hand, its actually alot like Xbox. I have been practicing alot lately though and i am still just as good!

In all seriousness though, I saw a crane fail once. We were working on a water tower and the crane came in, set up, outriggers down butch. Boom goes up, move counterweights off the loading truck, set up counter weights. Boom down, flipped out the jib arm, re ran the cable. Picked the man basket off the load truck to the ground, same with the test weight. Basket onto the test weight. Finally went to do a test pick and test our reach, man basket went up 2 feet maybe, cable snapped 150ish' above me, basket fell, ball crashed through the cage. Afterwards my boss calls and asks me what im doing, he knew about the failure, i told him we were all a little shaken up, he says, the jobs got to continue nick, we need to be productive!






The Black and Veatch safety guy said since no one got hurt he was thankful because he wouldnt have to write an incident report!!

 

[MasterBlaster]

Lordy!!!

 

[sotc]

What was it that caused the failure? I didn't follow

 

[CurSedVoyce]

Holy clean my shorts crap!

 

[bonner1040]

They never really found out conclusively. My guess is that the cable, a dual core 80,000#er, got pinched between the retaining pin and the pulley sheave on the top of the jib. The CO said that the meter never even read over the weight of the basket and test weight, around 1200#, and that the basket never lifted. My eyes, which were fixed on the jib said otherwise, i saw the cable break and heard the cage slam and turned and ran. The cable laid down well past where i had been standing and if things had gone differently it could have easily whipped me or one of my guys. As it were, i was only 5 minutes from getting in that basket and going up 100' + . Had i been in there, even being dropped only a foot or not at all, i am pretty sure the ball, which you see in the pics, would have killed me coming through the cage. I think it weighed in @ 280# the CO told me. He also said that in 20 years of operating he had never heard of a cable failure. Due to the safety officer being lazy there was no investigation to my knowledge. The crane company was out of Ohio where i live. I dont want to get sued for slander but if anyone has concerns about using a crane company here in Ohio i can give you the reference privately, or lack of reference i guess. (Can you get sued for slander if it is true?) The strange thing is that the counter weights weighed well over the weight of the basket and such, as well as the fact that more cable moved through the system after the restringing of the jib during the operation of attaching the basket to the test weight than when it ultimately failed.

They brought another crane the next day and we completed the job. I was unnerved to say the least as the basket went up and i rethought my decision to work..

 

[PCTREE]

When you were told you had to be productive I think I might have replied I would be productive calling OSHA.....

 

[bonner1040]

I was in a position where i needed my paychecks to keep coming. Regardless of what was right and what might have happened in the long run, i couldnt really handle an interruption in funding.

Not to say i risked my life unnecessarily because i was trapped or anything, the work we continued that day was not related to the accident and posed no greater risk than any other day.

As for finishing the next day well, ultimately i never really believed that 2 cables would break in as many days. I just didnt want to cause trouble and get fired.

But yeah it did cross my mind to tell him off. When he asked me what i was doing i had said flat out, "Nothing man, we are all just hanging out talking about how we almost died and are still a little shaken up." Response: "We cant let things like things like this slow us down, the job needs to keep moving and we need to stay productive"

 

[woodworkingboy]

Test weight?

 

[SkwerI]

I was in a position where i needed my paychecks to keep coming. Regardless of what was right and what might have happened in the long run, i couldnt really handle an interruption in funding.

This is all too common in our industry. Virtually every tree guy I know who works as an employee of a tree company is pretty much in this boat. Nobody will ever get ahead doing this work for somebody else. Goes a long way toward explaining all the owner-operator tree companies though.

 

[chris_girard]

This is very, very true.

 

[Old Monkey]

It always occurs to me when I hear about a fatality, that the job still has to get done. That's gotta suck.

 

[Al Smith]

I don't know a thing about those cage things .However in an open basket it's a common practice to use a life line much akin to what tree climbers use to be tied in to with a safety in case the load line fails .I'm not for certain if that's OSHA or not but it was the Canadian standard when I worked in Sarnia .

 

[Old Monkey]

Al, that place only exist in books and movies.

 

[bonner1040]

Test weight?

They use a test weight, it attaches to the bottom of the manbasket/cage, and simulates the weight of workers and tools to test the lift capacity and function of the crane before it is used to support life. You can see one used in the beginning of the first video, they 'unpin' it right before takeoff and it is left on the ground under the basket.

This is all too common in our industry. Virtually every tree guy I know who works as an employee of a tree company is pretty much in this boat. Nobody will ever get ahead doing this work for somebody else. Goes a long way toward explaining all the owner-operator tree companies though.

It is only fair to say that this incident did not occur during my tenure as a tree-man. This was on a cellular communications job working on a watertower. I used to climb towers and other structures to provide rope access labor and rigging support.

 

[MasterBlaster]

That sounds like a cool gig!

 

[Al Smith]

Al, that place only exist in books and movies.

Well yeah I know in the real world things aren't totally as they should be .However were it I I certainly wouldn't be showing a vid clip with such bravado for the whole world to see using such practices .To each their own on that .

 

[woodworkingboy]

Thanks for explaining how the test weight was used. The concept trips me up, though. I can't picture why a crane operator would need to run a test. Everything should be clear as a daisy what is good to go and what isn't, without testing it, for someone skilled enough to be at the controls. If it is so dicey that you need to put a couple hundred pounds in to see if it is ok, I'd ask for volunteers from guys doing long stretches in the pen. I must be missing something....

 

[Thor's Hammer]

Heres a beaut




<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lxX9-dcJ7NA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I pass this site regularly, its about an hour from me. It was a former employee of mine on site, seemingly the crane company took the rap entirely, as the operator should have had his legs fully extended. My ex guy was'nt climbing that day, but claimed it wasn't their fault at all.

I entirely disagreed (we sort of fell out over it) as my stance was that any treeworker with a smidgeon of experience would have known not to trust the crane to make that pick without the outriggers fully extended. They were trying to avoid a public road closure, which they would have needed to fully rig the crane.

 

[Al Smith]

That's an inexperianced crane operater doing that .