Why Do Cranes Collapse

Sat., July 19, 2008
Another crane collapsed Friday. This time in Houston Texas, killing four and injuring at least seven others. After the recent crane collapses in New York, this one in Houston is especially disturbing. These cranes are enormous structures so when a crane collapses, as we have seen it can be devastating. It leaves many of us shaking our heads wondering why, when we can send people to the moon, we can't keep a crane from collapsing.

I dug in a little to see what I could find out. According to an abstract of a journal article on ingentaconnect.com a crane collapse is responsible for one third of all construction deaths. This was surprising, as crane collapses have only recently been stressed in the news. Many of the deaths from crane collapses prior to this year have not been in the United States.

So why are all the crane collapses in the U.S. now? We can't just blame the New York Crane Company who owned the cranes in the New York disasters now that we have other cities including Houston with their own crane collapses. The recent cranes involved in the collapses did not result from the same issue so we can not blame a specific part or error for the collapses. We do not yet know the culprit of the Houston crane collapse.

You would think with the lull in new construction we would have less crane collapses. In a discussion conducted by The Washington Post, John Cumings assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland College Park believes the lull in construction may be part of the problem. He states that the lack of new construction causes companies to be more rushed in order to save money. The faster a project is done, the less is spent on labor. He also points out that these huge cranes (the Houston crane is 300 ft tall) are rented by the month at the rate of fourteen to thirty thousand dollars per crane. Time is money and money is motivating.

An MSNBC report states that OSHA does routine inspections on the cranes and the construction sites. It goes on to explain, however that these inspections are "self policed" by the industry because no records of these crane site inspections are required to be submitted to any agency. Sounds a little like the wink and a nod approach to save a little time and money.

In the discussion conducted by The Washington Post a federal construction engineer chimed in with an interesting point. He noted that the ground laborers could often not speak English and could not follow code standards. A crane operator said he had seen many accidents happen because of lack of operator experiences. Hmm... it comes back to the whole money issue again.

As a layman who knows very little about the physics of cranes or crane safety I may have solved the mystery of the crane collapse. Money is a motivating factor and in tough economic times tough decisions have to be made. Decisions like to take a chance on having a crane collapse and killing some workers and bystanders, or spend the money to have the job done right. The former seems to be the decision too many construction companies are choosing. How many cranes will collapse before regulators choose to step in?