crane safety, never stand underneath

They just had a close call a couple of days ago at work.
A nylon sling broke when a load being lifted snagged. Crane being used was one of the turbine hall main gantry cranes with a 180ton main hook and the 25ton auxiliary.
So they ran the 25ton crane up and down inspecting cables, pulleys etc for obvious damage and non found. Final step was running the crane to the top limit to ensure the emergency over travel lever/switch operation.
Up goes the 25ton hook and pulley block which weighs about 500lbs to 45ft above the floor. Hits the emergency stop and keep on traveling. Pow.....the cable snaps and down comes the pulley block and hook.
Hit a heavy I-Beam fortunately instead of the turbine steam superheater beside it. Hook and block assembly skidded several feet across the floor while cutting a groove in the concrete.
And that folks is why it's best to never stand or travel under or near a suspended load.
Broken cable is still dangling from the crane and is full of kinks. The broken ends are bloomed out like a cow's tail.

You are in a large power plant I take it?

I worked for the City of Fort Pierce Florida in the power plant one summer in my youth. It was cool back then. Probably bigger and cooler today.

Glad nobody got hurt.

Last fall, I was watching a 90T crane pick an air-handler onto the roof of a building at work. Two girls were jogging up the sidewalk, ducked under the caution tape and crawled underneath the outrigger of the crane, then walked unto the building. Happened so fast that they were gone before we even started to yell. They were perfectly fine and didn't have a clue that had risked their necks. Had trouble sleeping that night and still freaks me out when I think about it. Be Safe. Watch out for the other people too.

About 35 years ago I worked in a steel mill.

After my regular shift was over, I would "double over" in the tubing mill.

Normal pay was "time-and-a-half", but because of the danger involved the normal pay was double-time.

There was an overhead P&H crane with one pulley block/hook.

Braded wire cables were used to lift and move the oil coated pipe.

Knowing where to place the wire cables for the best balance; not only for lifting, but also for momentum shifts while traveling through the mill, was one of my better skills.

Crane operators never lost a load that I had "hooked".

Working as an overhead crane operator in the mill, I never lost a load of pipe.

Always watched the man on the floor to make sure it was done right before operating the lift levers.

Too many different ways to get killed or injured around an overhead crane.

We had a gantry robot fall a few years ago. The bolts holding it on broke. Found out the whole job was held together with cheap bolts. Changed all the bolts to grade 8, and added a safety cable to the robots.

When I was in the Marine Corps a SeaBee operator was load testing a crane with a large concrete block.Suddenly both hyd. cylinders bent ,one came into the cab blowing window glass all over him.He jumped out of the cab white as a ghost. But then he jmped back in and extended the cylinders a bit.I said Fred whats up with that?He said Im not a crane expert and Im not so sure on my boom angle here.Still shaking he said theres gonna be an investigation and aint paying the darn Marine Corps for this piece of junk crane.It was found to be metal fatigue and age due to the operator having the boom extended correctly at the time of failure.The thing had knobby tires and camo paint.It was sent to Albany ,Georgia for repair.The USMC is cheap.

What plant do you work in. I work for WOODGROUP doing inspections on steam turbines. We had a crew in the south that just did the same thing only the cable didn't break but the block was stuck to the drum. We use overhead cranes and mobles all the time. Thing can happen fast.

Worked under a lot of hammerhead cranes as a commercial carpenter.One hammerhead would.nt stop going around.Around and around it went,had a large wall from hanging from the hook,too. Somehow the wall form alighned itself and snaked through the rebar verticals in the stair well every time.Eventually the got the power turned off.
Another was two hammerheads on one job.The counterweight on one crane smashed into the operaters hut on the other crane causing the craneman to fall through the floor of his hut and to his death on the deck below.

Having worked on both mobile and stationary cranes for nearly 15 years my question here is how/why did the operator allow the crane to pull the cable in that far? In my experience an emergency shutdown is designed to shut off EVERYTHING if something goes wrong, like say a function control sticks, etc and it will do it at ANY hook height. Now if your talking about the ATB (anti two block) switch that's designed to keep the block from getting pulled into the drum like happened here, that's a different story. In that case, it's true, it only works with the hook block at the top to pick up the weight. Even then the weight should be hanging far enough down to give the winch drum/line time to decelerate from speed and stop before the hook block gets sucked in.

That said, if it was a true emergency shutoff and not an ATB switch, why did any the function controls even have to be activated like they were to test it? If the emergency shutoff was activated, and if it worked, then once activated no function would work. In other words no power, no go, so no accident. This, in effect, would then prove that it did work.

Not knowing if your meaning a true emergency switch or if your meaning an ATB switch, I'll say this also. I don't know whether the crane has a winch speed control but if it did then it should have been being tested at a low speed. Even if it is a single speed control being activated manually (I assume it has no automatic function) the operator really should have no excuse for not paying attention and therefore not being able to release the function control before it sucked the block into the drum. To test under power he should have eased the line to the top and let it bump and slightly pick up the weight to activate the ATB switch and cut off the winch. If the line speed was too high for that to be done safely then the weight whould have been picked up in another "safe" manner to test the switch. Either way something simply wasn't right about this "test"

That said I agree with the heading of the post to never stand under a suspended load. In this case though there wasn't really a "suspended load" there was just the hook block which I'm sure gets walked under a million times a day. Granted getting under any load is not the safest place to be but there are times when it is a necessary evil in order to crib the load, cut off temporary bracing, etc. In the case of the hook block it's technically not considered a load and you pretty much have to get under it in order to rig a load...

Whatever the case, or load, the main thing is that that you use quality, tested cable and rigging, and have both an operator and, if needed, a signal man/men that know what they are doing. In the case of the snag breaking the strap, it sounds like the signal man/men wasn't properly watching the load in this instance...although I have been doing this long enough to know that occasionally $hit does happen..... As far as the cable breaking and droppng the hook block I think the fault for that can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the operator. Had he been either paying attention or simply using a little common sense to do the test safely that would have never happened.

Even though I don't really care for many of their tactics/policies myself, and whatever the final cause of this incident is judged to be, I'm sure OSHA will have a field day with their investigation. Good luck on that.

I agree, way too many mishaps with cranes. I specialized in setting up mobile hydraulic cranes, Krupp, Liebherr etc. up to 500 ton, in NYC, as well as working with and under tower cranes in NYC. The first collapse in NYC last march, was a perfect example of gross under-estimation of rigging, they used nylon straps for a 12,000 lb pick, straps failed, load dropped, severed the connections and the crane toppled, I did a lot of business with that crane company and the engineer of record for that installation, still can't believe what happened, and firmly believe it could have easily been prevented. Not much else to say, if you do crane work, you must know what you are doing or these things will happen.

My close call was at NAS Miramar in the early '70's. We had pulled the TACAN antenna off for bearing replacement, and were to reinstall the antenna on a Saturday. The TACAN is in the rear of a large paved pad, and I and a mate were on the tower. In came the old 6x6, swung a big "u-ie" We could see what was going to happen and could not believe that the driver wasn't going to stop. The crane op was trying to swing the thing, beepin his miserable signal horn. The driver finally got it and stopped--but the stick still had enough momentom to slap the tower.

I'm sure I set a world record down that ladder, and was going to murder myself one each crane driver. Two of my crew had to stop me. I still get would up thinking about that, and how close it was

They had a man killed several years ago nearby. U.S. highway bridge replacement. Line broke & huge concrete slab fell on a worker.

The part you left out................

The biggest over sight or goof up was the fact that they allowed people to stand around while preforming TEST on the crane.

I worked as a crane operater in a rolling mill and crane inspections and training was a joke. Saw one guy killed from a two block hit. Wasn't pretty.

They were standing there but well back out of the way.
Update,block + hook weighed 880lbs.
Incident could have been avoided. Turns out the crane failed a load holding test with only 7000lbs the previous day but............Pressure to maintain production won out.
The poor smuck that was scared of his foreman, front line manager and section manager. He didn't want to take the heat for shutting down the job the previous day. Now he's carrying the blame for the entire incident.
Tear down after the incident found one set of brake lining friction material "de-laminated" from and fell away from the brake.
They figure the over travel limits did operate but they brake couldn't yank everything to a halt in time. There was enough inertia in the spinning drives to snap the cable.