The political storm

The US crane industry is in crisis-at least, it looks that way reading the news, which has focused attention on this year's fatal crane accidents in Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming.

"These accidents are terribly detrimental to workers, unions and employers alike, as well as the overall public impression of the industry," says Michael Vlaming, executive director of the California Crane Owners' Association. He and other industry and labour reps helped create a new standard in state after a tower crane collapsed in San Francisco in 1989. Twenty years later, the latest tower, mobile and crawler crane accidents, echoed and amplified through the news media (including Cranes Today), have caused business problems for the industry-a third of respondents to a Cranes Today poll said that they have had an effect on their business. They have also reached the nation's political agenda.

In July, nine US senators, including Democrat presidential nominee Barak Obama and runner-up Hillary Clinton, sent a letter to the Republican Bush administration and the US rule enforcer, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, complaining about the delays in the promulgation of the forthcoming US cranes and derricks safety standard, C-DAC.

In a press release about the letter, Democrat senator Charles Schumer of New York said, "These terrible and tragic accidents must be a wake-up call to close the gaping holes in the federal regulations governing crane safety. OSHA cannot continue to be asleep at the switch as cranes collapse here in New York and across the country."

On the other hand, what else would they say? There is 'definitely' pressure for regulators to be seen to be doing something, says Bill Irwin, executive director of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, which offers rigging training for millwrights and trades in local unions and at its Las Vegas, Nevada national training centre. He also believes something needs to be done. "Currently there is not adequate regulation, nor adequate enforcement."

It is not the first time that crane accidents have caused this kind of political interest, says Joel Dandrea, executive vice-president of US crane association the SC&RA. "The bottom line is that every time there are a couple of high-visibility accidents that are going to get attention from the media, the regulators and the legislators, the political environment is going to change, and the regulators and legislators are going to ask questions."

According to US professional engineer Ron Kohner, this political storm may completely miss the point of improving crane safety. "I am very skeptical that politicising something like this will have a positive value," he says. "From my viewpoint, unless you can peg the causes of these accidents-and that's incredibly difficult to do, because there is always associated litigation, and the stories vary depending on who you are talking to-you don't know whether politics will be helpful or harmful. If the politicians are mandating something that addresses the causes, then it would be helpful. Otherwise, more laws generate more paper, which is useless."

The Feds

In their letter to the Bush administration, the nine senators complain that federal crane rules have long been outdated: "As the skills and knowledge necessary to operate construction cranes has increased, standards to operate them safely have not kept pace. Cities and states have varying rules governing construction cranes, and some choose to rely on outdated federal guidelines from 1971, even though technology has greatly changed crane operations and substantially increased crane size.

"In addition, federal inspections are failing to provide adequate safety oversight. Annual inspections are rare. In states without any state regulations, many crane owners are able to side-step inspections altogether."

It was a sign of the power of this line of thinking that forced OSHA boss Edwin Foulke to testify before a House of Representatives Education and Labour Committee in June. In a written response to an earlier letter from Clinton, Foulke said the current OSHA standard requires inspection of cranes prior to each use, and each year. In fiscal year 2007, OSHA conducted 48,686 construction inspections. Foulke also wrote that OSHA has increased inspections in New York City and increased safety promotion there, and elsewhere.

The senators also complained about OSHA's 'unfathomable' four-year delay in developing the new cranes rule. Foulke replied that OSHA is required to perform feasibility analyses and write an explanation of the proposed laws.

In any case, OSHA finally sent the 120-page rule, now more than 1,000 pages, to the White House Office of Management and Budget in June. That agency has until September 16 to review it. If the agency approves the standard, it will recommend its publication as a 'proposed rule' for further industry comment. In July, representatives of the SC&RA spoke in front of the OMB in favour of the rule, since its members had helped develop it. SC&RA vice-president Dandrea says that all of this political pressure should spur development of the rule, which he says he hopes to see published this year.

Happening already

Recent accidents are unfairly punishing an industry that has already begun to change, says Michael Vlaming at the California Crane Operators' Association. He says, "Many of the states have been working on, and passing, regulations regarding more stringent crane and crane operator safety since the 1990s."

Graham Brent, executive director of the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, makes the same point about crane operator certification programmes. "In the four years since this document was finished, six states have enacted legislation, and we are now working with at least another six looking at it." He says that nationwide crane operator certification is just a matter of time. "The way we see it, operator certification is coming anyway, was coming regardless [of the cranes rule] and it is already here in many cases." His organisation runs the USA's biggest crane operator certification programme.

Brent says that a federal system for crane licencing makes the most sense. "The reality is that it is coming. What do you want? A crane operator with 50 licences? Or one, or at least one process?

The new federal rule contains a provision that crane operators would need to be certified by a third-party certification body, such as CCO, four years after the effective date of the standard.

When asked if there were some states that would resist what they might see as federal interference, Brent agreed: "You will always get people who think that. It depends a lot on population. I would have said that Texas was one of those, until recently when there have been multiple fatalities in three or four accidents. I still get people who say, 'We don't need certification, our state has been five years accident-free.' That's what Washington state said until Bellevue [where a tower crane fell over, killing a man in November 2006]."

"The history of this sort of legislation is that people have to die for this legislation to be introduced-when you get people involved with cranes dying, and people around cranes dying."

The local level

At the same time, crane accidents are spurring laws at the city and state level. The state of Oklahoma, for example, is planning to develop minimum standards for licencing cranes and operators for the first time, following a recent fatal accident, according to a report in the Associated Press. "It may save lives," state commissioner of labour Lloyd Fields told AP. "That's what we're after." After a fatal accident in April, the state of Maryland's department of labour has also proposed stricter crane regulations.

This kind of activity makes Dandrea at the SC&RA slightly concerned. "Sometimes when regulators and legislators go off on a reactionary measure to try to prevent something happening on their turf, it goes overboard, and does not take into account the realities of the industry, because they do not fully well comprehend what it might mean to members' operations. That's part of why we exist, obviously, to help express the views of our members and provide a voice to the industry.

"The challenge is that there are hundreds of different jurisdictions, in countless different states, moving in different directions. The lack of uniformity in what is going on creates difficulties for industry. That's why it is important that Federal OSHA moves forward, to get the rule published."

Dandrea cites the recent case of Miami-Dade county, Florida, as an example of just this sort of bad policy. Earlier this year, the county, which is the most populous in Florida, published a crane law that some crane operators argued made it impossible to operate cranes in the county. It was later blocked by the state's southern district court.

Florida state representative Greg Evers has worked with crane manufacturers, owners (including the Florida Crane Owners' Council), operators and riggers in developing a law that would cover the entire state. It requires tower cranes to be certified by a third party, and tower crane operators to be CCO-certified.

He tells Cranes Today that the problem with the Miami-Dade ordinance was that it tied the crane to withstand hurricane-force winds. But the amount of tie-in required to withstand these winds would make the crane unable to sway during operation, and risk collapsing on itself, Evers says. "You have folks wanting to prepare a crane for hurricane conditions that only happen a few times a year when no-one will be involved with that crane - they will be evacuated. My concern is dealing with the everyday use of that crane," Evers says.

Miami-Dade commissioner Audrey Edmonson, who helped initiate the legislation, agreed that the intention of the standard was to protect against hurricanes. But she said that structural engineers in the Miami-Dade buildings department dispute the claim that the ties make the crane too rigid for safe daily use.

In any case, Evers says he is confident that with the backing of the Florida governor the bill will pass in the 2009 session which starts in March. "What we did was to bring all parties together and we come up with a reasonable safe compromise to do the best job that we can as far as the regulation of these cranes goes. You don't play politics with this," Evers says.