Safety is all important. Managing risk is crucial to it. And training is essential to managing risk. This year ESTA launched a new guide to promote all three. The Lifting Operations Risk Management (LORM) best practice is a 36-page document, free to download, and was launched at the GIS Expo conference for the lifting and heavy transport industries, held in Piacenza, Italy, in September.
ESTA’s director Ton Klijn made the introduction. We spoke to him about the guide, what it contains, and how its intention is to improve the safety record of crane lifting in Europe.
CT. What exactly is the Lifting Operations Risk Management guide?
TK. This Lifting Operations Risk Management document, or LORM for short, is a guide to good practice. It is not written for the Sarens and the Mammoets of this world; big companies like that have their own in-house expertise. It is for the smaller companies.
Why did you decide to compile it?
It was written because we were getting signals from both our members and the marketplace: smaller companies are increasingly taking on bigger and bigger jobs and the increasing size and complexity means they are running into risks that they did not anticipate at the beginning. So we wanted to give these companies a little more insight into things they might not normally think about.
Can you give an example of the kind of risks you’re referring to?
Wind farms are an obvious example. If you are working on a wind site there are all kinds of responsibilities, with different people responsible for different things. For example, who is responsible for the lighting on the site? Who is responsible for security? Who will admit the ambulance in an emergency? There are all kinds of things like that and they need to be known in advance. When an accident happens it is already too late to discuss them.
So part of the problem is confusion over who carries which responsibilities? Exactly. Increasingly our members were having problems with clients who didn’t understand what they were doing and why they wanted to do it and who didn’t understand why they had to give certain information and why they were responsible for giving it.
If you are doing a lift for a client what kind of contracts do you have you have with that client and how are the responsibilities divided within those contracts?
How does the guide help clarify those responsibilities?
The first thing we have done in this guide is to try to explain who is responsible for what.
We set out a responsibility matrix between the client, the operating company and the crane manufacturer. It is actually a responsibility triangle, and it all starts with that.
The manufacturer must make sure that the right equipment is available and that it is clear how it can and should be used.
The operating company’s responsibility is to use the crane in the correct way and to take all necessary steps to assure that the lift can and will indeed be executed safely.
And it is the client who has to give them the opportunity to do so. Only if the client provides the right information and gives an operating company the opportunity to do its work professionally can the safety of a lifting operation be guaranteed.
Do you encounter clients who don’t share enough information?
Yes, that happens. For example, there have been clients who are reluctant even to tell the crane company the weight of the load that is to be lifted. Or they reveal the weight but then add 20 boxes of bolts to it before the lift without telling anyone, and that can add a tonne to the weight.
Does LORM also touch on contractual issues?
Yes; we then look at the contract. It is hard to believe but there are countries in Europe that do not have specific conditions for contracts for transport or lifting work. At ESTA we laid out such conditions a long time ago: we actually followed more or less the British system of having contract lifts and having crane rental contracts, which have been used in the UK for many years.
But the aim of the guide is not to reissue sets of rules and regulations for the industry. Rather it is an attempt, by outlining different forms of contracts and listing existing regulations and incident prevention measures, to make users of lifting equipment aware of the risks of lifting operations and of protections against their consequences.
How does the guide help operators prepare for a lift?
The next step is that the guide gives people all sorts of information on how to prepare for a lift: where the risks are, what you should do to minimise them. We refer readers to existing guidelines, because we don’t want to be just wasting paper by writing out all those rules again.
What guidance does the document give regarding training?
We have made some remarks about the people who perform the lift, their roles and professional competence and training frameworks. Of course, there is the operator of the crane, and the supervisor and the Appointed Person, and there are also the riggers and the signal person; and all of these need to be trained in one way or another. We set out what their training courses should have included.
ESTA has initiated the development of a ‘mobile crane operator training’ course (ECOL) that can be considered as a minimum standard for crane operators, and we refer to that because we would like it to be more widely used.
Germany is one country that does not use it. The UK is another. I think that if that if it were to be more universal it would be a good improvement of operator skills throughout Europe.
Sadly many companies are short-sighted: they will happily spend three million euros on a crane but think €500 on training an operator is a waste of money.
There are too many companies – sometimes large ones – that talk about safety but that do not follow though.
Does the guide also address different types of lifts?
Yes, we have classified lifts into three sections because you could be lifting a tool-box from a truck onto the ground with a knuckle boom, or you could be lifting a thousand-tonne vessel using three giant cranes.
So there are standard lifts, complex lifts and critical lifts.
There is also a section on double hook single crane lifting operations which are allowed in some countries but not in others.
The guide also has a section on engineered lifts. For example, if you have a plan for your engineered lift, what should be in that plan? What should you be able to see on the drawing? And what are the minimum requirements for such a drawing? Some people make beautiful full ones, some draw a couple of lines on a piece of paper and say ‘that’s it’.
How does the guide address unexpected situations on-site?
There is on-site preparation for a lift. You do what you can to plan but what do you do when there are exceptional circumstances, when real events do not follow that plan? So we have paid quite a lot of attention to contingency planning.
If you execute a lift, and your load is off the ground and you want to put it down in another place, what do you do if that place is suddenly unavailable for one reason or another? There might not be a second place to put it; you might not be able to put it back in its original location. Operating companies do not always think about such things.
Have you ever personally encountered any of these kinds of situations?
I personally have come into contact with this some 30 years ago when the first superlift cranes came in. On a superlift you have the counterbalance weight suspended from the crane; and if you put the load down you also have to put the counterweight down, or else your crane might fall over backwards.
I have seen a situation where a transformer was being offloaded from a barge, the crane rotated 180 degrees to set it down – only for the operator to realise that the counterweight would not fit onto the barge so he could put down neither the counterweight nor the load. It is not the only time that someone couldn’t put the load down because he couldn’t get rid of its fellow.
Where can readers access the LORM guide?
The guide is free to download from the ESTA website: go to the ‘Public Library’ page, then click under ‘Cranes’.’ (Alternatively, https://bit. ly/4nIPcFj gets you straight there.) It is available in English and in Italian and we are working on French, Spanish and German translations. We are hoping that it will be useful in pointing operators, manufacturers and clients – towards best practices in what they do. The result can only be an improvement in safety; in other words, fewer accidents and fewer people harmed.
ESTA safety award for Liebherr’s blind spot information system
In April this year ESTA announced the winners of their 2025 Awards of Excellence. In the category for ‘innovations in safety’ the winner was Liebherr. The company is equipping their new LTM 1110-5.2 mobile cranes with advanced driver assistance systems that increase road safety by detecting blind spots around the crane and signalling that there may be people in front of the crane.
In the confines of a jobsite, only trained personnel will be present. Access is restricted, and some degree of control is available where cranes and people meet. That is not the case on the public roads that the mobile crane has to navigate on its way to and from the jobsite.
There the crane shares the space a wide range of other road users Most readers will be familiar with the warning signs carried by large trucks reminding cyclists and others about blind spots; a mobile crane on the road is even more unwieldy than a truck, with still more blind spots that can potentially cause accidents and injuries.
Hence Liebherr’s release of its award-winning Blind Spot Information System (BSIS). It is to increase safety of road users near mobile cranes when they are on the road. Even with large mirrors the crane driver cannot see the entire area around the crane – there are always blind spots. In road traffic, and on-site when navigating through surrounding infrastructure, there are dozens of factors that he must be aware of. The blind spot information system is operated as standard via a so-called ‘camera wing’ on the vehicle. It carries two integrated digital cameras. If the system detects cyclists or pedestrians, it warns the crane operator visually and acoustically.
Children in particular are almost invisible directly in front of the cab: they are short, and the hook block is located in front of the driver’s cab, partially restricting vision. Despite specially fitted mirrors, visibility is often restricted. Here Liebherr’s Moving Off Information System (MOIS) comes into play: digital cameras on the left and right of the windscreen scan the area and warn the crane driver visually and acoustically of the presence of an adult or a child.
Automatic ballast detection system from Spierings helps reduce the chance of accidents
Another finalist in the ESTA Awards of Excellence was the Dutch crane company Spierings; this was also for an innovation for mobile cranes. The company’s Automatic Ballast Detection System is a system that is integrated into their new five-axle mobile crane. It introduces a transformative safety enhancement by addressing one of the most critical aspects of crane operation: accurate ballast configuration. The state-of-the-art system incorporates a dedicated load measurement axle to accurately detect and monitor the amount of ballast attached to the crane. By automatically selecting the correct lifting chart based on real-time measurements, the system eliminates the risk of human error and enhances operational precision.
Key safety benefits include error elimination: by automating the ballast measurement and lifting chart selection, the system removes any potential for operator miscalculations or manual input errors so reducing the likelihood of accidents caused by incorrect setups. It is also an aid to operator confidence: the system handles the complex calculations, leaving operators free to focus on their tasks with greater assurance. The end result contributes to a safer work environment and helps safeguard not only the operator but also surrounding personnel, equipment, and the construction site.
Liebherr’s Andy Claypole on Rising Demand for Crane Operator Courses
A properly-trained crane operator is a safe crane operator. Andy Claypole, Training Manager at Liebherr Training Services (a fully accredited CPCS training centre in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, UK) spoke to Cranes Today editor Christian Shelton at the Vertikal Days show earlier this year about how demand for training has dramatically increased.
“We train only for the lifting industry,” Claypole said. “And the big thing that’s changed of late is the funding that is available for companies through the CPCS, the Construction Plant Competence Scheme. Just now they can get 70% funding for training courses. If a company sends one of its operators on a Slinger or Mobile Crane course, if they book it through the Construction Industry Training Board, CITB, they can get a 70% grant for it. That is a massive saving, and they are up-skilling their staff.
“It has led to many more people coming into the industry. There has been a massive, massive increase. There is a big shortage of operators within the industry, which is causing problems for manpower, strains on people’s working hours and things like this, because people aren’t coming into the industry as they used to. There are now a lot more things available to the younger generation, and what they want to do is not necessarily crane operating.
“But, thanks to that increase in numbers we are now running crane courses back-to-back, and they are fully booked for the rest of the year. That is an issue in itself, because there are only a few providers in the country that run training courses, and so of course they are running into problems of availability of places, just trying to get applicants through.
“Everybody wants something, and they want it quickly. At the moment you might have to wait till next year for a place, which is something people don’t necessarily want to hear. I don’t know of an easy solution to this. You could say ‘make more training centres’ or ‘run more courses’ but I think it is a problem that’s been happening for a lot of years and it has not been addressed. People just haven’t been coming into the industry. There are lots of issues, lots of people have lots of different ideas and solutions, but there are many different problems contributing to it. But there is no one thing that will solve it. It’s not an easy fix.
“But if a young person is looking to become a mobile crane operator one piece of advice that I would give them is to go a crane firm and do the hard work. Do the labouring, do the swinging, do working in the yards… and offer to do them. People want to be fast tracked, they want to be driving the big cranes, but you have to work up to that. You’ have to understand the cranes, you have got to gain that knowledge, you have to understand what the industry is before you get to that stage.
It can be very long with unsociable hours. You have to accept those things. And if you can’t accept them then the crane industry may not be for you. Also, there are plenty of crane firms that don’t do the unsocial hours; whereas with the bigger firms you have to do the hours. And the bigger the crane, the more the hours you do. So I would say start at the bottom. Don’t expect to be fast tracked. Don’t expect to be driving a thousand-tonne crane within three years of starting your career as a slinger in the yard. Instead, help out in any way that you can and show your worth that way. And then that will get you into the industry, and perhaps eventually to the top.
The full video interview with Andy Claypole at Vertikal Days can be seen here: https://shorturl.at/YMAQV
Launch of New Guidance for HFRS In Construction
In the UK the Construction Industry Plant Safety Group, a pan-sector group managed by the Construction Plant-hire Association (CPA) and set up through the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), has launched a new publication entitled ‘Good Practice Guidance for the Use of Machine-Mounted Human Form Recognition Systems’.
The new publication is to inform owners, users, operators, managers. OEMs and third-party suppliers on the considerations for the fitment, use and management of Human Form recognition systems (HFRS) installed on plant to detect and warn of human presence in defined danger zones.
The guidance covers topics such as: HFRS types, function and fitment; management of systems onsite; data collection, monitoring; responsibilities to fitment and use; education and behaviours.
