Spreading the safety net

More than a hundred delegates assembled at the Okuri Hotel in Amsterdam on 20 and 21 June for Crane Safety and Management 2005, the annual international conference organised by Cranes Today and its sister magazine Hoist.

The event attracted delegates from all over the world including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Australia, the US, Canada, India, South Africa, Cyprus, Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Malta, and all the Scandinavian countries.

They heard a range of industry experts talking about an array of business issues from the need to harmonise safety standards to the advantages of head up displays in cranes.

Each morning there was a plenary session at which all the delegates were able to get the lowdown on safety and management initiatives from around the world. In the afternoons, delegates were free to join one of three streams – lifting engineering, factory cranes, and loader cranes – at which industry specialists discussed issues specific to those sectors.

Opening the first plenary session, keynote speaker Heinz Helmut Kempkes, president of the FEM (the European Federation of Materials Handling and Storage Equipment) observed that crane manufacturers were increasingly offering complete logistical solutions. “Competence,” he said, “does not rely only on technical knowledge, but also on the ability to control process flow, which guarantees quick and reliable material handling.”

Increase in capacity

He gave the example of port technology. “Due to the increase in world trade, the number of containers transported by sea will continue to grow. This will result in demand for a significant increase in the capacity of modern container terminals,” which will have a significant impact on crane designs.

Kempkes said that the implication of the integration of handling equipment including cranes into fully automated systems was being discussed in the FEM’s Integrated Systems Group.

The message from Mammoet’s safety director for the US, David Mendenhall (standing in for safety director Bryan Cronie who was unable to make the conference), was that international standards harmonisation was the best way to boost safety in the lifting industry.

He also called upon contractors, lifting, and transporting organisations to stop accepting work that had been bought to keep the competition out and keep equipment working for little or no margin.

He said major customers must stop tasking the contractor with the cheapest price and “screwing the safety element out of lifting and transporting organisations to get the cheapest price”.

Mendenhall concluded by saying that governments, industry associations, and individuals in the lifting industry should be remembered for raising worldwide standards rather than lowering standards to gain commercial advantage.

Somebody committed to raising worldwide standards is Derrick Bailes, chief executive of the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association. His subject was the effective management of lifting tackle and he wasted no time in getting to the point: “While it is true that a good slinger can lift almost anything with a range of general purpose equipment, it is certainly not always the most efficient or safe method.”

He urged those planning lifting operations to widen their thinking beyond general-purpose equipment: “Even within the readily available range of off-the-shelf equipment, there is a wide variety of special purpose equipment but, for some jobs, the planner should be thinking of bespoke equipment.”

This, he warned, meant planning further ahead: “Last minute lash ups made under pressure of time and money are a common cause of accidents.”

Bailes concluded that selecting suitable equipment of the right quality in a serviceable condition and using it correctly would stack the odds firmly in favour of a safe lift.

Safe lifting was also a major theme of Yukinori Ouchi’s presentation. After looking briefly at the history of the crane industry in Japan, the director and general manager of the Japan Crane Association produced a startling comparison of the number of deaths and injuries of those in all of Japanese industry. He pointed out that even though the design, manufacture, use, and maintenance of cranes are regulated in Japan: “The number of deaths related to crane operation account for 4.4% of all industry. This means that the severity of crane accidents is much higher than others. In other words, crane operation involves higher risks.”

But, it is not only in Japan that cranes can pose a significant threat to health and safety. Australia too has to confront a range of safety-related issues, which were neatly summed up by Jeff Brundell, managing director of Manitowoc Crane Group in Australia. Looking back to the early 1990s, he said that all cranes had to undergo a 12-month inspection, and many States insisted on overload testing every unit imported into Australia.

Fast-forward a few years, he said, and: “We have gone from a tightly regulated industry to a completely deregulated industry in a very short time. As an industry, we always complained about the over-regulated state we were in, and now that we are deregulated, we did not know what to do, or were too ignorant to deal with the issues.”

These, he said, included design regulations that were “and continue to this day” to be abused, and imported cranes that failed to comply with Australian standards.

On the latter he said: “It used to be the case of Asia being the dumping ground for the world, but Australia is now the undisputed dumping ground for Asia. We first became alarmed when New Zealand cranes over 30 years old were sold at an auction in Brisbane some years ago, but even older units have since arrived at our shores.”

Crane industry implosion danger

Brundell could see a danger of the crane industry imploding if something were not done urgently. Luckily something was done – CraneSafe Australia was developed. This is a programme designed to provide crane owners, suppliers, and users with a common industry-wide system for third party assessment of the safety aspects of their cranes.

Brundell explained: “The CraneSafe Assessment Programme is voluntary, and while it does not form part of any legislative or regulatory scheme, it will assist crane owners and users in Australia to meet their obligations under occupational health and safety legislation to ensure that their mobile cranes are in a safe condition.”

CraneSafe is now in its third year, and Brundell is happy with the way it had been embraced by the industry.

He added: “The problems we encountered with used crane imports are picked up by the assessment reports [which form part of the CraneSafe programme]. The decals must be in English, load charts must conform to Australian standards, English manuals have to be with the crane, a log book has to be in the crane, the LMI must conform to the load charts, and be in English, etc, etc. Virtually all of the suspect areas are addressed, and the unit has to comply before a CraneSafe sticker is issued.”

Although the system was starting to have an impact, Brundell went on to produce some frightening statistics on the age of used cranes in Australia. He estimated that the average age of the country’s all terrain cranes was 6.18 years, but this masked some big differences in age with the oldest AT picked up by the CraneSafe monitoring system being 35 years old. The average lattice boom crawler crane was 16.27 years old, with the oldest detected by CraneSafe being 46 years old. For rough terrain cranes the figures were 12.68 years and 40 years old respectively.

Evaluating the rules

Another safety initiative, this time in the Netherlands, was outlined by Lion Verhagen, director of the VVT (Vertical Transport Association, which represents 183 companies, mainly crane rental firms). This organisation last year introduced “VVT-Erkenningsregeling”, an initiative designed to evaluate in practice relevant rules and regulations affecting crane rental companies together with safety criteria outlined in the VVT safety manual. Participants in the voluntary scheme commit to implementing continuous and practical improvements to their processes in order to embed safety as part of their organisations.

The goals of the system are to create a single safety system for the cranes/vertical transport sector; achieve a process of continuous improvement of safety and skills; and support the implementation of new developments and legislation.

Verhagen said VVT-Erkenningsregeling was not a system, but a behaviour based on safety. He posed this question: “What do you think is practical – think everything through 100 per cent and then start working, or start working sensibly and improve along the way?”

He favoured the latter approach, and explained that this underpinned the VVT-Erkenningsregeling approach: “It is a voluntary [continuous] improvement process that should create a win-win situation for the vertical transport sector and government.”