German safety body the Berufsgenossenschaft (BGS) raised a query about part of the EN 13000 standard in September 2004. The section concerned the ability of crane operators to use a key to manually override the crane’s load-moment indicator. The BGS argued that this was unsafe.
An FEM committee has devised a solution to this objection that allows the manual override to remain in use, but with some limitations. These limitations include slowing down boom motion to a fraction of normal speed. Every time the crane is overriden the event is logged.
At the Intermat show in April, the FEM committee met and broadly approved the solution, although a few details remain unfinished. Also during Intermat, the European federation of crane rental users, ESTA, approved the solution.
The FEM group of manufacturers has agreed that all new cranes sold after 1 January 2009 would include the new technology, which cannot be retrofitted to earlier cranes.
For more information, see the feature article “Flicking the Switch” on p. 15.
