Top-heavy crane injures 2
Construction related accidents often result in injuries such as spinal cord and back injuries, amputations, crushed limbs, burns, traumatic brain injuries, paraplegia, quadriplegia and even wrongful death.
Dallas, Texas (JusticeNewsFlash.com – News Report) – It is not very often you hear about accidents involving cranes but like any man-made object they have their flaws. It was a normal workday at the Old Hampton Pumping Station, a facility that is responsible for taking rain runoff from city streets and pumping it into the Trinity River. Workers were performing maintenance on one of the four pumps, but when they lowered the 9-ton pipe through an opening on the pump station roof, the crane cab was pulled off the ground. Within seconds, the boom of the crane fell onto the roof and the pipe landed on two car roofs. The injuries were quite minor, one worker had a small head laceration, and another suffered an ankle injury. The accident’s cause is under investigation.
There have been two other major crane accidents within the past few years. In mid-July, one of the nation’s largest mobile cranes collapsed at a Houston oil refinery, killing four workers and injuring seven others. In New York City, two crane accidents since March have killed nine people, which was a greater number than the total number of deaths from cranes over the previous decade. An analysis in the Associated Press found that cities and states have wildly varying rules governing construction cranes, and some have no regulations at all.
Texas leads the nation with 26 crane-related fatalities in 2005 and 2006, according to federal statistics. Additionally, Texas is one of 35 states that do not require crane operators to be licensed. Dallas city officials found eight of twenty-three cranes being used across the city had uncertified operators at the controls. It is astonishing that this is permitted with such large, heavy machinery, when we require licenses to operate planes, trains, buses and cars, why aren’t the same standards applicable to cranes? It should not take injuries, especially not deaths, for our lawmakers to realize that greater restrictions concerning the operation of cranes must be implemented.
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