WorkSafeBC crane conference lifts bar for safety in booming highrise construction sector
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 02:32:27 +0000
Though it happened across the border, April’s collapse of a tower crane in Downtown Seattle wasn’t far from the minds of B.C.’s crane community Wednesday at a safety conference in Richmond.
In that incident, crews disassembling an 85-metre-tall crane had removed too many connecting bolts too soon, against manufacturer instructions, and the structure toppled in a gust of wind killing two ironworkers who rode it down and two people in cars on the street below.
“It’s a wake-up call for sure,” said Fraser Cocks, executive director of B.C. Crane Safety, the agency responsible for certification of crane operators in the province and co-organizer of the Richmond conference with WorkSafeBC.
“You always hear about them in the news and the question comes up, can it happen here?,” Cocks said, adding that such disasters always get the industry examining how it operates.
So with 300 tower cranes at work in B.C., 250 in the Lower Mainland alone, and no sign of the sector slowing down, B.C. Crane Safety and WorkSafeBC co-hosted their second annual safety conference for 160 industry leaders.
In the province’s case, WorkSafeBC immediately sent a letter out after the Seattle disaster reminding crane owners to be diligent about following manufacturer instructions when assembling or disassembling tower cranes, said Doug Younger, a key occupational safety officer on the agency’s crane inspection team.
“That kind of event that close is immediately blasted out,” Younger said.
Generally, Younger said the crane sector’s safety record is “quite good.”
“We have the industry’s ear. It’s a small industry and it’s fair to say 80 per cent of (its) leadership is here,” Younger said of Wednesday’s conference.
At the same time, there are safety issues that Younger wants to stay on top of. For instance, he said this year WorkSafeBC has recorded 22 contact incidents with tower cranes, incidents where cranes have hit power lines, hit other structures or another crane on construction sites where two or more cranes operate on overlapping paths.
None of those resulted in injuries or fatalities, but all of them had potential to be catastrophic, Younger said, and all of them were preventable.
And with some 300 cranes at work in the province, from Downtown Vancouver to B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam project near Fort St. John, Younger said, “work sites aren’t getting any easier.”
Younger said he hasn’t personally seen lax practices such as those that led to the Seattle disaster happening in B.C., but couldn’t definitively say they haven’t happened, but without a reported incident.
However, Younger said WorkSafeBC brought together contractors that assemble and disassemble cranes for a breakfast meeting over the summer to debrief the Seattle incident.
And from that, WorkSafeBC and industry groups put together an initiative to write their own putting-up- and-taking-down-tower-cranes best practices guidelines, which Younger hopes to have in place by spring 2020.