Can cranes repair their reputation after recent accidents?

Cranes have had a bad press lately, due to a spate of accidents. But with new guidance and legislation on the way, things are on the up. Colin Sowman reports.

The public's view of cranes has changed dramatically over the past two years - the publicity and pressure groups resulting from the fatal accidents in Battersea and Liverpool have seen to that. Although, or perhaps because, investigations have found no smoking gun, cranes remain under far more scrutiny than ever before.

But major accidents often result from a sequence of small, individually insignificant, happenings, while the Liverpool incident was caused by a freak gust of wind. To overcome these and other potential shortcomings, the crane industry is being subjected to a host of new rules, regulations and guides.

While some of the work on the revisions to legislation and guidance surrounding cranes and crane operations pre-dates the incidents of the past couple of years, they have raised the stakes considerably.

Nothing can underline this more than the grotesque coincidence of a member of the public being injured by an air-conditioning unit falling from the hook of a tower crane in Waterloo at the same time that a new charter for crane safety was being launched at the site of the Battersea incident.

Crane owners, operators and users face a two-pronged attack with new regulations and best practice guidance on one side and a greater emphasis in ensuring those rules and recommendations are adhered to, on the other. Crawler cranes have escaped lightly but other sectors look set for a major overhaul.

Tower cranes

Having suffered the high-profile fatalities, it is perhaps not surprising that tower cranes come under the closest scrutiny. Work on the Construction Plant-hire Association's (CPA) new guidance on the inspection, maintenance and examination of tower cranes started long before the recent tragedies, but it is now being joined by other measures devised since the accidents.

Tower Crane Working Conditions Best Practice Guidance is a case in point. It was published by the Strategic Forum as a direct result of the work that followed the fatalities and the CPA's technical information notes on the safe use of luffing jib tower cranes followed the findings of the inquest into the Liverpool collapse.

And now the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is renewing its efforts to ensure cranes are hired only to companies able to prove they have suitably qualified appointed and competent persons to plan and supervise lifts. Contractors unable to convince crane hirers they have the required staff must rely on a contract lift. This adds considerable cost as the crane hire company undertakes the administrative side as well as the actual lifting.

Mobile cranes

Mobiles have had their fair share of incidents but thankfully not the fatalities seen involving tower cranes. Changes in their design mean the traditional four-yearly overload test is outdated and an inappropriate way of checking the structure is sound. Computer-aided design and finite element analysis have allowed designers to make cranes light for the load they carry. The flipside is that the test's 25% overload can cause irreparable damage, is not recommended by most manufacturers and is banned by some insurance companies.

Instead the thrust will be towards thorough inspections picking up defects before they become serious enough to threaten the crane's integrity. This will be enshrined in a forthcoming revision of BS7121, due next year.

For contractors this means they will not be able to rely on the four-year certificate as proof that the crane is safe and will have to take a more active role in checking a crane hirer's inspection and maintenance regimes.

Truck loading cranes

The revision to BS7121 will also catch up with the latest developments in truck loading cranes. When the original standard was drawn up, truck loading cranes did only that load and unload the truck that carried them. But cranes have become much bigger and powerful, enabling them to undertake work that wasn't envisages when the original rules were drafted.

The revisions will do away with the anomalies that allow truck loading cranes to undertake lifting jobs without the paperwork and planning required if the same lifts were undertaken mobiles. The HSE says the proposed revisions will place lorry loader and mobile cranes on the same footing and require an equal level of planning and paperwork regardless of which type of crane is used.

The required planning and paperwork will be solely dependent on the complexity of the lift.

Lifts will be divided into 'basic', 'standard' or 'complex', depending on the risk involved. For instance, unloading roof trusses from the truck to the ground with clear line of sight will be a basic lift that can be undertaken without specific paperwork - regardless of which type of crane is used.

Operating without line of sight or towards the extremities of the crane's load/reach envelope increases the risk. What control measures are needed will depend on the risk involved with the lift as the HSE wants to make the process risk-based rather than 'one-size-fits-all'.

The upshot for contractors may be that without planning and paperwork, the truck driver may only be able to drop the load by the side of the vehicle instead of craning it onto a building.

It may have been some time coming, but whether you are a crane owner, operator or user, the events of past two years will have a profound effect on your work.