Above and Beyond

Hanging more than 200 ft over a jobsite in downtown Kansas City, Mo., James Hague doesn’t seem to notice the tiny people and equipment below his feet.

The senior technician is intently fiddling with a dial gauge that measures the amount of play in a crane turntable—the giant gear that rotates the jib. “A bearing could go bad,” says Hague, suspended from a full-body harness. “And that’s something we want to know before the top falls off.”

Although this vertigo-inducing procedure is not required by law for a routine inspection, it is standard practice at Kansas City, Mo.-based J.E. Dunn Logistics Inc., which is stepping up its safety program in an effort to cut risks—especially around hoisting equipment. After Hague performs an inspection for one of the company’s cranes, he climbs down, slips off his gloves, sits in his pickup truck and enters his findings in a smart phone or laptop. In seconds, the electronic report shoots off to a file server in the home office.

J.E. Dunn’s safety managers anywhere in the U.S. can then use a secure Internet site to pull reports on the company’s fleet of 31 tower cranes. In the past, Hague and the firm’s other half-dozen inspectors would fill out a paper that eventually was filed away in a cabinet.

“We have had an aggressive inspection program for years,” says Dan Euston, president of general contractor J.E. Dunn Construction, the logistic unit’s parent. “It’s just becoming more formalized and stringent as we’ve started sending more tower cranes around the country.”

After a spate of catastrophic crane accidents that rocked the construction industry in 2008, contractors like J.E. Dunn are boosting their quality checks—and trying to go above and beyond current safety standards around cranes. “We felt that that was an area of the industry that had risk,” Euston says.

A large crane-rental company in Salem, Ore., is doing the same. There, Morrow Equipment Co. is putting its workers through a newly built, 9,000-sq-ft training center that it finished last summer. Among the classes are seminars on fall protection, rigging, lockout/tagout and electrical protection—fundamental training in areas that clients, regulators and insurers have tagged as risky.

Nearby, at the company’s maintenance shop, a new system of red, blue and green stickers—which inspectors must sign and date—indicates whether or not crane parts are safe to go out into the field.

Both J.E. Dunn and Morrow are boosting “quality assurance.”  

“We have to be diligent in maintaining our equipment and erecting equipment that we truly know—not that we believe—is safe,” says Peter Juhren, Morrow’s corporate service manager. “The accountability is the largest part of this new process.”

Plugged In

Kansas City is well known for blues, jazz and barbecue. But residents are also are quite familiar with J.E. Dunn’s fleet of royal-blue cranes, believed to be the largest general-contractor-owned tower-crane fleet in the country. Made by Spain-based Linden Comansa, the iconic cranes have a signature “flat top” design, meaning that they use no overhead wires to support the jib.

“I think it’s a complete coincidence that the cranes are blue and our company colors are blue,” Hall says. “It’s just been a part of the culture.”

What locals probably don’t notice, though, is the invisible database that now connects these cranes. The initiative began three years ago for general safety compliance and expanded last year for the hoisting fleet.

“In the past, when technicians go out to inspect a crane, they have a paper report that they fill out, and basically it’s filed away,” Hall says, adding that J.E. Dunn inspects its tower cranes every six weeks or 300 hours. Federal guidelines require annual inspections.

J.E. Dunn uses a software program called DB02 to track its safety compliance. In 2008, it asked the San Carlos, Calif.-based supplier to retool the program around the hoisting fleet.

“We can pull statistics and data, everything from fall protection to crane inspection,” Hall says. “Once a crane is moved, those statistics follow that crane to the next job.”

The equipment is hooked up to mobile GPS trackers, too. That may sound especially strange for tower cranes—which typically work from a stationary position. But the tracking devices monitor essential data points, such as load testing. Everyday, J.E. Dunn requires its operators as part of their startup routine to test the crane to 110% capacity. Industry standards only require this procedure upon initial erection of the crane.

It works like this: The operator instructs a rigger on the ground to hook up a dedicated test block that weighs the same at the crane’s maximum rating. Tethered to it is a smaller, “pup” weight that adds on 10% more.

The operator lifts the test weight, and when the chains pull tight on the pup, the crane’s limit switch trips, shutting it down. If not, the operator knows something is wrong.

This method is controversial because it potentially exposes the crane to premature fatigue. But it is perfectly legal as long as the manufacturer does not prohibit it.

Operators say they like the assurance. “If anything [bad] happened, it would be on me,” says Terry Pierce, a crane operator for J.E. Dunn. “You don’t get any second chances.”

E-mails fire away to Hall’s staff whenever a switch is tripped—so they know if an operator does not perform daily load tests. “When the contact goes in, it sends a signal to the GPS system,” Hague says. Technicians are the only people allowed to adjust the switches, which are calibrated for every job. If an operator tries to cheat, Hall says, “It’s an automatic no-questions-asked; that operator is dismissed within the hour.”

Tagged Out

With 550 machines, Morrow is believed to run the largest rental fleet of tower cranes in the U.S., and the firm’s management team says the company could be doing more to improve safety.

“We have to change as an industry,” says Juhren, who also chairs the American National Standards Institute’s B30.3 committee on tower cranes, which publishes best practices for the machines. “For years, it was just assumed that we did what we said we had to do.”

Years ago, Morrow already had developed a quality-control program—an internal mechanism for tracking its crane parts. In 2008, the company developed a system of tags—blue, red and green—that inspectors must sign and date. Blue means the part has been visually inspected and is ready for further tests. Red means it failed an inspection or test. Green means it is safe and ready to ship to a job.

Every time a Morrow crane comes back from a rental, it gets a top-down inspection. In New York and California, where it is required by law, next comes a round of nondestructive tests: Tower sections are tested using the magnetic particle method, which exposes bad welds or cracks that are unseen to the naked eye. Bolts are tested using the ultrasonic method, which also detects breaks in the material.

In other jurisdictions, Morrow tests its bolts every five years, and it tests sections only after structural repairs are made.

Interestingly, Liebherr Group, the Germany-based crane manufacturer that supplies the most equipment to Morrow, only requires a visual inspection of these parts, Juhren says. “Sometimes, you want to go above and beyond,” he adds.

Another key risk that Morrow recently identified: electrical shock. Most tower cranes in the U.S. are electric and run on 480 volts of power.

When workers need to service a crane, Morrow has for years required them to lock out and tag out the crane. If they need to follow live circuits, however, they now need to wear special gear. “The biggest issue is not necessarily electrical shock but what they call arc flash,” Juhren says. “If you create a dead short with high voltage, it basically shoots out a fireball.”

Spurred on by its insurers after such incidents, Morrow this summer began implementing a requirement that forces technicians to wear special clothes, face shields and gloves that conform with National Fire Protection Association’s arc-flash standard, NFPA 70e. “We were unaware of the full requirements up until last year,” Juhren says. “That’s when we decided to start our campaign.”

Paying the Piper

It may not be the best of times, but contractors like J.E. Dunn and Morrow are taking advantage of economic downtime to reinvest in safety—even as U.S. regulations lag behind. After all, only two states in the U.S. now require independent crane inspections.

And these initiatives are large costs in a time of little revenue. J.E. Dunn’s crane fleet is only running at about 35% capacity at the moment—down from 90% a year ago.

“When the ‘blue iron’ isn’t up in the air, that is a definite contributing factor in the profitability of the company,” Hall says. But a potential bright light in the recession is these companies’ renewed focus on quality assurance—a lack of which regulators have identified as a contributing factor in recent crane fatalities across the country.

“In this economy, most companies are holding onto every penny that they can,” Juhren says. “We are actually spending money and putting money back into our fleet.”

Mandatory crane inspections will only continue to increase, he adds. Starting on Jan. 1, Washington became the second state to enforce a rule that requires all cranes with one ton or more capacity to receive a top-to-bottom inspection each year from a licensed surveyor. California has a similar rule. Federal rules require annual inspections but do not require the inspector to be licensed.

And an updated federal rule, which lays out new training guidelines for crane workers, is expected to be published in July, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “The ultimate goal is to ensure that the cranes are safe to operate,” says Hector Castro, a spokesman for Washington’s Dept. of Labor and Industries, which regulates cranes in the state.

Ironically, the stakes in the safety game usually go up after, not before, lives are lost. Washington initiated its rule in 2007 after a deadly tower-crane collapse in Bellevue, attributed in part to a lack of inspections. California’s rule came on the heels of a deadly tower-crane collapse in San Francisco in 1989.

Even companies like Morrow and J.E. Dunn are not immune from accidents. In 2008, OSHA slapped Morrow with five violations—including a “willful” fine—the agency’s most serious—after a tower section fell during a crane climb in Miami. Investigators found that the crew did not follow manufacturer instructions. Morrow eventually settled with OSHA, the terms of which included knocking the “willful” citation down to “serious.”

Recent crane accidents were not the sole reason behind Morrow’s new training, but they “influenced” the curriculum, Juhren says. “Nobody wants to be in the spotlight,” he adds. “But every once in a while, we get into the spotlight. And we have to dance.”

Likewise, in 1985, a derrick fatality on a J.E. Dunn project in downtown Kansas City forced the company to rethink its hoisting protocols, many of which are still in use today.

“It’s not about how much money we make or how tall we build the next building.” Hall says. “It’s not a success if someone doesn’t come home at the end of the day.”