Ernie Pierini

SCENARIO: I need buttons for my upcoming Social BOOM! book launch. I want 1,000 buttons with the word BOOM! on them for people attending the launch party. Buttons will be an easy way of identifying who has registered and who has not. The buttons will also be a souvenir from the event.

The inaugural Canadian Crane & Rigging Conference opened yesterday to a standing room only crowd. Crane professionals from all the western provinces and many from the United States attended the two-day event being held in Edmonton, Alberta. Most noteworthy was a strong contingent from the oil sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Indicative of both wind power’s continued maturation and the importance the industry places on the safety of its greatest asset, today the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) entered into an official Alliance to further protect the health and safety of the industry’s workers.

The Revised COP provides practical guidance to the industry as to how to use tower cranes safely and properly with a view to assisting duty holders in preventing accidents as well as complying with the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance and the Factories and Industrial Undertakings (Lifting Appliances and Lifting Gear) Regulations. The revision mainly involves incorporation of the good practices recommended in the second version of the Guidelines on Safety of Tower Cranes published by the Construction Industry Council into the COP, with a view to further enhancing the safety of tower crane operation.

A crane overturned yesterday in a suburb of Darwin, in the Northern Territory, Australia, dumping the pool it was lifting, after one of its outriggers gave way

The crane a Zoomlion QUY 1000 crawler crane owned by Ningxia Tianxin Construction and development was lifting a 5MW wind turbine nacelle at the production facility of Sinovel where it was made. The load was recorded as 318 tonnes which was within the cranes capacity.

Almost after a gap of more than a month, mobile harbour cranes began functioning at the New Mangalore port from the second shift on Tuesday. The mobile harbour crane operators, whose five-year contract term came to an end on September 3, had stopped operations since September 4.

A fatal accident at York University in Toronto this afternoon did not involve a crane as has been widely reported. The tragic incident in which one man died and another was seriously injured, involved an excavator based foundation machine, which overturned at the site of a future subway station for the university.

A new double boom system to increase the lifting capacity of lattice boom cranes has been launched by Liebherr in Germany. Capacity can be increased by more than 50% “with relatively little effort,” the manufacturer said.

One man is confirmed dead and rescue crews managed to free another after a crane toppled over at a construction site at York University in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon.