Crane business

The Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association announces session topics for its Crane & Rigging Workshop, to be held Sept. 21-23, 2011 at the Sheraton Philadelphia City Center, Philadelphia, Pa. For more information, go to the Meetings section at www.scranet.org.

A crane crashed into a house in Shoreview, Minnesota – near St Paul -yesterday after it tipped while lifting a large hot tub into the back yard. The crane, a four axle Grove truck crane owned and operated by local crane rental company Truck Crane Service Company of Eagan, Minnesota. The crane was properly set up with outrigger mats in place and all outriggers fully extended.

A crane working in Elburg, the Netherlands, dropped an old boat after the web slings broke in a similar manner to the recent accident in Ireland, where the failure of a set of slings dropped a ferry in to water.

A female crane operator was injured yesterday, suffering two broken arms and a broken leg, after the crawler crane she was operating – a vintage Link Belt- tipped over sideways trapping her in the cab.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour announced Monday its inspectors will conduct a safety blitz this month of construction sites with tower cranes, checking access and fall arrest equipment, plus inspection records and certification of operators.

Pieces of the global wind energy market are moving through Vancouver. Through July, trucks and rail cars will haul the enormous wind-energy components — including blades, generators and towers — from the Port of Vancouver to wind farms in Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

The Sany Group recently announced manufacturing the world’s largest crawler crane. The jumbo crane rolled off the production line of China’s largest machine manufacturer on Tuesday in east Jiangsu Province, marking a major step forward for the Chinese manufacturing industry.

The company has won two safety awards from the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association (SC&RA). The first was the Crane & Rigging Zero Accident Award. This award is for members that complete the year without a single accident.

The company was preparing to re-roof the building, but when the operator raised the first pack of materials, the crane lost stability and tipped, coming to rest against the leading edge of the building.

A couple of our readers have sent us information and photographs of the new 3,600 tonne Sany SCC86000TM crawler crane. The crane looks like a combination of the Terex CC8800 Twin and Manitowoc’s model 31000. It uses a twin boom and twin derrick mast but employs four sets of tracks in a similar way to the Manitowoc. We are still lacking a great deal of detail, but some of the photos we have seen show a four tracked carriage which looks as though it might be a super-lift counterweight carrier.