New Blogger

Hello all! My name is Gaytor Rasmussen. Some here may have seen my writings before on another blog that I have called www.towercraneaccidents.blogspot.com . I’m bringing that content over to Crane Blogger to expand the audience so that we can maximize our crane accident coverages and all learn as much as possible. Information is the key to preventing accidents. I do this blog because I grew weary of the claim that tower crane accidents never happen. That’s an ignorant viewpoint and I’m here to expose it as such. If we were to maintain that opinion 100’s more would die unnecessarily, and I do mean 100’s. I come from the tower crane industry in Seattle Washington. I’m currently a tower crane inspector and I may be the only guy in the nation licensed as such in two states. Before that I was an NCCCO licensed crane operator with Local 302, also in the Seattle area. I have substituted in many manufacturer’s types of cranes and models as I was building my inspection business, but I only spent one year operating cranes full time.  My real introduction to tower cranes was as a crane erector. I spent 7 years plus as an Ironworker out of Local 86 in Seattle. We travelled all over the West Coast, Hawaii and Anchorage  erecting cranes. After 4 years of the travelling circus I decided that I wanted a home life and a schedule. That is when I moved from hanging off the cranes to sitting in the seat.  On the weekends I would still erect tower cranes when it was busy. Interestingly enough I was one of the crane erectors on the crane in Bellevue Washington that collapsed. I have some insight on that crane , and that insight actually got the company that I worked for dismissed from the lawsuit. You’ll soon be able to find that insight here. I’m going to maintain both blogs. They are going to be duplicates of each other. I’m currently going through the old blogs and preparing them for posting here. I want to chronicalogically order the accidents so that we have a history of what I can find to date. If there are updates, misspelled words, new pictures, you’ll find them all corrected and updated here soon. I look forward to blogging here and hearing from you if you have thoughts about an accident that I may have missed. The purpose of me blogging is education. We all deserve a safe worksite, and the public should be able to go about their business without having to worry about what we are doing. Thanks to Crane Blogger for the invite!