Crane Accident

A man died yesterday on a building site in the small village of Cártama to the north of Málaga, after the jib of a tower crane ‘broke its back’ and crashed down onto the scaffold he was working from, throwing him from the third floor of the structure to the ground.

Six children have been killed near Tokyo after they were hit by a mobile crane while walking to school. The tragic accident occurred this morning in Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo, the children – five boys and a girl – included three nine year olds, one 10 year old and two 11 year olds.

A crane operator has been fined £2,500 and his employer £4,500 following a fatal accident in the UK in 2007. The accident occurred on a site in Liverpool in March 2007. Mark Thornton, 46, was working as crane supervisor for his employer Sitwell Construction, when the 50 tonne crane he was directing tipped over due to overloading. The load, a six tonne steel column, struck Thornton killing him instantly.

A man working on the top of a mobile crane was injured yesterday in Tempe, Arizona, it is not clear if he was rigging or carrying out maintenance work, when something struck his leg and broke it.

A Rough Terrain crane tipped over yesterday by the side of the river in St Joseph Michigan. The operator escaped with minor leg injuries. The crane went over sideways at the Pier 33 Marina trapping the operator, Walton Dohner in the cab upside down hanging over the St Joseph river. The photos suggest that one of the outrigger beams was not fully extended on the side the crane tipped.

A 450 tonne All Terrain crane went over on a wind farm in Denmark last week dropping the rotor blades of a turbine it was helping to repair.

A four axle truck crane was turning at an intersection and hit a 71 year old lady, who died later in hospital. Witnesses say that the driver was not speeding or driving recklessly and there is absolutely no suggestion that there was anything wrong with the crane.

A man has died after a crane dropped a concrete panel on him in Kitchener, Ontario, just west of Toronto, Canada yesterday, it was the second incident on the site in two weeks. The man aged 42 suffered severe head injuries when the concrete slab fell as it was being lifted off of a truck by a tower crane. The ministry of labour suggested that poor rigging may have been to blame. The company responsible for the site is Tricar Developments.

A Chinese crane delivery ship has been ‘arrested’ by the U.S. Marshals Service after it damaged a quayside crane in Portsmouth Virginia. The arrest follows an accident on February 14, the crane delivery ship Zhen Hua 24 had just delivered two new cranes to the port and was pulling away from the berth when one of two cranes still on-board the ship, for delivery elsewhere, clipped the jib of one of the new 1,650 ton crane it had just unloaded, knocking it off of its rails and twisting part of the structure.

The superstructure of a tower crane broke free at the Mercedes Benz stadium in Stuttgart on Saturday seriously injuring the operator. The flat top crane was rigged on a 14 metre tower and was working on the conversion of the historic 1933 40,000 seat mutipurpose stadium to a 60,000 seat football stadium.