Barack Obama

Democrats Seek Tougher Crane Safety Standard as Deaths Mount

Friday, July 25, 2008

Wall Street Journal By KRIS MAHER

Crane-related fatalities continued to mount, with six deaths in the past week, prompting Democrats in Congress to push for an enhanced federal safety standard and put more pressure on the agency charged with overseeing workplace safety.

An elderly man who was in his car watching a church steeple being assembled in Oklahoma City Thursday was killed when the boom of the crane fell on the car, according to a local fire-department official.

A day earlier, an iron worker in Normal, Ill., who was assembling girders at a construction site, died when the boom of a crane fell on him, according to the McLean County, Ill., coroner. Friday, four workers were killed and seven injured when a 30-story crane, one of the world's largest, collapsed at the LyondellBasell Industries refinery in Houston.
The company, which had contracted the crane to do scheduled maintenance work, said it has launched an investigation into the accident.

Tuesday, nine Senate Democrats sent a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, urging her to issue a new safety standard for cranes and derricks.

The letter, which was signed by Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, said it was "unfathomable" that the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for maintaining worker safety, including inspecting cranes, hadn't implemented recommendations made in 2004 by industry and labor to issue a new standard to improve crane safety.

Sharon Worthy, an OSHA spokeswoman, said regulatory and legal requirements slowed the rule-making process.

She said OSHA is sending more inspectors to its training-institute class that focuses on crane safety and organizing training events with local unions and industry groups. Overall, "workplace fatality rates are the lowest in history," she said.

So far this year, at least 18 construction workers have died in crane-related accidents. That figure doesn't include bystanders' deaths.

Industry and safety experts haven't come up with a central cause for the accidents, although some cite a shortage of inspectors and an increase in inexperienced contractors and workers who flooded the industry during the recent construction boom.
It isn't clear whether the rise in accidents is due to a rise in construction. OSHA estimates there are 96,000 cranes used in construction each year in the U.S. but couldn't say Thursday whether the numbers of cranes in use has increased this year.

Also, developers and contractors are under increased pressure to complete projects, as delays can be costly and the market is already suffering from the weak economy.
Between 1992 and 2006, there were an average of 22 construction-worker deaths a year involving cranes, according to an analysis of government statistics by the Center for Construction Research and Training, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The leading cause of death was electrocution while operating a crane, for example from contacting a power line, followed by crane collapse.

The recent string of fatalities follows a series of construction accidents involving cranes earlier this year in New York, Las Vegas and Miami, which led to a hearing in June by the Democrat-led House Committee on Education and Labor on construction-industry safety.
Edwin Foulke, who heads OSHA, defended the agency's safety practices and said OSHA is "proactively engaged to improve crane safety." He said the agency increased inspections of large construction sites in New York after a crane collapse killed seven people in March.

Among those attributing the accidents to a shortage of qualified crane inspectors is Frank Burg, a safety consultant in Woodstock, Ill., who is chairman of a committee with the American National Standards Institute that sets safety standards for cranes. "You don't have enough qualified people to inspect cranes," he said.

Mr. Burg said he believes that it will never be possible to inspect all of those cranes and that companies need the threat of large fines to upgrade crane-related maintenance and safety practices on their own.