Why are there so many crane collapses?

Question

It seems like every time I turn on the news there is another crane collapse. I don't know if it is the same problem every time, but it seems awfully suspicious. Does anyone know why crane collapses seem so common lately? Has it always been this way?

Answer 1

You are not alone in wondering:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25740449/

In every case that I've read about recently, the fundamental cause has been human error.

Sometimes the direct cause of the human error was the incompetence of the crane operator; other times the direct cause was the business pressure to cut corners to try to get the job done faster and at lower cost.

Have there always been these pressures? Yes. Have they always been as intense? Not at all clear. At least some of the blame has been going to the edge-of-the-envelope nature of these particular cranes and their operation.

All that said, no job is completely safe and none will ever be. Power tools of every sort have more power to hurt, but people have been hurting themselves in construction, even without power tools, for thousands of years. So one aspect is that we take such accidents more seriously now than people did 100 years ago, because life, for most of us, is a lot safer than it was for people 100 years ago.

Note how many of the "most dangerous jobs" were the kind of work most people did 100 years ago:

http://www.menstuff.org/issues/byissue/d...

This chart is not definitive, it leaves out many occupations (such as mining), it only considers fatalities (not loss of limbs, etc.) but it conveys the general picture. For hard data look at:

http://www.bls.gov/iif/