End of an Era

[CINDERS]

Lastly there was a notice in a crane operators learning guide "No single piece of construction equipment has the potential to do so much damage as a crane toppling over."
So for ease of example I'll use my last crane I operated for 4 years ~ Liebherr LTM 160 - 2 a 160 tonne capacity machine carrier is 15 meters long & 3.9 meters wide with a road going weight of 60 tonnes and onsite when fully counterweighted weighs 110 tonne which it can mobile itself around sites like that set up in a special way which I have done.
So it has a 60 meters main boom power pin boom you check your load weight & radius then pic a boom configuration that gives the best capacity it has a gripper system where it will take one section at a time out lock it, the gripper will travel back to grab the next section, top sections first, got to get it right as to reconfigure it takes a lot and the client will be p*ssed.

So as a quick example I may want a selection of booms in percentages from the bottom to top 92 - 92 - 92 - 46 - 46 if you mess up and have to change say the 2 46's then you have to suck the whole lot in again starting from the bottom 92's it takes time for the gripper to travel up & back inside each section.
On top of the main boom you have a 36 meter fly so all up 96 meters of boom/fly combination.
Now your a person on the ground working 90 meters away from this crane when for some reason or another it topples over the fly can effectively hit you so imagine the velocity & weight impacting your body, in a certain scenario it may go beyond 96m if the headache ball is slung on the rope!
So take notice of cranes as they are still able to get to you even though you think your outside their red zone!
Thanks for your patience guys hopefully you may have learned a little bit about them but there is so much more to operating a crane than fits in here.