Safe lifting

New training and technology are making the region's cranes safer, but is there more to do?

No-one can agree what the number of cranes working in the emirates is. Some say the total is as high as thirty percent of all the world's cranes, others (including us) think it much more likely to be nearer three per-cent. Whatever, one thing we can all agree on is that there are a lot of lifting machines in the country, with numbers in the tens of thousands, more probably if you included the number of mobile, tracked, hydraulic and gantry cranes in with towers, masts and climbers.

On top of this, there are the thousands of elevated work platforms, of both boom and scissor type to take into consideration.

Then there are the cranes working through the rest of the GCC. Saudi Arabia particularly has a large number of the devices working throughout the many and various oil operations, as well as in the construction sector.

Perhaps then, it is little wonder that a few people fall off the structures occasionally. Waiel Manfalouti, general manager of Dubai-based House of Equipment (speaking to us earlier in the year), doesn't think it should be so. He says: "I think it is a catastrophe that so many companies don't invest in training. They are too busy racing against time to save penalties and they are more interested in taking a bigger volume of work; sometimes bigger than their delivery capacity. Some contractors are paying attention to safety, but the majority doesn't."

"Without safety and continuous training in the industry you cannot deliver something professional. If those two factors are missed, it is only the blessing of God that prevents accidents happening."

Elias McGrath, secretary of industry watchdog Build Safe UAE agreed: "We question the competency of operators and the training that they are going through to ensure that they are up to date with the right standards of practice. We keep stressing how simple it is to prevent damage to the machinery and an accident. Are the risk assessments being done, are the tool box talks being carried out?

These things don't cost you any money --- if the site manager has a checklist and things are properly carried out, then these things can progress smoothly. It all starts with management, you know they need to sort out the right budgets for the training, and it all comes down to the right supervisors managing. Yes, management has a role to play, when it comes down to it."

Modern

So the impression that safety standards need to be modernized and improved is clear, but can this be attributed just to the operators and site managers, or are the machines themselves playing a part? Manfalouti said: "You need to have the right men to service equipment. Accidents could happen while you are servicing or as a consequence of bad servicing.

If the equipment is not serviced correctly, on the operations side you could expect an accident at any moment. Unfortunately, with the lack of regulations to prevent accidents at a municipality level, the chance of accidents is high."

This is a point noted by Mr. Terry, a former tower crane operator and the webmaster of safety site liftingworld.co.uk, who believes that the age of the crane is a large factor in the amount of time it will last: "There is only a shelf life for these cranes. The reason being that welds on cranes are only designed to last the length of time that structure was designed for. After that, the crane is finished. If it is maintained tip-top it will last longer than it should do. But we all know what life most of these cranes lead. The crane is flogged to death on some sites, and how can you check a crane when it is up in the air?"

Terry's experience is with cranes in Europe, but he witnessed first hand a collapse in Dubai, ironically when attending a crane safety conference on Sheikh Zayed Road early last year. "I was right in the thick of an investigation involving inferior metals in cranes, [when the collapse occurred outside the venue] and I thought: ‘there goes another one...'"

The age of cranes is of perennial interest in the region. When there was a shortage of equipment, the price of secondhand machines rose dramatically, particularly in all-terrain mobile cranes, and as a result all kinds of obscure and ancient equipment was finding its way into the region. Of course the crisis has passed, but these elderly booms are still here and working. Really old tower cranes are far less common, but they are about, and they have generally been thrashed. Earlier this year, Paul King, an operations manager at a local crane erection company, said that the quality of the steelwork should be inspected regularly if a crane is to be used beyond its normal lifespan.

"You see 1960s tower cranes up full height, lifting maximum weight. It should have non-destructive testing every fifteen years. There is no way in the world that a forty year old crane should be lifting maximum weight at maximum height," he said.

He added that most manufacturers state that ten percent of the metal should be tested every twelve years or so. "To me, it is ridiculous putting up such old cranes that haven't had any testing since the day they were made" he said.

Officially, tower cranes don't have a designed-in lifespan, but the desert heat and around the clock working takes its toll, leading to these concerns about the strength of the metal.

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