Originally published at: Watch the nightmare of a catastrophic crane collapse in New York | Boing Boing
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Just a high profile reminder of how much regulation is ignored for speed and money in the construction business in NYC (worker safety, requirements for low-income housing, agreement for public greenspace in exchange for lifted height limits)
It also reminds me of the singularly disturbing but also beautifully intricate (kinda like NYC itself) graphic novel “The Tower (La Tour)” by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters about an isolated building inspector slowly realizing the project has been abandoned and trying to escape the crumbling monstrosity he was assigned to.
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Huh - that looks cool. I may have to order it.
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Dumb question: How does a crane catch fire?
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Friction, electrical fault, glass bottle acting as magnifying glass, protection racket.
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It has a motor that provides power to turn the crane and to raise and lower loads. The fire broke out in the motor, and the crane operator was unable to contain it using a hand-held extinguisher.
On a semi-related note, during Hurricane Sandy a crane boom broke, and was left dangling for several days before they were finally able to take it down safely. I have a short video of it swinging back and forth in the wind, but BB doesn’t seem to allow video uploads, so you’ll just have to accept one of my photos instead. Which is terrifying enough.
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… I don’t know why they don’t fall over more often
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… we have to rename them with the filetype suffix .m4v and they have to be less than 8 MB
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It happens:
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I see it managed to swipe the building opposite as it went down, so now they’ll probably have to put to two new cranes to repair the damage…
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I saw the smoke from my Hudson ferry commute. I thought it was a high rise fire. Most people in the boat didn’t even bother to look outside at the big plume of black smoke.
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Useful to know, thank you. Here it is, then.
Incidentally, looking at my photos just now, I realized that the jib didn’t simply break in the obvious way, the force of the wind actually bent it backwards over the operator’s cabin and the counterweight.
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nice crane ya got there. be a shame if something happened to it.
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Looking forward to Grady doing an episode about this on his Practical Engineering channel.
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There’s a building being put up near me, on a stretch of road I have to travel. A couple times the construction crane has been dangling a girder several stories up right over the road as I’m going by.
Can’t help but get a little freaked out by it.
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Sorry. My fault. The tool I was using encoded it using the MP4V codec, which seems to be less widely-supported (Apple software could cope with it, others not so much). I re-encoded with VLC using the H.264 codec and re-uploaded it and I think it should be good now.
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An acquaintance of mine worked for the Public Trustee’s office in the 1980s and related a crane death story. The crane operator was killed when his crane collapsed on a high rise office construction site in Calgary. He was one day short of a Decree Absolute in his divorce. His almost-divorced widow received his death benefit from the accident, his company pension and other survivor’s benefits for the rest of her life.
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I wonder what the trope for this is but this is the closest that comes to mind
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