If she were the one divorcing him, that might not have been enough for the pain and suffering that had gone before.
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They used to.
These days the crane’s computer collects data from sensors to figure out how to move the counterweights to stop the crane from falling over as it takes on or releases a load . Pre-computers, the human driving the thing had to manually control the counterweights based on their perception of how much they were tilting.
As a kid who grew up in a working Port city before computers, I remember multiple news reports per year about crane collapses at the port. These weren’t skyscraper cranes. They were just tall enough to lift stuff between dock and boat. But the limited space between boat and wharf warehouses meant there wasn’t space for a long horizontal crossbar. The counterweights had quite a short range of movement, and to compensate for that, they had to be heavier, which made the crane far more sensitive to errors of judgement in positioning the counterweights. While the cranes weren’t very tall, the news reports almost always reported that the crane driver died.
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I walked under that crane the previous evening, eek. My morning commute did suffer from Lincoln Tunnel rerouting congestion, but something I can live with; just glad that nobody died from this.
Oddly, when walking through the mass of cops, firefighters, and evacuated construction workers, there was an amazing amount of marijuana in the air.
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I don’t blame them. While generally safe, these cranes are right at the limits of engineering. They have to be to do what they do. It doesn’t take much, unfortunately, to cause failures with them. Plus, the failure mode is always catastrophic for all the same reasons. There are no minor crane accidents.
That said, as an engineering nerd, I love them and find them amazing. But also I’m a little scared of them.
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Government regulations and government certification of engineers, that’s why.
Yet another way the government is saving all our lives every day. This is the stuff that grinds my gears when the libertarians go on about tearing it all down. There would be no tower cranes in a libertarian world.
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I was thinking this was at least a silver lining to a story of a tragic death. Could have contributed to their children’s long term health and happiness too. You’d hate for entitlements like those to go nowhere.
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