Why lifts go wrong

Cranes and hoists move loads that no person could move alone, and they do it every day on construction sites, in steel mills, at ports, in warehouses and in plants. Most lifts end safely because someone planned them, rigged them correctly and kept people out of harm's way. When a lift goes wrong, though, the consequences are rarely minor. A dropped load, an overturned crane or a boom touching a power line can kill people who were not even part of the lift.

This course is awareness and supervisor training. It explains how lifting operations fail, what the law and standards expect, how to recognize sound rigging and planning, and how to keep yourself and others clear of the load. It does not qualify anyone to operate a crane, to rig loads or to signal a crane operator.

Under OSHA's cranes and derricks standard, 29 CFR 1926 Subpart CC, crane operators in construction must be certified or licensed and then evaluated by their employer on the specific equipment and tasks (1926.1427). Riggers who hook loads where workers are in the fall zone must be qualified riggers (1926.1425), and signal persons must be qualified under 1926.1428. Some states and cities also license crane operators. Completing this course is one part of that picture, not a substitute for it.

What a lift actually involves

It helps to think of a lift as a system with six parts. If any one of them fails, the whole lift can fail.

• The crane or hoist: its structure, its rated capacity in the configuration used, its safety devices and its condition.
• The ground or supporting structure: soil, mats, outrigger pads, floors, runway beams and anything else that carries the crane's weight and the load.
• The rigging: slings, shackles, hooks, spreader bars and the way they are attached to the load.
• The load: its true weight, its center of gravity, its strength and its lifting points.
• The people: operator, rigger, signaler, lift supervisor and everyone else on site, including people who simply walk past.
• The environment: wind, weather, visibility, power lines, nearby structures, other cranes and traffic.

Most serious incidents involve more than one part. A crane may overturn because the load was heavier than the shipping paper said, the outrigger pad sat over a backfilled trench, and the operator was relying on a signaler who could not see the load. Each weakness alone might have been survivable. Together they were not.

What the numbers show

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a detailed look at crane deaths using its national census of fatal workplace injuries. Safety associations, insurers and the crane industry use these figures, together with OSHA investigation summaries, to target training and inspections.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 297 crane-related workplace deaths in the United States from 2011 to 2017, an average of about 42 a year. More than half of them, 154 deaths, happened when a worker was struck by an object or equipment, and 91 of those involved a falling object such as a dropped load or a collapsing boom. Private construction accounted for 43 percent of the deaths and manufacturing for 24 percent.

These counts cover deaths only. Dropped loads, crushed hands during rigging, near misses and property damage are far more common and are where most learning should come from. A crane that touched down an outrigger in soft ground and settled 50 mm before the operator stopped is a gift: it shows exactly where the next overturn will start.

How lifts fail

Lifting incidents fall into a small number of patterns. Learning to recognize them is the first step in spotting the conditions that lead to them.

Look at how many of the causes sit outside the operator's cab. The weight of the load is a planning and communication problem. Ground conditions are a site management problem. Rigging is a rigger and supervisor problem. People in the fall zone are everyone's problem. That is why supervisors, site managers and workers who never touch the controls still need to understand how lifts fail.

The energy in a suspended load

A suspended load stores energy. If it falls, that energy goes into whatever it hits. The potential energy of a load is its mass times gravitational acceleration times the height it can fall.

The example makes a simple point: personal protective equipment does not protect anyone from a falling load. The control that works is keeping people out of the area where the load could land. That idea, the fall zone, returns in almost every lesson of this course.

Applying the hierarchy of controls to lifting

The hierarchy of controls from HSE-103 applies to lifting just as it does to any other hazard. Start at the top and work down.

The best lifts are often the ones that never happen. A project team that sequences deliveries so that rooftop units arrive while the crane is already on site for steel avoids a second mobilization and a second set of risks. A plant that installs a jib crane at a workstation removes dozens of improvised lifts with chain falls hung from beams that were never rated for them.

A simple risk screen for a lift

Not every lift needs an engineer. A tote of bolts lifted onto a scaffold by a small overhead hoist is very different from a 90-metric ton transformer set with two cranes. Many employers use a short screening tool to decide how much planning a lift needs.

Lesson 5 returns to lift planning in detail. For now, the habit to build is simple: before any lift, ask how heavy the load really is, how close to capacity the crane will be, what is underneath the load path and what is overhead.

Who this course is for

This course is written for site supervisors, foremen, safety coordinators, plant maintenance leads, project engineers and workers who work around lifting operations. It will help you:

• recognize unsafe conditions before a lift starts;
• check that the people doing the work hold the right qualifications;
• read a lift plan and a load chart well enough to ask good questions;
• inspect slings and hardware for obvious defects and remove them from service;
• set up and enforce exclusion zones; and
• respond correctly when something goes wrong.

If you will operate a crane, rig loads or signal as part of your job, you need the trade certification, employer training and evaluation required where you work. Related HSE courses cover topics that overlap with lifting: HSE-212 for fall protection, HSE-218 for telehandlers and forklifts with suspended loads, and HSE-224 for the electrical background to overhead power line hazards.