subject: Seven Years in the Making [print this page] Seven Years in the Making Seven Years in the Making
I've been doing this for seven years now. Wow SEVEN YEARS! I'm 27 now, have got a awesome missus, a lot to show for my seven years of being basically a company slut!
Bad Times
As I've previously noted there's been good and bad time's in my seven years in the Cranes. One of said bad times was one of the worst moment's in my life. I don't wish this upon anyone either in my seat or on the receiving end.
I was operating the crane at said time and we were working in the blind inside the building down a hole, say 3x3 metre's wide. Like any story it was a lovely summer's day blue sky to boot and not a breath of air. Picturesque day. I don't blame the dogman and neither does the poor chap who was on the receiving end but he did something that was a wee bit dodge, a short cut really, short part to that is that he hooked a load up wrong. Every now and then as an operator you get told to "be nice with that one" meaning the loads a little rough, so you do just that drive it like you were to be having sex for the first time, slow an safe ! Don't wanna be loosing ya load to early now a!!
But this time I didn't have the slightest clue as to what was going on because there was no call to be nice etc etc. We had to move 5 fire doors (about 100kg's each) from 1 hole to another. Simple enough task, hook the load up, bring it out of one hole and down into another. But as we brought the load (bear in mind all in the blind) down into the second hole the load caught on one end on a scaffold tube that just happen to be sticking out enough to grab our load, now because the chap who hooked to the load up took a short cut...he didn't put the pivot point of the load where it would under any normal lift would be, which is at the main block, where all the chains start from, instead the pivot point was about 200mm above the load then we had our 6m chain go up from there. So imagine a big door and then you pick it up from the exact middle, as soon as you put any sort of weight upwards or downwards at the end of the door it's going to want to flip/role over. And that's exactly what happened. As I was being told to come down on the hook (lower the load) I had maybe 800kg's on the hook at this point, (being the weight of the doors and my chains) the chains, my block, and the hoist rope all did a little dance an the radio went quiet, so as soon as my brain clicked a second or so I stopped the hook and noted that all I had on my weight gauge was 200 odd kgs - we lost the doors!
1st thing I did was get on the radio and ask the bro "what's going on I've lost all the weight." The reply was....silence....
I sat in the crane for about 2 more minutes before the reply came.....
There's more....... To find out what happen's follow the link below to the full article.
