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Rant: A safety guy in Houston told me one lift stat that's stuck in my head for weeks
So I was at a refresher course down in Houston back in February, and this old safety instructor drops a number on us that I can't shake. He says more than half of all mobile crane tip overs he's looked at over 30 years came down to ground conditions, not load charts or rigging. Not even close. I started thinking about my early days running a 40 ton RT on job sites where we'd just toss out the outrigger pads and call it good. We eyeballed the dirt and figured if it looked flat we were fine. Nobody ever told me to check what was under the top inch. The part that got me was him saying most of those crews thought the ground was solid right up until the pad punched through. I went home and dug out my old pad boards from the garage and one of them is bowed so bad I wouldn't trust it on wet clay now. How are you all checking soil before you set up, or am I the only one who just trusted the spotter's nod for way too long?
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amy69211d ago
After a near miss on a job in '19 with an outrigger sinking into what looked like hard packed gravel, I started carrying a piece of rebar to poke around and a small tarp to lay pads on, which sounds dumb but it caught soft spots twice.
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