Sunday, July 18, 2010

September 28th, 2009


Tver Russian - A Self-Erecting Tower Crane collapsed after running off it's rails. The collapse didn't actually happen until the next day, and so fortunately no one was injured. This is not a rare occurrence in Russia. Cranes seem to run off the rails on a regular basis. So why and how is what comes to mind for me.

Examples of cranes running off the rails.. St Petersburg 2007, Minsk 2008, and I've ran across another one that ran off the rails, but they successfully got it back onto the rails so I didn't put up a post on it. In St Petersburg, the rails were removed prior to dismantling the crane. They just got ahead of themselves and then the operator ran off the end. In Minsk the brakes failed. But more importantly, where are the stops on these rails? Why is it that these cranes are able to run off the rails? They are supposed to be level, have a mechanical shutoff prior to the stops... oh, and have functioning brakes to safely stop the crane.



In this Tver case, the brakes were not working on the traveler. What I found really interesting in the article is this quote, "Tower Crane, who worked at the construction site, was built in 1991, the term of such equipment is 10 years. Accordingly, the life of the crane expired 8 years ago." I don't know where the writer is getting the information and he notes that with maintenance the life can be extended. Do we have maintenance records? Was it maintained? Was this the first time that the brakes malfunctioned?
Original Article

Russia is clearly not respecting any standards set by manufacturers. You can have the rules in place, but if no one enforces them due to open corruption, what is the point o having regulations? I have family in Eastern Europe, and they can't believe how business is done here. There needs to be a fundamental change before these accidents will come to an end over there. When government officials are wearing $300k watches, we can easily see what the real source of accidents like this are.

крах башенный кран, аварии башенного крана

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