Heart stopping video of boat lift going badly wrong

Frankly amazed the crane operator even bothered to attach the slings given the vessel was so obviously way outside its weight limits. A child's eyes could have seen it was never on the cards. Luck escape with minimal damage. On lookers also in need of a brain transplant.
 
Quite an old crane, and obviously an accident waiting to happen. A modern crane has strict operating limits on the weight -v- radius with automatic alarms to prevent toppling. I expect the only way to properly launch this boat would be to bring in another suitably rated mobile crane, to relieve "Cranky" so he could make his return to Sodor.

I am no fan of interfering Health & Safety busybodies, but clearly this is a near miss that should have been reported - I wonder if it was.
 
oceanfroggie said:
Frankly amazed the crane operator even bothered to attach the slings given the vessel was so obviously way outside its weight limits. A child's eyes could have seen it was never on the cards. Luck escape with minimal damage. On lookers also in need of a brain transplant.
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I would guess that somebody fibbed about the weight. Mebby forgot he left MiL onboard or something.
 
I'm no expert but I do know this. All cranes, however old or tired, should have safe load indicators (SLI) which sound an alarm if the load exceeds the safe lifting capacity of the crane in any position. Some even disable the operation of the crane in those circumstances.

It has been known for crane operators to disable the SLI if they know that the load they are about to lift is close to the safe lifting capacity (normally 75% of the tipping load). This is illegal of course. My complete guess would be that the operator and/or the yard foreman was told what the weight of the boat was, determined that the lift would be close to exceeding the safe load by a small margin and decided to chance it and disable the SLI. Then they either misjudged the radius at which the lift would take place or the weight of the boat was significantly higher than they were told. If the SLI had been operating correctly, the alarm would have sounded as soon as the crane took the weight of the boat and normally the alarms are very loud, in fact so loud you probably would have heard it in the video

Its easy to make judgements but this looks like a bodge job from the start. First the crane lifted the boat from the back of the truck instead of the side which increased the lifting radius and second the crane carried out the lift across tracks (instead of inline) in which position some cranes have a reduced capacity. Either way, the SLI should still have sounded an alarm and caused the operator to abort the lift

Having said all that, the most reprehensible part of the whole sorry saga was that after the crane started to tip, men were still allowed to work around the boat and beneath the crane jib. This was extremely dangerous and had the boat or the crane moved further could have resulted in death or injury. I'm not normally a fan of the safety nazis but this incident deserved a full H&SE investigation and prosecution if any malpractice was found
 
Deleted User said:
Its easy to make judgements but this looks like a bodge job from the start.
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+1.
Far from pretending to be an expert, but if it were my boat I would have started screaming as soon as they were preparing to lift the boat with the slings attached to a single bar rather than one of those square thingies (sorry, 'dunno the EN for them) which allow the slings to work vertically rather than diagonally.

PS: though in hindsight it's impressive that the slings didn't slip, while the boat was bouncing...!
Maybe they were secured in some way which I didn't notice in the video.
 
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It looked from the get go that no one was in charge, witnessed by the fact there was no controlled working area - spectators should have been behind barriers/tapes. It would have been obvious to the crane operator if no one else that as soon as the boat was clearing the truck he was exceeding limits and should have plopped it back down. Complete cluster f***
 
Deleted User said:
second the crane carried out the lift across tracks (instead of inline)
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That's the bit that got me. It looked marginal but they may have got away with it if they were inline (tracks). I doubt it was going to be launched as the marina was mud so it was just a small lift and chock off job.
 
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