Loading…
18
Watched a guy boom up into live 13.8kV lines in Council Bluffs last Tuesday and I still feel sick about it
So last Tuesday morning I'm on a job site in Council Bluffs, just a little tilt-up warehouse going up off 16th Street, and there's this operator running a 60 ton rig doing steel picks for the ironworkers. Around 9:30 he booms up to swing a beam over near the utility pole line that runs along the north edge, and I swear his boom tip came within maybe 3 feet of the top conductor. Nobody had a spotter watching that side, the utility hadn't been called to cover or de-energize anything, and the guy just kept on swinging like it was nothing. I walked over to the super and asked if they had clearance on that line and he goes "nah, we measured it, we're fine." Measured what, with your eyeballs? Two days later I heard the same crew got shut down by the utility inspector and had to prove minimum approach distance with a spotter and a range limiter on the boom. I've been running cranes 11 years now and the one thing that scares me more than a dropped load is a guy who's been doing it so long he stopped respecting the power lines. Any of you ever had to walk off a site over something like this, or am I overreacting for thinking about it a week later?
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.