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Crane Collapse

Crane Collapse

RE: Crane Collapse

"Video of an accident that happened in Australia in 2008 at the Wesfarmers Curragh coal mine in central Queensland.

The official report cited operator error, and rumor has it the operator was inexperienced and pulled the wrong lever and allowed the winch to go into free-fall. He tried to catch it on the drum brake but that overheated, exploded and caught fire as you can see.

The dragline boom was being lowered for maintenance, and as you can see the correct radius hadn't been chosen to let the drag line boom clear the M4600-based Transilift boom. The operator suffered minor injuries."

Aftermath photos can be found here: http://goo.gl/SrEc2

Quote above is just info I found via google.  I'm not posting it as fact.

RE: Crane Collapse

Spats:
Thanks for the video.  Watching those kinds of accidents is always interesting and informative.  I had watched the video several times and came away with ideas about what had happened.   I clicked back to your thread, and it seems that Azcats put my thoughts into words, perfectly.  Except, I just thought the load line drum brake had failed.  Obviously, if the crane operator fiddled with one of the control sticks this could lead to disaster.

I suspect they intended to walk the Transi-Lift back a few yards as they lowered the dragline boom under somewhat more controlled conditions.  They can walk that crane around under load.  They can boom out, but they can't swing, so that's the only means they have of positioning a load.  Riggers live dangerously, don't they?  That's really interesting work, but they do take us engineers outside our comfort zones at times.  Sure it's over stressed a little, but that's what FoS are for, and besides it's only for a short period of time, so what could possibly go wrong?

RE: Crane Collapse

Just one of those "bad days" at work!!

RE: Crane Collapse

Saw a video yesterday of the partial demolition of the cantilevered roof of Husky Stadium in Seattle a couple of days ago.  

I guess part of the crane rigging used to support the cutting mechanism got held up in the framing, imparting huge stresses to the crane boom and vehicle.  Crane didn't fail, but it had to be taken out of service, at least to be repaired and recertified if not more.   

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
http://mmcengineering.tripod.com
 

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