SAFETY
Accidents happen. They shouldn’t. Rules, regulations and best practices have been developed and refined to make industrial lifting as safe as possible. The rules are essential, but so is another factor: human beings have to act upon them, and to be to be vigilant at all times. Julian Champkin reports.
n the four out of 11 OSHA fatal accident reports included involving overhead cranes, all occurred in the year to July 2024. All have said that they were fatalities. In less official language, 11 people were killed. They died in the course of what should have been the routine and safe operation of overhead lifting machinery. Not one of those deaths was necessary – all of the workers involved should have been alive today. One of the four accidents selected was caused by an eyebolt separating from its load. One occurred when a load fell from its rigging. The third was due to the failure of a wire rope. The fourth arose from a non-vertical lift. Those were the immediate causes. Underlying all of them was a common fundamental cause: human error. A lapse of concentration, a failure to observe the proper rigging procedures, a failure to check that machinery was in good condition, a failure to observe proper lifting procedures – it was, in all these cases, a person who got things wrong.
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Rigging, pre-operation checks and, above all, concentration on the job in hand – these are things that good training tries to instil in people who work with or around hoists. That is one reason that in this issue of hoist, both safety and training are the focus – safety and training are inextricably linked. These particular accidents happened in the US – OSHA rules and regulations therefore applied. Specifically, the regulation in question is OSHA reg: 1910.179(b)(1), which states at its opening: “Application: This section applies to overhead and gantry cranes, including semi gantry, cantilever gantry, wall cranes, storage bridge cranes and others having the same fundamental characteristics. These cranes are grouped because they all have trolleys and similar travel characteristics.”
Under section 1910.179(n)(3) entitled ‘Moving the load’, paragraph 1910.179(n)(3)(i) states: “The load shall be well secured and properly balanced in the sling or lifting device before it is lifted more than a few
inches.” It seems a statement of the obvious, indeed almost too obvious to be worth writing down. Yet failure to observe that all-too- obvious paragraph resulted in the first two deaths above. According to paragraph 1910.179(n)(3)(vi):
“The employer shall require that the operator avoid carrying loads over people.” If this requirement was being observed, how was it that the falling load – in Case Study 2 below, it was an 880lb piece of steel – fell onto and killed an employee? Under ‘Running ropes’, paragraph 1910.179(m)(1) states: “A thorough inspection of all ropes shall be made at least once a month and a certification record which includes the date of inspection, the signature of the person who performed the inspection and an identifier for the ropes which were inspected shall be kept on file. Any deterioration, resulting in appreciable loss of original strength, shall be carefully observed and determination made as to whether further
Heavy loads moving overhead can pose a significant danger to those working beneath. 30 | November 2025 |
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