Accident report on Facebook

Yikes, I just heard this from someone else. News report I saw was 2 injured.. also not surprised and hope this is a wake up call
 
Wow! That is something.

I hope they are ok. I've watched their videos and they seem like good people.

I wonder if Jed is saying anything on the treehouse.
 
Hi, all. Seeing as I'm pretty much retired and spending tons of time with my photography, I just happened upon this accident a few days ago. Then, a good bud and competent arborist came over yesterday. He had the details, some of which were provided by Bob of ACDeucy Crane.
The crane, a 55 ton, was working at about a 100 foot radius, appx. Boom angle 50 degrees--from vertical. Yikes. (128 foot of main boom.) The piece being cut was abt 3000 lb. Double yikes. As soon as the climber saw it going over, he bailed fast on his preset SRS system, like fast. He might have had a slight injury. The crane op is the big guy seen in the the videos. I imagine he was thrown around and also had a minor injury. Apparently, he was able to safely climb out and make his way down. Homeowner had a video of the event, but it and other footage and images were commandeered by L&I.

Edit, found some posts by Jed on the TH. The crane op was pretty much knocked out. Managed to climb out of the cab and onto the roof of the smashed garage, where he was found, passed out....Jed's words.
 
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Reach said:
If that is actually Eastside Tree Works, I’m not surprised either, considering the first day they used that crane they were using it as a rigging point and dropping pieces into it.
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Yes. That was that Doug-fir top that they swung into the rigging. (Crane TIP at least 15 ft to the side, instead of directly over the pick. Granted, it was a light top, but not SOP, that's for sure.....

My arb bud told me that is what they did on this crane failure, but I doubt it. No way could they have been so reckless as to swing a 3000' section into the crane rigging. Might they have? Wouldn't surprise me.
 
Roger_Barnett said:
Hi, all. Seeing as I'm pretty much retired and spending tons of time with my photography, I just happened upon this accident a few days ago. Then, a good bud and competent arborist came over yesterday. He had the details, some of which were provided by Bob of ACDeucy Crane.
The crane, a 55 ton, was working at about a 100 foot radius, appx. Boom angle 50 degrees--from vertical. Yikes. (128 foot of main boom.) The piece being cut was abt 3000 lb. Double yikes. As soon as the climber saw it going over, he bailed fast on his preset SRS system, like fast. He might have had a slight injury. The crane op is the big guy seen in the the videos. I imagine he was thrown around and also had a minor injury. Apparently, he was able to safely climb out and make his way down. Homeowner had a video of the event, but it and other footage and images were commandeered by L&I.

Edit, found some posts by Jed on the TH. The crane op was pretty much knocked out. Managed to climb out of the cab and onto the roof of the smashed garage, where he was found, passed out....Jed's words.
Click to expand...
Thanks for passing on the info.
 
Roger_Barnett said:
Yes. That was that Doug-fir top that they swung into the rigging. (Crane TIP at least 15 ft to the side, instead of directly over the pick. Granted, it was a light top, but not SOP, that's for sure.....

My arb bud told me that is what they did on this crane failure, but I doubt it. No way could they have been so reckless as to swing a 3000' section into the crane rigging. Might they have? Wouldn't surprise me.
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Thanks for sharing this info Roger. If this is in fact true this incident has exposed 2 practices which need to be seriously look at.. Using cranes as a rigging point (have noticed vids of a few outfits doing this lately), and leaving persons inside structures when we are working overhead.
 
Stumpsprouts said:
Thanks for passing on the info.
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Looking at the chart for that crane, which if I recall correctly, is an NBT55L, the over-the-rear chart allows lifting just over 3300 lbs at 100’ of radius with about 128’ of boom out. Picking 3000 is pushing against that limit, but it’s not over. And a 3500 lb piece should not tip the crane, according to the manufacturer specs it would take nearly 4000 to reach rated tipping load.

Makes one wonder where the error occurred, if they did drop that log into the crane, it would tip it. Or if the operator had too much pull on it, that could bounce the piece enough to tip the crane. Just conjectures, but it does make me curious.

I was climbing with a 45 ton all day today (I am worn out!) and we picked five White Pines, all about 80’ tall. Each one was codominant, 2-5 trunks. These trees were puzzling the crane op. and myself greatly, and the weights were all over the place. All living trees, and one piece would be 40% heavier than it should be, another would be 50% less than expected. I don’t always get all my weights dead on, but I’ve done enough that I’m usually better than that, and so is this crane op. Maybe something like that occurred here too, and the piece was just much heavier than expected for no rational reason.
 
Reach said:
I was climbing with a 45 ton all day today (I am worn out!) and we picked five White Pines, all about 80’ tall. Each one was codominant, 2-5 trunks. These trees were puzzling the crane op. and myself greatly, and the weights were all over the place. All living trees, and one piece would be 40% heavier than it should be, another would be 50% less than expected. I don’t always get all my weights dead on, but I’ve done enough that I’m usually better than that, and so is this crane op. Maybe something like that occurred here too, and the piece was just much heavier than expected for no rational reason.
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I'm a bit intrigued by your weight estimates being significantly off. Has hindsight provided any insights as to the source of the error? Seems like this could be educational. If you don't mind sharing your method for weight estimation, I'm interested.
 
Dan Cobb said:
I'm a bit intrigued by your weight estimates being significantly off. Has hindsight provided any insights as to the source of the error? Seems like this could be educational. If you don't mind sharing your method for weight estimation, I'm interested.
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Sap content of the tree can make a difference, and needle density can make a big difference on White Pine. We are not certain why some of the weights were so far off, the best we can figure by the sap dripping out of some of the logs is they they just had a lot more sap/water weight in them. They may have also had more needles than we anticipated too, that one is hard to tell sometimes.

Estimating White Pine logs is like estimating any other logs, we measure them and use a log weight chart. (Personally I use an app, Log Weight Pro, because it’s easier than carrying a paper chart all day.)

Estimating brush weight is much harder, it pretty much has to be done by eye, based on experience, and White Pines around here often have very odd/irregular growth structure due to ice storm damage, so estimating those weights is very difficult.

There are some trees where there’s not much we can do besides take an experienced guess, and guess very low (30% of chart max) and work from there. That’s what we ended up doing yesterday for some of the trees. It’s not a big deal to do that when the crane capacity is 10k+, we just plan picks not more than 3k, which leaves plenty of margin even if they’re much higher. When we are unsure, we usually put less tension on the piece with the crane than we expect the weight to be, and adjust as necessary during the cut - a good climber can watch the cut and see if the crane has enough pull on or not.

Hopefully that helps, if you want more clarification on anything I’ll give it a try.
 
Weights have been all over the map here in the pnw. The drought, and the heat wave is to blame. We had a tremendous amount of SLD this spring/early summer, as if the trees were sucking up every last drop before the rains stopped. Enter mid summer and everything is brittle as shit.
 
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