Element of danger

A young lawyer was in his apartment on a November evening last year when a 210-foot tower-crane collapsed. The boom ripped through his fourth-floor condominium, killing him.

The incident in Bellevue, Wash., was reminiscent of a 1994 tower-crane collapse in Laughlin. A crane being used to work on a casino expansion in the Colorado River town collapsed as it was being disassembled.

Three people were killed; two of the victims were sitting in their car, another was walking through a parking lot.

With the cranes' power, comes potential dangers.

"There's always an element of chance anytime you look at putting something 400 or 600 feet in the air," said Phillip Kinser, a manager for the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators. "But if they are well-engineered, engineered for safety, they are pretty safe when operated in a safe manner."

The state's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the office in charge of monitoring crane and construction safety, doesn't keep statistics on the number of construction injuries involving cranes, said Steve Coffield, OSHA's acting chief administrative officer.

But David MacCollum, national crane safety expert and author of the book "Crane Hazards and their Prevention," said cranes are involved in as many as a third of all construction deaths and serious injuries.

Just this year, at MGM's CityCenter project, two workers died and two more were injured when a crane was detached from an under-construction wall that hadn't been properly secured, according to an OSHA investigation. Without the crane's support, the wall collapsed.

OSHA is armed with two laws to ensure crane safety, Coffield said.

The first came about after the Laughlin accident. It requires that all tower-cranes submit erection and dismantling plans to OSHA.

The second regulation took effect on Jan. 1 and requires that people operating cranes pass written and practical tests, and be certified by designated third parties.

"I was surprised to learn that you had to have a license to drive a car, but you didn't have to have a license to operate a crane," said Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks. Smith sponsored the bill, which passed during the 2005 Legislature.

Most states don't require crane operators to be certified. But that is changing.

Besides Nevada, only Hawaii, California, Utah, West Virginia, New Jersey and Minnesota require crane operators be certified. Washington is phasing in such certification requirements.

Some states require crane operators possess state-issued licenses. In those states testing is carried out by the government.

The safety of the engineering of the cranes operating in Nevada, though, is left to 17 OSHA investigators. They oversee the safety of the 32 to 35 tower-cranes in operation, what is believed to be the most tower-cranes to operate simultaneously in the history of the state.

Coffield said his office is preparing for even more cranes on the valley's skyline, as more large resort projects are slated to begin construction.

MacCollum, who is also founder of the Hazard Information Foundation, said requiring that crane operators have credentials is a good step toward crane safety.

Technology could make the equipment safer and limit operator errors that cause accidents, he said, but companies are resistant to pay for it.

Usually, regulations don't come about until there are spectacular accidents like those in Washington and Laughlin, he said.

"We don't write standards until we have a lot of fatalities and injuries, which is ridiculous," MacCollum said. "We can get to the moon and back. We ought to be able to get a guy home after a day using the crane."