Unpopular opinion: the 'lift with your legs' crowd has never run a bar pad crane

I was reading a safety bulletin last week that said 'proper lifting posture' for ground crew is all about leg drive. Meanwhile I'm up in a 60 ton Grove about to pick a 14,000 lb steel beam that's sitting on cribbing that looks kinda sketchy. That little advice booklet never mentioned what to do when your load chart says you're fine but the ground looks like soup. I bet half the people writing those pamphlets havent even stepped foot on a rough terrain site. Has anyone else had a safety guy try to lecture you about rigging when he's never made a pick heavier than a coffee cup?

2 comments

2 Comments

oscarwright17d ago

Buddy of mine got ragged on by a site safety guy once for not using a tagline on a beam. My buddy just looked at him, pointed up at the 30 mph wind, and asked him how long he thought a tagline would last before it snapped. Guy had no answer. Same safety guy also tried to tell him his slings were rigged wrong. My buddy had been a tower crane operator for 15 years and the safety guy had been on site for three weeks. The load went up fine, as always. It's like they read the textbook but never saw the job.

matthew_baker16d ago

That old trick of just nodding along and then doing it your way is what got me through my first few years on site. I had a safety guy try to tell me I needed to use a different hitch on a bundle of pipe once, and I just said "okay, let me see you tie it then." He froze up, handed me the clipboard back, and never bothered me again. After that I started just asking them to show me the actual technique they wanted, since it's real easy to talk theory but harder to do it with the load swinging. Most of them get real quiet when you call their bluff like that.