TT Talk - ICHCA International highlights crane danger
In the April edition of its bulletin Cargo World, ICHCA International reports on an incident where a trainee dockworker was killed when he was crushed and fell from a container crane. He had left the crane cab and was crossing from the movable walkway attached to the rear of the cab onto the crane's fixed walkway. The crane operator had an obstructed view of the crossing point and believed that the trainee had already descended. As the crane driver moved his cab off, the trainee was caught between the sets of railings on the two walkways and suffered severe crush injuries before falling to the ground.
ICHCA International notes that this fatality led to court action in which it was said that the company should either have prohibited people from visiting operational cranes or installed interlocking access gates that would have prevented the crane cab from moving while anyone was crossing between the walkways. ICHCA understands that a similar accident has happened in an RTG in another country where the deceased fell 20 metres. It comments that the implication of these accidents is that all owners or operators of container cranes (and other similar types of crane) should review their own equipment and procedures to ensure that similar accidents do not occur again.
TT Club has previously reported on incident experience whereby containers have dropped from lifting equipment during handling operations. Recurrence appears, as previously, to have nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of the corner castings. The reliability of the lifting process is critical.
When things go wrong, an incident occurs, there inevitably is a response. The degree of severity will generally be commensurate with the diligence in creating, documenting, reviewing, testing and communicating a response plan – hopefully.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying ‘information is not knowledge’. The challenge today is to translate all the data points into clear learning that brings improvement.
This January sees a new Amendment to the International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) Code released, Amendment 39-18, entering its transitional year before being mandated from 1 January 2020.
