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Lack of State Certification, Oversight of Crane Operators Decried by Industry

August 19, 2005

It caused quite a stir a few years ago when a giant crane toppled onto Interstate 25 during T-REX construction. The crane hit two cars and injured three people. U.S. safety officials fined the crane company, and T-REX officials wisely booted the company off the project. But it was never widely known that the crane operator had not been certified to operate such a huge piece of machinery. The state took no action, since Colorado has no requirements for crane operators.

For the last two years, the crane industry has been begging the legislature to require training and certification. They cite a slew of accidents, several in the last year. Four months before T-REX, a crane worker - who had recently left an EMT ambulance job - slammed his crane into electrical wires and killed a worker on the ground.

The sad irony, says Calvin "Corkey" Wassam, a 35-year veteran of the industry and tester for the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, is that the operator had learned his job from the same untrained man who later tipped his crane over on I-25.

Wassam and other industry officials worry that the Owens administration's policy of less regulation might stall their efforts, despite a horde of construction projects underway in the state involving cranes. Tambor Williams, head of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies, says the legislation was delayed because the industry failed to go through the proper application procedure required by her office.

Crane officials say they filed the proper application last year and have done so again for the coming legislative session. Gov. Owens' spokesman, Dan Hopkins, says the governor is not anti-regulation and plenty of "necessary" regulation goes on. "The governor feels it necessary to keep a balance and not go to the extreme of over-regulation," said Hopkins.