Found these on another site with no info....anyone got any info?
hope no one was hurt looks like there is alot of damage to clean up
wow, that looks like a pretty big deal. usually it takes 2 cranes to lift those sections from horizontal to vertical i think, wonder if there are more photos.
What is something that large used for on a wind farm?
That is the bottom section of the tower.
there is 2 cranes there...
hmmm... obviously much bigger apparati than I realized...
Such a big accident...hope no one is injured... Nice pics..
if those cranes were the ones that lifted it, they look way to small
Bet some bodys Insurance Company is crying over this .I think the Ford PU will take a while to fix.
I think the Ford is the cheapest of the 4 damaged items in the picture to fix. 2 cranes and a tower section make the Ford like pocket change.
the ford was probably a rental... hard to say what happen here..a costly set back is most apparent
those look like siemens cans ... same as what were doing in canada ... can't tell what the big red conventional truck mount is ?? any ideas lotsa ??:cool2
probably 75-100 ton ..best guess.. on a limb 150 ton
At one point that section was standing upright on the ground. In picture #2 look at the imprint on the ground at the bottom of the picture. It appears they are in a staging area for a large wind farm project. I still have no idea what happened.
That is where it fell, they are never stages in the vertical position. They use 2 cranes to lift them, then transition them to vertical. One crane is usually half the size of the other since it is only used to assist in the transition.
Judging from the imprint, they never got the section fully upright. My guess would be the crane malfunctioned.
That pickup should buff right out.
if the time and date were set properly on the camera, the photos were taken 7/04/2010 at 8am. This might help people find more information.
that's what I was thinking.
Shoot ol Pedro could take the P.U. down to Mexico and have it looking new in about a week.
Looks like they had plenty of tag lines on it. How could they have lost control with THAT many tag lines?????:beatsme:beatsme
All the tag lines in the world wont increase the load charts. Just at a glance, it looks like someone twisted that override key, but thats just my first impression. Improper setup, bad rigging, who knows? Could also be the operators werent on the same page, as these pieces are routinely handled with an assist crane. And hey, its a wind farm, wind could have helped this along too.
i remember this, combination of wind and lowering the boom to much. once we got it vertical we cut the other crane loose, and tried to get it in position. good news nobody was hurt at all and the other crane was okay too.
How much does the average wind tower weigh? (each tower section, cell, and blades)......
70-80k for the hub and blades together. The 80 meter towers anyway. Never built any though. Just brought them down for repairs.
I think it is a Mmanitowoc 777T kerst
This is a Balfour Beatty / Balfour Wind Energy Constructors job. That's actually one of their better looking trucks. They have a really poor record as far as accidents.
The nacelles weigh about 80 tons , so it take a bit of iron to get it into the air. They are using 18000's to do the 2nd, 3rd sections, nacelles and blades. 999's and 777's set the bottom sections. Plus there are a handful of 90 to 100 ton RT's running around .
Yes, this was the Oct. 1999 Tehachapi CA. accident. Link: http://www.wind-works.org/articles/Aagaard.html
ronsii, i think that is a different accident.... the article you linked says it was a lattice tower section that was already on foundation and free of the crane.... neither of these appear to be the case in the pictures
Oops, I missed the part about the lattice tower I just remembered the pickup being crushed and the location and figured they were the same incident, sorry about the wrong info.
I know that the post is quite old but I noticed that there are no real answers posted. I was at ground zero on the end of a tag line when this accident occurred. So I thought I would fill everybody in on what happened. First off there were no major injuries. The crane operator jumped out of the cab when it started to roll over and he twisted his knee. There were about 24 or 25 people in the fall zone when the accident occurred so we were quite lucky that there were no more injuries than that. The main crane that rolled over was a triple 7 Manitowoc. The tail crane was a Kobelco but I do not remember what the model was. The lift was around 48 tons. The triple 7 crane was rated for this capacity but it had a very limited radius for this pick. The tower section was the base section for a GE 1.5 wind turbine. The rigging and rigging techniques were proper. We continued to use the same type of rigging and practices for the remainder of the job. We were erecting approximately 100 of these turbines total. Everything was normal that morning. We picked the base up with 2 cranes horizontally to finish cleaning and touching up the paint on the bottom of the can. We then tripped the can into a vertical position just off of the right rear of the crane. We then proceeded to de-rig the tail rigging. Once this was complete the crane operator raised the load up until the bottom of the can was approximately 8 foot in the air. He then slowly proceeded to swing the load around behind the crane. I was running a tagline and the load was swinging towards me. I moved around up on to the pad with the concrete pedestal where the section was to be set between me and the crane. I was approximately 40 feet away from the crane. (In the first picture I was just this side of the water buffalo) The load did not seem to be real stable it was swinging around more than it should have. We had some low level winds but well within chart for this pick. The operator stopped swinging the load and it swung back in towards the boom. The foreman and 2 of the other tagline operators pulled hard on the taglines. The can started to swing away from the crane at that point in time. Things kind of got fuzzy here but it appeared to me that the crane operator panicked when the load swung towards the crane and he started booming the load down. I heard a loud pop at that time come from the crane. I looked towards the crane and didn’t see anything to worry about. I have heard cranes pop rather loudly before when under heavy load so I wasn’t too concerned. I looked back at the load and noticed that the load seem to be coming down and moving away from the crane. About that time I heard an even louder pop and looked back at the crane. (It turned out later the pops I heard were the welds breaking on the stabilizer) It was obvious at that point in time that the crane was going to roll over. I dropped the rope and ran as fast as I could. I looked back over my shoulder as I was running and I saw the crane roll over and knock the DTA and pad mount transformer over as it rolled into it. Immediately after the motion stopped I ran back to check on the crane operator. He was out of the cab shaken up but ok. I then heard a horn blowing continuous. I walked around the can and saw the pickup underneath the can. My heart went straight to my toes for fear that somebody was inside of the pickup. As scared as I was, I walked over and looked in and saw that nobody was in the pickup. What a relief it was to see nobody in there. The pickup actually belonged to the owner’s representative who was on site to watch the pick. There was a 10KW generator in the bed of the pickup that was about 3 to 4 inches thick after the fact. When the crane boom came down it clipped the gantry on the Kobelco crane. It did some minor damage but not too much. Parts were ordered and replaced on the crane and we continued to use the Kobelco as a tail crane for the remainder of the job. What caused the accident is purely my opinion based upon what I saw and my experience with heavy lifting and was caused by a combination of the following factors. The operator apparently had very little critical lift experience. The crane while rated for the lift was very close to the limits and gave no margin for error. Inexperience on the part of the tag line operators pulling so hard on the load causing the swing reversal to be accelerated. There was some speculation about wind gusts being a factor but when the accident was investigated the anemometers in the area recorded no wind or gusts that were outside the chart of the crane. There was also some speculation about poor repairs on the crane because the welds on the rear stabilizer to the truck frame broke. I believe the primary cause of the accident was the operator taking the load out of radius thus overloading the crane. I was told by the accident investigator that he could prove the load was 18 feet out of radius but he felt like it was closer to 25 feet out. The prime contractor on the job was Balfour Beatty but the actual company performing the erection was a sub contractor. I’m not going to give their name since they have been sold out and the new owners have dramatically improved their safety record.
It is GREAT to get some updates to go with these types of photos. Thank you for taking the time to fill in the blanks.
On the Kansas job they were using Maxim Crane, This was last summer 2011. All contractors were requires to remove their company logos on the vehicles and equipment. There were a few things that didn't have logos covered. So there were all kinds of stuff with duck tape , plastic, and plain white magnetic stuff covering logos I asked why once, it was more or less because we can do it. The only logos were magnetic BWEC on their stuff. As you can see by the crushed Ford. It is lacking the magnetic sign. The photos like this are in the safety orientation , They told us that the truck was for the grout crew, The crew wasn't supposed to be in the lift area at the time of the lift.
Thank you for that information Bowden great to know what happened.
Thanks for the post bowden, glad no one was hurt bad.
I think the basement of the tower should make strong to avoid such type of accidents. These accidents are very common at working area. So there should be preventive and safety measures to avoid these types of accidents.