Cities work together to reduce construction accidents with new crane database

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

The New York City Department of Buildings, together with officials in Chicago and Philadelphia, are instituting a new program to share information about tower cranes that will leave New York construction accident lawyers scratching their heads wondering why it was not instituted years ago.

The New York Times reports the program aims to make information regarding the maintenance, inspection, usage and history of individual large tower cranes available to officials in participating cities. Though initially the program will only encompass New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, New York State, Ontario and Dallas are all interested in eventually joining the program.

One of many reforms made in the wake of last year's crane collapses, the new program is set to start in late June. The wealth of information it will make available to various inspectors and city officials will help them track the mammoth machines - some of which are 76 stories high and take 16 trucks to transport - as they move from site to site and city to city. Among other things, it will help them find problems the cranes may have had in other jurisdictions and help them monitor these problems in their inspections. In short, it should make the cranes safer.

For New York construction accident lawyers this is an exciting change. While it is unfortunate that it usually takes a tragedy such as last year's crane collapses to get this sort of fairly basic change, it is still welcome. With some luck the program will flourish and become the first step in a nationwide (or even international) system of information sharing on these critical pieces of construction equipment.

[ The New York Times ]