The forms and reports also indicated that when booms, boom equipment, and crane pedestals failed, it often resulted in significant damage to the cranes.

Trend - One type of equipment does not seem to fail more often than another type of equipment. However, the analysis shows that when equipment fails, the results can be deadly and cause significant damage to the crane and surrounding facilities. The root causes for the equipment failures were not usually stated in the reports.

HUMAN ERROR INCIDENTS
Human error was listed as the cause of 12 out of 34 incidents. We looked at the injuries and damage that resulted from human error and compared that to the injuries and damage resulting from equipment failure incidents. Tables 2 and 3 below show the injury and damage results from the 12 incidents that were attributed to human error.

We also looked at determining what job type was responsible for making the error that lead to the incident. The personnel that can make human errors associated with crane incidents are crane operators, riggers, and other personnel involved in the crane activity (such as workers in a personnel basket). Unfortunately it was not possible to clearly determine who was responsible for causing most of these incidents. Ultimately, the crane operator is responsible for the safety of each lift.

TABLE 2 - INJURIES/FATALITIES RESULTING FROM HUMAN ERROR INCIDENTS

TABLE 3 - DAMAGE RESULTING FROM HUMAN ERROR INCIDENTS

Trend - Human error incidents had only one fatality out of 12 incidents (8%), while there were five fatalities associated with the 17 equipment failure incidents (29%). Major property damage occurred once with the human error incidents (8%), while major property damage occurred in six of 17 equipment failure incidents (35%). Judging from this information, incidents attributed to human error appear to much less likely to cause fatalities (8% to 29%) and result in major damage (8% to 35%) than incidents caused by equipment failures.

Three incidents attributed to bad weather could also be considered as human error incidents if the crane operator erred in judgment to make the lift despite the poor weather conditions. However, there was not enough information to make that determination. There were no significant injuries or damage associated with the bad weather incidents.

FREQUENCY OF INJURIES/FATALITIES
Nineteen incidents had at least some type of injury. Seven fatalities are associated with six incidents. The other 13 incidents had serious, moderate, or minor injuries. (We noted that there does not seem to be consistent definitions for serious, moderate, and minor injuries. For this report, severed fingers and broken bones are considered minor injuries.) Fifteen incidents did not cause any injuries.

Trend - Injuries occur with more than half (19 out of 34 or 56%) of the crane incidents. Injuries are often serious and fatalities are not uncommon.

INJURIES BY JOB TYPE
We identified four types of workers (job types) that could be injured in a crane incident: 1) crane operator; 2) riggers, roustabout, floor hand, work boat deck hand, or other person assisting with the crane operations (all categorized as riggers in this section); 3) personnel in personnel basket; and 4) personnel not associated with the crane operations. There were seven fatalities and 20 injuries.

TABLE 4 - INJURIES/FATALITIES BY JOB TYPE

Trend - Riggers appear to be at a much greater risk of injury and death than any other personnel during crane operations.

SUMMARY OF TREND ANALYSIS
As you can see, crane accidents can be very serious. Equipment failure or human error can lead to death. We believe the most significant finding of our analysis is that riggers appear to be at the greatest risk during crane operations. Seven fatalities have occurred since January 1995, all of which involved riggers or other personnel working around cranes. Crane operators appeared to be less at risk because they were not among any of the fatalities, nor did they sustain any major injuries.

The above analysis could also lead you to believe that equipment failures cause more crane incidents than human error. However, the workgroup believes that human error likely played significant contributing roles in those incidents listed as being caused by equipment failure. We found that almost 75% of the reports (14 out of 19) listed the cause of the accidents as mechanical failure (several incidents are still under investigation and the specified causes could change), while human error was only listed as the cause in six of the reports (several accidents had multiple cause categories and slip/trip/fall and bad weather were listed as the causes in one report each). This percentage is almost directly inverse of what you would expect to find if you buy into the adage that 80 percent of all accidents are due to human error.

Our identification of trends in crane incidents is limited to the simple analysis discussed above. We do not believe it is possible to do a more detailed analysis because much of the information needed to conduct such an analysis is not available. While most of the forms and reports provide a very good description of the incident, many do not provide sufficient data and analysis about why the accident occurred. Information that is missing includes the experience and training of the personnel involved in the accident; operator/contractor training and maintenance programs; job procedures; condition of the equipment; and maintenance and training records. We believe that this type of information holds the key to accurately identifying the causes of many accidents.

The purpose of the above discussion is not to criticize the authors of the reports, but to point out that there is room for improvement in these reports. Right now the reports do an adequate job of telling us what happened, but they don’t do a good enough job of explaining why it occurred. In our opinion, MMS must significantly improve the method of investigating, analyzing, and reporting the root and contributing causes of accidents if MMS is going to use these reports in understanding why accidents occur. We believe that MMS must rethink how it conducts accident investigations and how it reports them and not just tell the current investigators and authors of the reports to do a better job.

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Last Updated: 07/15/2008, 07:40 AM