NEW YORK (AP) — Debris fell from a supertall skyscraper nearing completion in New York City as the top of a crane spun in the wind Thursday evening, but no one was injured, officials said.

Video posted to social media showed the top of the crane revolving in a full circle in rainy weather at the building, which has topped out at over 1,400 feet, on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

Fire officials said they started operations at the building shortly before 7 p.m. The Buildings Department sent inspectors. Traffic was shut down in the area, and subway trains were rerouted.

The crane is stable and is being evaluated, Buildings Department spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said in an email. The crane is designed to spin in the wind, he said, but inspectors are trying to determine what caused debris to fall.

There were no official details on what the debris consisted of.

The skyscraper was developed by JDS Construction Group. A message was left with the company.

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By PAUL J. WEBER
Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Two cranes collided Wednesday at a construction site in Austin, Texas, causing one of them to partially collapse and injuring at least 22 workers who were sent scrambling for safety, authorities said.

The cranes collided and got tangled several stories above a building under construction a few miles north of downtown in a rapidly growing neighborhood that includes residential, retail and office space.

The development also includes a children’s hospital near the accident site.

Austin-Travis County EMS spokesman Darren Noak said at a news conference that 22 workers were hurt, including 16 who were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries. The cause of the accident was still under investigation.

Most of the injuries occurred when workers scrambled away from the accident scene, Noak said.

One of the crane operators was still inside the crane cabin about 150 feet above the ground more than an hour after the accident, though that crane didn’t appear to be damaged. Authorities said the operator was safe and that rescuers would go get him if necessary, but that his presence was helping to stabilize the crane.

“He’s fine,” Fire Department Capt. Mark Bridge said. “There’s no danger to him.”

He said the cranes’ bases were stable and that investigators didn’t believe they were in danger of falling over.

Diane Stewart, who lives near the construction site, said she heard the collision while out for a walk.

“I heard a crash. It was like pipes falling,” Stewart said. “The police, first-responders were here in minutes.”

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By GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press

TUKWILA, Wash. (AP) — Washington state on Thursday fined three companies their roles in a crane collapse that killed four people in Seattle last April, with officials calling it “totally avoidable,” and Seattle Police confirmed that they have opened a criminal investigation.

The Department of Labor and Industries released the results of its investigation Thursday. It found, as experts suspected, that the crane toppled in a wind gust because the workers who were disassembling it prematurely removed pins securing sections of the crane’s mast, contrary to the manufacturer’s instructions.
The practice appears to have been common in the industry, even though it had led to fatal collapses before, investigators said.

The collapse occurred April 27 in the booming tech neighborhood of South Lake Union, where the crane had been used in the construction of a Google office building. Sections of the crane landed on the building and on traffic below, striking six vehicles. Two ironworkers on the crane were killed as were two people in cars. Four other people were injured.

“The incident that occurred was totally avoidable,” department Director Joel Sacks said at a news conference. “If the companies on site had followed the rules, the crane would not have fallen.”

Det. Patrick Michaud, a spokesman for Seattle Police, said he could offer no details about the criminal case except to say it is being headed by violent crimes detectives. Labor and Industries officials said they cooperated with information requests from police.

Regulators issued the biggest fine, $70,000, to Salem, Oregon-based Morrow Equipment Co., which supplied the crane to general contractor GLY. GLY was fined $25,000, and Northwest Tower Crane Service Inc., which provided the crew, was fined $12,000.

Morrow was most culpable because it was the expert on site and should have known and ensured the manufacturer’s instructions were followed, regulators said, while the other companies were cited for not having a supervisor present, inadequate training or other violations.

Two other companies that were investigated were not responsible, officials said.

The companies have 15 days to appeal. Morrow did not immediately return an email seeking comment. In an emailed statement, GLY President Ted Herb said the Bellevue-based company was deeply concerned by the collapse, cooperated with investigators and had already made changes.
Herb said the company will “do everything possible to protect our workers and the community.”

Brian Haight, crane program manager with the department, said that the manufacturer’s instructions say the crane should be dismantled in sections. As a secondary crane is attached to the top of the section being removed, workers pull the pins for that section only, leaving the rest of the tower secure. The pins are about 16 inches (40 cm) long and weigh 26 pounds (11.79 kilograms).

At the crew’s pre-task meeting that morning, they did not review the manufacturer’s instructions for crane removal, Haight said.

That afternoon, the secondary crane couldn’t function because of high winds. So the disassembly crew, while waiting for the winds to die down, decided to remove the pins up and down the tower crane and to loosen the bolts attaching the tower to its concrete base. When a gust of around 50 mph (80 kph) hit, the crane swayed and collapsed.

Early pin removal was blamed after a tower crane mast collapsed during disassembly in Dallas in 2012, killing two workers. Terry McGettigan, a tower crane specialist in Seattle, wrote a paper after the Dallas collapse warning about the danger of taking shortcuts.

Following the April collapse, the department issued a hazard warning that was shared among the crane industry internationally. It also asked crane companies in Washington to notify them of assembly or disassembly of any tower cranes, so that the department can send an auditor to inspect the crane and ensure proper procedures are followed.

It is also re-examining its rules for crane operations and is considering making that notification request mandatory instead of voluntary.
The $70,000 fine issued to Morrow was the maximum allowed under state regulations for a single, willful violation of workplace safety rules, unless a company has a prior history of such actions before, said Anne Soiza, the department’s assistant director.

David Beninger, a Seattle lawyer who plans to sue on behalf of one victim’s family, said the state’s investigation had explained how the collapsed happened, but not why.

“That’s what the civil litigation will try to get at,” he said. “We know procedures were broken, but how often, and why? This is a fairly widespread practice of cutting corners, and that’s a concern.”

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By JAKE BLEIBERG
Associated Press

DALLAS (AP) — Authorities have identified 29-year-old Kiersten Symone Smith as the woman who was killed when a crane fell on a Dallas apartment building Sunday amid severe thunderstorms that also uprooted mature trees and left thousands without power across the city.

Smith was pronounced dead at a hospital, according to the Dallas County Medical Examiners’ office, after the construction crane smashed into a five-story building near downtown destroying peoples’ apartments and reducing parts of an adjacent parking garage to a pile of concrete and mangled cars.

The cause of Smith’s death has not been determined. Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Jason Evans could not provide an update on the condition of the five people injured in the collapse.

The crane fell around 2 p.m. as storms ripped across parts of Oklahoma and Texas, bringing high winds, heavy rain and hail that flooded streets and caused power outages. Wind gusts up to 71 mph were measured at Dallas Love Field airport, said National Weather Service meteorologist Patricia Sanchez.

Heavy rain and winds up to 80 mph also cut through the Austin area, blowing down tree branches and gas station canopies, said meteorologist Bob Fogarty.

Sanchez said a crew was going out Monday to determine the intensity of a reported tornado that damaged houses in Copperas Cove, located about 75 miles north of Austin. A city fire official said about 200 homes were damaged and three of those are uninhabitable.

“The sun was out, and then all of a sudden a wind came in, it got dark, the lights went off, and once the lights got off then the wind started blowing,” Copperas Cove resident Erasmus Julien told the Killeen Daily Herald.

Oncor, Texas’ largest electricity provider, said early Monday that their crews were working around-the-clock to restore electricity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The company said that at the peak more than 350,000 of their customers were without power, and more than 130,000 have since had it restored.

As of late Monday morning, almost 500 traffic signals were inoperable across Dallas, and about 170 were flashing red lights, according to the city.

At the Elan City Lights building damaged by the crane, fire crews were escorting evacuated residents back inside to retrieve their possessions, as city workers and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials ponder how to remove the crane embedded in the structure’s east side.

A spokesman for the federal agency confirmed it’s investigating the crane’s collapse but declined to provide further comment.

Bigge Crane and Rigging Co., which owns the downed crane, had representatives in Dallas Monday to assist and cooperate with OSHA’s investigation, said Randy Smith, the California-based equipment rental company’s lawyer.

AP staff writers Jamie Stengle contributed reporting from Dallas and Clarice Silber contributed reporting from Austin.

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Oregon crane operators will be required to complete a national certification program after the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration adopted new rules.

The requirement comes amid greater scrutiny of crane safety since four people were killed in the April 27 collapse of a tower crane in Seattle.

Oregon’s move to update the crane operator certification rules has been in the works since the federal government issued new rules in November 2018. The rules adoption was not spurred by the Seattle crane collapse, OSHA spokesman Aaron Corvin stated in an email.

OSHA delayed enforcement of the rules until Jan. 1, 2020. That’s intended to give crane operators time to complete the required training, Corvin stated.

Crane operators had warned during the public comment period that training all crane operators quickly would be difficult.

“This difficulty largely stems from a shortage of training programs that would meet the nationally accredited standard required by the rule,” Corvin stated. “The training programs exist, but they lack the capacity needed to quickly train the amount of operators that are affected by this rule.”

Safety procedures have been placed under a magnifying lens in the aftermath of last month’s crane collapse at a Google building under construction in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. The crane was awaiting disassembly when it toppled in a modest gust, The Seattle Times reported. Two construction workers and two people on the ground died in the collapse. One of the crane workers had local ties: Travis Corbet, age 33, of Iron Workers Local 29 in Portland.

The Washington State Department of Labor and Industries is inspecting five companies that were working at the job site. The companies are GLY Construction Inc., Northwest Tower Crane Service Inc., Omega Morgan, Morrow Equipment Co. and Seaburg Construction Corp.

“That process can take up to six months from the time the inspection was opened,” said Frank Ameduri, spokesman for the department. “It could end sooner than that, but it can’t go longer than the six months.”

The department can levy fines if any violations are found. The citations would explain what went wrong on the Google job site, Ameduri said.

Ameduri said he could not comment on the investigation’s direction.

“While the inspection is ongoing, unfortunately there’s not a lot of detail we can share,” he said.

The Seattle Times, citing independent experts, reported bolts were likely loosened on the crane prior to it toppling.

Washington requires third-party certification of crane operators, and conducts inspections throughout the state. Most inspections are “self-referrals,” or inspectors checking crane sites on their own. The department receives few complaints, Ameduri said.

Oregon last updated its operator certification rules in 2002. The state plan is required to be at least as stringent as federal rules, so when the federal government updated its rules last year to require crane operators to complete a nationally accredited training program, OSHA followed suit.

OSHA does not require advance inspections of tower cranes before work begins, Corvin stated. A “competent person” must visually inspect a crane each day, and further inspections are required monthly and annually. OSHA crane inspections can be spurred by a scheduled visit, accidents, referrals or complaints. If infractions are found, OSHA can issue citations and will work with operators to eliminate hazards. If hazards cannot be fixed immediately, OSHA can issue a “red tag” notice, suspending crane operations.

OSHA has not changed its practices in response to the Seattle incident, Corvin stated.

Existing rules address crane disassembly. One requires that boom sections, suspension systems and components “must be rigged or supported to maintain stability upon the removal of the pins.”

Portland has been one of the busiest construction markets in the nation, with 30 tower cranes in the air as of January, according to Rider Levett Bucknall. The cranes are in use by a number of general contractors.

One major general contractor, Mortenson Construction, said it continues to emphasize safety.

“Mortenson safety and operations experts oversee all critical operations on its projects,” Dan Mehls, a vice president and general manager of the company, stated in an email response to questions. “Mortenson’s standard procedure is to prepare a detailed crane erection and dismantlement plan for all tower cranes and built-up cranes used on any of our projects. This plan includes input from our erection subcontractor, supplemental hoisting supplier, project management team and safety department.”

Several crane operators did not respond to messages seeking comment on safety procedures and OSHA’s new rules. Joseph Bowers, business manager of Iron Workers Local 29 in Portland, declined to comment.

Oregon has not suffered a catastrophic tower crane collapse in nearly four decades. The last such incident, in December 1980, killed two people during construction of the Glenn L. Jackson Bridge between Portland and Vancouver, Washington, according to OSHA.

A crane operator was killed in February 2015 when a metal beam pierced the crane’s cab on a job site in Northeast Portland.

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By GENE JOHNSON
Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — It appears workers who were disassembling a construction crane had prematurely removed pins securing the sections of the crane’s mast to each other, and that could explain why it toppled Saturday, killing four people, experts said.

Crane accident investigator Tom Barth said Monday based on videos of the Seattle crane collapse that “if the pins had been in, that crane would not have fallen over.”

The crane’s mast fell over on Saturday afternoon as workers were taking it apart. Sections landed on top of the new Google building where it had been used and on traffic below, striking six vehicles. Two ironworkers on the crane were killed, as were two people in cars — a retired city employee and a college freshman. Four others were injured.

“The reason this tower fell over is ironworkers and the people working on it did not follow the manufacturer’s instructions for disassembling the crane,” Barth said.

Barth, who has been a tower crane operator, inspector and accident investigator for 38 years, said the only safe way to disassemble a tower crane is to do it by sections.

First, a line from another crane is secured to the top of the section being removed. Only then do workers remove the bolts that secure the section being removed to the one below it. The second crane lowers the section, Barth said.

The videos, including one from a dash camera in a car approaching as the crane fell, appear to show the sections of the tower crane separating cleanly, indicating the pins had likely been removed early, said Dave Kwass, a trial attorney who handles crane accident lawsuits.

“Where I would be starting as an investigator is getting a better grasp of what these two ironworkers who tragically were killed may have done in removing the pins,” Kwass said. “What I’m seeing is a crane that looks as though the pins were popped all the way down to the pedestal section.”

Kwass also suggested that the shifting weight of the workers at the top of the mast as they tried to grab the wind-swayed hook and line from the other crane might have helped push the mast over.

Early pin removal was blamed after a tower crane mast collapsed during disassembly in Dallas in 2012, killing two workers. Terry McGettigan, a tower crane specialist in Seattle, declined to comment on Saturday’s crash, but he wrote a paper on the Dallas collapse warning about the danger of taking shortcuts by loosening or removing the bolts in advance.

The Iron Workers Union Local 29 based in Portland, Oregon, and Local 86, in Seattle, represented the workers who died and did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Washington Department of Labor and Industries inspectors finished their work at the scene Monday, said Tim Church, a department spokesman. He said it was too early to speculate on a cause.

The department on Monday expanded its investigation to include a fifth company: Seaburg Construction Corp., which employed the tower crane operator. The other companies are general contractor GLY, Northwest Tower Crane Service Inc., Omega Rigging and Machinery Moving Inc., and Morrow Equipment Co. LLC

“GLY and its sub-contractors involved with this tower crane accident are doing everything we can to investigate the incident,” the company said in a written statement. “We are cooperating fully with investigators and assisting the local authorities. At this early stage of the investigation, we have no further details.”

The ironworkers who died were identified by their unions as Andrew Yoder, 31, of Washington, and Travis Corbet, 33, of Oregon. Corbet’s wife, Samantha Corbet, told Seattle television stations that her husband had served in the U.S. Marine Corps for five years before becoming an ironworker.

They married last year and planned to go on their honeymoon in June.

Also killed were Seattle Pacific University freshman Sarah Wong, 19, and Alan Justad, 71, who retired in 2014 as deputy director of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development.

In a written statement, Mayor Jenny Durkan called Justad “a true public servant.”

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By LISA BAUMANN
Associated Press

SEATTLE (AP) — A construction crane fell from a building on Google’s new Seattle campus during a storm that brought wind gusts, crashing down onto one of the city’s busiest streets and killing four people.

One female and three males had died by the time firefighters had arrived Saturday afternoon, Fire Chief Harold Scoggins said. Two of the dead were ironworkers who had been inside the crane while the other two were people who were inside cars, Fire Department spokesman Lance Garland said.

A 25-year-old mother and her 4-month-old daughter were in a car that was smashed by the crane on its passenger side, and both managed to escape with only minor injuries, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said, calling it a miracle. They and a 28-year-old man were taken to Harborview Medical Center. A fourth person also was injured and treated at the scene.

The crane collapsed near the often-congested intersection of Mercer and Fairview Avenue just north of downtown in the South Lake Union neighborhood shortly before 3:30 p.m., Scoggins said.

The deadly collapse is sure to bring scrutiny about the safety of the dozens of cranes that dot the city’s skyscape. With Amazon, Google and other tech companies increasing their hiring in Seattle, the city has more cranes building office towers and apartment buildings than any other in the United States. As of January, there were about 60 construction cranes in Seattle.

Durkan said the city had a good track record with crane safety but that officials would conduct a review.

“It’s a horrible day in Seattle when something like this happens. But it’s a time when we come together because Seattle is a city that rallies around each other,” she said.

Officials do not yet know the cause of the collapse. Police and the state Department of Labor and Industries were investigating, which Durkan said could take months.

Daren Konopaski, the business manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 302, which represents heavy-equipment operators, told The Seattle Times he understood the crane was being dismantled when high winds moved through the area.

“We don’t know, but that’s what seems to have happened here,” he said. “We are in the process of trying to get information.”

Durkan confirmed that people were actively working on top of the building Saturday, but she didn’t say whether the crane was being dismantled.

A line of showers moved over Seattle just about the time the crane fell, the National Weather Service said. An observation station on nearby Lake Union showed winds kicked up with gusts of up to 23 mph at 3:28 p.m., just about the time the crane fell.

“It was terrifying,” witness Esther Nelson, a biotech researcher who was working in a building nearby, told the Times. “The wind was blowing really strong,” she said, and added that the crane appeared to break in half.

“Half of it was flying down sideways on the building,” she said. “The other half fell down on the street, crossing both lanes of traffic.”

The office building the crane fell from was badly damaged, with several of its windows smashed.

A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the company was saddened to learn of the accident and that they were in communication with Vulcan, the real estate firm that is managing the site and working with authorities.

Harborview spokeswoman Susan Gregg said Saturday night that the mother and baby had been discharged, while the man injured was in satisfactory condition.

The King County Medical Examiner’s Office said it would not release names of people who died until Monday.

Tim Church, a spokesman for the Washington Department of Labor & Industries, said the agency formally opened an investigation into four companies — general contractor GLY, Northwest Tower Crane Service Inc., Omega Rigging and Machinery Moving Inc. and Morrow Equipment Co. LLC.

A crane collapsed in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue in 2006, damaging three neighboring buildings and killing a Microsoft attorney who was sitting in his living room. The state Department of Labor and Industries cited two companies for workplace-safety violations after an investigation that found a flawed design for the crane’s base.

“Trudi and I join all Washingtonians in extending our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the four people who died in this afternoon’s tragic accident,” Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement. Inslee also said he hoped for a speedy and full recovery for those injured, thanked first responders and urged people to stay clear of the accident scene.

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The chances of an extreme storm system rolling through western Oregon before 2014 are less than 4 percent. But those odds were threatening enough to trigger significant changes to construction plans for the replacement of two aging Interstate-84 bridges near Troutdale.

The Oregon Department of Transportation initially contracted to use traditional bridge-building methods. But after the general contractor started working in summer 2010, a report revealed that if a flood were to occur when the project was in full swing, the amount of equipment and material the company had in the water would raise water levels enough that wreckage would increase drastically. So they came up with another plan.

“This is a situation that could have been very contentious,” said Byron Perry, deputy program manager for , a joint venture of and with offices in Salem and Troutdale. “We were able to work together to develop an approach that lets us reduce our impact as much as we practically can and still get the job done in a reasonable time.”

But the new plan also increases the project’s cost by approximately $5 million and extends the schedule by a year. The budget for the entire project is now approximately $83 million, according to Jim Cox, ODOT’s bridge delivery unit manager.

Springfield-based Hamilton Construction initially planned to build a detour bridge for rerouted traffic and two temporary work bridges while the permanent east- and westbound bridges were built. But after realizing the increased flood risk, ODOT, Hamilton and Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners discussed several options and ultimately decided to use an innovative top-down construction method, which reduces impacts to water levels.

Hamilton will use a gantry crane to carry girders out to designated placements, thereby eliminating the need for one of the new work bridges in the river. The tracks that guide the crane’s base across the river extend for 840 feet – the same length as the bridges themselves. The two tracks must be aligned exactly 90 feet apart.

The gantry system has not been used on bridges in Oregon before, according to Cox. Gantry cranes are more typically used to hoist materials in shipyards and other industrial settings.

Hamilton purchased the $1.2 million gantry crane, which was delivered from Boston in nine truckloads. Three operators and two foremen went through special gantry crane training for the project, and crews are now doing trial runs in preparation for work on the eastbound bridge.

Wendell Snook, a project manager for Hamilton, hopes that the investment in training and equipment will pay off, but he says it may be too soon to tell.

“We’ll know a lot more in six months,” he said. “Whether we’re buying more (gantry cranes) or looking for a buyer, we’re learning a lot and are pretty optimistic.”

Even with the altered construction plans, however, the project will impact water levels in the Sandy River. The area is already susceptible to flooding because the bridges span a delta near the river’s confluence with the Columbia River. When both rivers back up, water is pushed to the delta and levels rise.

The last major flood to hit the area occurred in 1996, when riverside properties around Troutdale were damaged and one person died. The probability of a “100-year storm” occurring over the four-year construction period for the Sandy River bridges, according to ODOT estimates, is 3.94 percent.

ODOT built a temporary flood barrier on the west bank of the Sandy River and is reimbursing potentially affected property owners and renters for flood insurance premiums through the end of the project, which is expected by spring 2014.

After Hamilton crews finish the eastbound bridge this summer, they will move to the westbound bridge and use the detour bridge as the new work bridge. The completed eastbound bridge will have the capacity to carry detoured traffic traveling in both directions.

And although the innovative construction method will have almost no impact on the final appearance of the bridge, Snook hopes it will encourage more creativity in the building community.

“Maybe we’ve been tunnel-visioned into relying on the hoist-type machines that we always use,” he said. “This is opening up possibilities and letting the imagination start to run wild.”

Snook also said that if a prospective buyer made an offer for the gantry crane, Hamilton Construction would be willing to entertain it.

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One thing I will never forget about growing up with a pile driver for a father is driving down the road, seeing a crane boom and instantly detouring to check it out. Not only have I seen my dad jump in excitement over a vintage crane he’s never seen before, but I’ve seen him knock on strangers’ doors with a checkbook to make offers on cranes he had just encountered.

Long story short, there aren’t many pieces of equipment that get a heavy construction contractor more juiced up than a cool crane. And at the Intel site in Hillsboro right now is the mother of all cranes.

Earlier this month, 200 semi-trailer trucks hauled in the various pieces of the , or to those not in the know, the largest land-based mobile crane in the world. Workers have since been putting the crane together, a process that takes about 28 days.

The fully mobile crawler crane, which was manufactured in Kennewick, Wash., has a horizontal reach of 460 feet with its main boom and a lifting capacity of 2,600 tons, or 5.2 million pounds. It uses 4.8 million pounds of counter weight and can even track, or drive, with its load.

For comparison, the two tower cranes now on the Intel site are about half the height, at 281 feet and 241 feet, and have a horizontal boom reach of 274 feet. They can only lift 44,000 pounds on the closest lifts (compared to the LTL 2600’s 5.2 million) and on the farthest only 11,900 pounds. These smaller cranes are comparable to the crane hovering over the Park Avenue West site in downtown Portland.

The big LTL 2600 crane came from a job in the Middle East and apparently cost $5 million just to transport to Hillsboro. For safety and security reasons, you can’t go onto the Intel site to see it. But don’t worry, it will be visible from the highway.

You might want to check it out soon, though, because it won’t be the world’s largest crane for long. Lampson is in the process of building an , which will be able to handle 20 percent more capacity and hoist loads 50 percent faster than the LTL 2600. The LTL 3000 is expected to be completed later this year.

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Parr Financial, the owner of a building that houses Nordstrom in downtown Portland, has filed a lawsuit against TMT Development, the firm behind the stalled Park Avenue West office tower project.

The suit involves a 277-foot tower crane on the Park Avenue West site, which sits one block west of Nordstrom. The boom of the crane is frequently blown by the wind to a position that is directly over the Nordstrom building.

The case filed with Multnomah County Circuit Court on July 7 claims the crane had been frequently blows by the wind to a position directly over the building Nordstrom is in. In such a position, the lawsuit claims, the crane is a nuisance and is trespassing on the neighboring property, causing the owner of the Nordstrom property “a substantial and unreasonable interference with its exclusive possession of that property.”

Construction on the Park Avenue West project was halted in 2009 due to financing issues. Vanessa Sturgeon, president of TMT Development, told the Daily Journal of Commerce in 2010 that the company decided to leave the crane at the site until construction resumes instead of taking it down and reassembling it again.

During the same interview, Sturgeon said the crane boom isn’t secured so that it can sway with the wind, which reduces the chance of an accident. The company sends a crane operator to the site frequently to move the boom back over the construction site, as well as to inspect the crane, Sturgeon said. Sturgeon did not return calls seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Gaytor Rasmussen, a Washington crane inspector who has also operated and erected tower cranes, agreed that leaving the crane up was a good move. It would cost roughly $40,000 to take the crane down, and another $40,000 to erect it again, he said.

“Safety wise, you’d be at more of a risk to dismantle the crane and erect it again opposed to just leave it up,” he said.

Rasmussen added that the issue of invading airspace on another person’s property does come up in the industry, and often ends with money exchanging hands. But to whether it’s illegal to encroach on a neighbors’ airspace, he said the legal waters are murky.

Most legal cases that involve airspace rights are centered on whether aircraft can enter the space above buildings. In the 1946 case United States v. Causby, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that navigable airspace was public highway and within public domain.

But the ruling went on to say that “if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere.”

Ross Caron, a spokesman with the city of Portland Bureau of Development Services, said the bureau has no authority to regulate cranes. The state, he said, has a department that makes sure cranes are manufactured to certain standards, but there isn’t an authority that oversees how cranes are used or what they do.

“It’s usually dealt with as a civil issue,” he said.

BDS has been working with TMT Development since the project first stalled to make sure the project can continue legally once financing is in place and construction is ready to start again. When that happens, Caron said, the bureau will conduct a rigorous review process to make sure the site is safe for construction to continue.

The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Division has a six-page guideline of requirements for cranes and crane operators, but the document doesn’t address the issue of cranes and their surrounding areas.

David P. Morrison, an attorney with Cosgrave Vergeer Kester, which is representing Parr Financial, confirmed that the case was filed but said he would not give additional comments at this time.

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