CaseStudies-Header-JVD.jpg

ITI Showcase Webinar Archive

Lift Planning Considerations

Lift Planning Considerations

Enjoy the resources!  You will find the pdf presentation, video, and transcription of the webinar below. This webinar originally aired live on August 2, 2012.

  • Conditions & Consequences: Forming a Decision-Tree
  • Standard vs. Critical Lifts
  • Verbal vs. Written Plans
  • Managing Your Risk



Downloads:

 

TRANSCRIPTIon

Zack: Alright, good morning or afternoon everybody. This is Zack Parnell from ITI. I also have Kaitlin Lawry in the room with, she’s the marketing associate with ITI as well and oddly enough we are in Washington State. Know we’re going to go over to where all you are, but Mike Parnell, our presenter today, is in New York. He’s actually just at a legal office, so I’m hoping nobody comes in the room and annoys him with anything. We’re going to get started here. It’s about 10 am pacific time, 1 O’clock this is the lift planning considerations webinar. I’ve noticed, thank you all for rejoining us, we’ve been doing this showcase webinar series for a few months now and it’s basically a monthly webinar series, but if you don’t know much about ITI, we are a crane rigging training and consulting company. We really pride ourselves on skill building and education. Not so much after, we do certification training as well but we really focused on advanced rigging and lifting applications and inspections, so we’ve got a lot of friends and customers on the phone as well visitors and other people so we just really appreciate you time. To give you a little bit of background. We have a pretty vast variety of industry groups that we serve as you all know, just looking at the companies in attendance here. I’ll show you, I’m going to go over; it’s pretty incredible the amount of activities or industries that conduct rigging activities as you all know. To give you an idea, on the phone I think right now there’s about 22 countries represented, there’s over 230 registrants, you’re all in a big group together whether you know it or not. I’m going to show you about a social infrastructure we have after the webinar that you can communicate and get to know each other a little bit. There’s also 48 US States and Canadian Provinces represented and along with a lot of the folks you see here on the, the companies you see here on the screen, on the phone right now are also wind and power, BAE systems, Semen’s, Shaw Group, Crosby Group, Systems Group, GRUB, Army Corp of Engineers, URS Corp, Bestis, Disney, DuPont, US Navy, Kiewit Energy, Duke Energy, BP, GE Energy, Mad, Twak, Mitsubishi, and dozens more, we really appreciate your attendance, and know that you’ll be.

We really do this to kind of give back and the people an idea about ITI and if you haven’t been to some of the previous webinars, you might go check them out. There are several recordings that are on the webinar, or the showcase webinar page. It’s ITI.com/showcase these four are obviously up there and you can also download the presentations which is really neat. Not a lot of folks are able to attend live so they go register, and download it and watch it afterwards. So, today like we said, we are doing Lift Planning Considerations. A month from now, I’m going to give you a little back ground about Mike as well. But he’s going to do a presentation about ASME P30 and B30 developments. I saw a lot of you folks had some pre questions, pre-webinar questions about P30 cause this is obviously on lift planning, so the next presentation you won’t want to miss that, it’s September 7th. But to give you a little background on Mike Parnell, this is also Dad, I try to fool people that you know, we’re brothers sometimes and he loves it, but I don’t know if anyone has bought into it yet, but he’s strikingly handsome man, and, no he’s got a lot of experience in our industry he’s ASME B30 vice chairman and P30 main committee chairman and these committees, it’s all volunteer there’s a lot of great people that he’ll probably reflect on in this presentation that commit time and energy to make, really world leading standards adopted in many countries around the world, US and Canada especially, so a lot of people, he heads up our organization and we have about a dozen trainers that conduct services around the world, but without further ado, I’m going to pass it over to him as we can get started. And he is going to go over the agenda and some other things here. I just want to preface you here you guys, if we have any technical difficulties please forgive us it’s just that we’ve had a few in the past, but we’ve always been able to get through them, but that’s just technology isn’t it. So again I’m passing it over to Mike and you should be seeing his screen now. So take it away dad.

Mike: Alright, great. Thanks for everyone for joining us today and Zack; you see my screen up Zack?

Zack: Yep.

Mike: We have a whole series of program activities that we’ll be discussing. I would like to thank Bill Richardson has joined us from the Navy Crain Center, today Jim is also on the B30 main committee and heads up the container crane group on B30.24 and has been a long term member and really thankful he’s joining us today. Carl Johnson is with BP out of Texas, Carl works with me on P30 on the lift planning group and we have  a whole host of, as Zack has mentioned a whole host of companies has joined us and we’re looking forward to a pretty good fast pace series here. I think one thing I want to caution everybody about is, in our discussions we will be giving P30 update and I do want to a bring out that this, what you’re going to get involved with me today on this discussion is, in some development and there about 20 people that are on that group as well as another 15 or so that are contributing members and the P30 group has been meeting for about 2 years now and we’re hoping to get some good conclusion to our work planning in about 1st quarter of 2013 and will be able to start getting a document out to the general industry and some of these positions are going to be seeing are sort of a round table discussion and general directions of where P30 is headed as well as what ITI thinks we should be going in preparation for standard lifting activities and critical lifting activities.

I really want to give a lot of credit to my brothers in arms you might say for the brainstorming that’s gone forward. I don't think any of this is secret information we are and or in some cases always original but it is a format and layout that might be new to a lot of folks. In some part we’re going to each organization in today’s agenda looking at forming  a decision tree of some type and considering conditions and consequences and then we’ll be discussing quickly the difference between standard lifts and critical lifts and of course there’s some concern about verbal versus written plans and their managing your risk. So, we’re going to charge forward, if you have questions, type those into your question box there and Zack will help me deal with the questions at the end of the program and so we’ll get those cleaned up towards the end.

We’ll start on planning requirements. We have started to have much discussion about having three primary categories initially and there is a lot of national discussions we’ve been involved with and those were under either production or what we’ll call repetitive lifts and then standard lifts and then critical lifts and pretty soon it got clear to all of us that really these are the two standard and critical lifts because you can then also have within the standard lifting family, you can end up with repetitive lifts in the standard lift group so we can, so what we’ve done is a suggestion is, in a standard lift category it will have the subset of repetitive standard lifts and very closely to that and it may sound odd to us sitting here today, but critical lifts, and it may be in a nuclear environment or ship yard ship building where maybe a 92% lift and you have to make 6 identical lifts one after the other so we’ve also included under the critical lift group a retentive category for repetitive attention being paid to even critical lift activities, so that’s kind of how the discussions flowed so far and I think that’s the travel path and so each organization in effect will be making up a, and they do already, make up some decision tree so we have a load handling activity, you’ll see some verbiage coming up in our industry real soon. LHA LHE is load handling equipment, lift director and so on, we’ll identify the load handling activity and we’ll go through a series of criteria that we’re going to see this morning and then the organization, so here’s criteria and the organization may end up deciding it has a standard lift or a critical lift and so it all kind of gets down to what’s the risk involved in some of the criteria that we’re about to discuss.

The equipment that we’re really talking about will be in some of the standard coming up in the future as well and then our current sphere of operation because this can go from the wind energy group to the to the shipyard ship repair mining nuclear plants refineries all kinds of facilities indoors and outdoors underground horizontal work all kinds of things so the typical equipment we're dealing with and I'm going to say a large part going to be dealing with cranes mobile cranes in many cases telescopic gantry systems, wenches, stage X for large lifts, where a crane can’t get in place, but strange X can lift the vessel up and work, may involve helicopters or other craft, it is all about vertical and horizontal work and when we say the word lift. I do kind of want to get us into a mindset, when we use the word lift, then all our future discussions I do want us to be thinking about not only vertical lifting but also horizontal work. So the word itself, I know it’s    but you get the idea. the lift director that’s involved in a wench operation that it taking a load in sideways through a building, he’s really, it’s still a connotation that we’ll likely have to jack that thing up first then put it on rollers or air casters, airbags and move that load in, set the thing down or jack it down, so lifting really is, here is some lifting activity involved but it’s, don’t get too wrapped around the axel about lift because it really roads involving vertical and horizontal activities. Let’s take a look at some of the things we would probably exclude from some planning activities, because a lot of these types of equipment may not have, I mean you have to ask your question, do these other kinds of equipment really have the design factor that we’re looking for in that equipment. Is it built for the type of handling activity that we’re looking for and in some cases does it have redundant system in it, maybe a multiple breaking system in it, etc., so there is almost always going to be an exclusion for us to lift that we really want to be producing for, for what we’ll call load handling activities that aren’t too dedicated equipment, so we kind of look at an automotive jack or a portable automotive lift system PAL, those likely fall out of the standard lift and critical lift family because they’re dedicated to a specific type work activity and they have specific manufacturers instructions about capacity, setup inspection, operation and the only thing we’re really supposed to be using those for are a specific set of load types for, in a restricted environment, so you’ll always see an exclusions list, our wrecking operations can be a cagy bar to the door, we have all kinds of inclines and hazardous conditions road activities, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take planning, but in the lift planning document in our environment it really going to work under the approved and I guess I can drive you back to some of the best listing will be to see the equipment that’s listed in the B30 series for load handling machinery and equipment. so most of the time we use these wreckers come out, ship board cranes cause they’re not typically under the B30 family and so it’s really ship deck cranes etc., we will find portal cranes on dockside or barge side equipment, floating cranes, we certainly have those with us in the B30 family but shipboard cranes on freighters will typically be outside of it.

However, there may be times when public hull ships will be moving transformers and other equipment and the lift planning process will be incorporated into those for your particular activity, while building rigs, shipboard, those are typically very dedicated to a specific task and those will be outside of this little agenda, so down from the list you can see this well, mine hoists, truck body hoists, barge pullers, conveyor systems are dedicated systems, excavators, almost all dirt moving equipment is outside of the standard lift critical lift family because we’re lifting unspecified amounts of weight in unspecified volumes in some cases and so the control method is very different, so we really work our way away from expel equipment and forward loading or standard end to make the lift so any other non B30 equipment like I stated before, that’s probably our biggest target is the B30 equipment.

Here’s a new phrase that I’ve introduced in the past webinars, you’re going to see some new acronyms over time and throughout this entire in the proposed in the thinking coming forward with that number of folks within these lift documents. you’ll see this phrase LHE, and load handling equipment will be that first list that we offered up with cranes, telescopic, hydraulic gantry systems, sting jack and so all of those things will be under as called out in the volume downstream our current thinking is those will all be terms, LHE’s to your environment that will mean a crane, a mobile crane a town crane an overhead crane a gantry crane and so on and when using that crane these are the guidelines to follow. Here’s a new phrase in front of us that’s we’ll see quite a bit of across the industry and as it starts to enter into other documents , we have also a new term, lift director of course, we’ve seen this term up in the ASME B30.5 and it was the 2007 revision that now we have now a 2011 revision out on the street but they identified 5 key player and which we’ve had some discussion in part in previous webinars and that was lift director and for their case it was crane operator, crane owner, crane user and site supervisor, those are the 5 primary points that they identified earlier and of course in a lot of these elements we’ve talked about lift directors the new OSHA document mentions lift directors in a few areas. so if you want to take a look at the 29CF bar 1925.1400 document, do a word search through there and you’ll find lift director, if the lift director is being used or named and in a few cases they do call out the exact for a recommended purpose for the lift director and it is something going to hit the airwaves bigger and throughout all of our industries and all the things we’re doing. So let’s take a look and this is really a good place to, it’s one of those things that, the lift director, let me start it this way, the lift director is a qualified person to be able to perform numerous tasks that have to do with I’m going to suggest to, he really needs to understand the LHE activity the rigging of the load handling activity and then all of the safety elements personnel management of the team and the procedures, so he really need to have a very large 30,000 foot view of what’s going on and what’s going to about to be tapped, however I think it’s through some advice with some of the folks we’ve been working with in our industry, they’re not really always the final say if it’s categorized as a critical lift, they are a great resource person but I want to be cautious about putting too much on the lift directors shoulders because he’s really a doer, and this is one of the things I’d like for you to take heart with is that on the advisement of management, and management will end up with a risk tree and they may decide that based on a matrix, they’re going to decide that if we have three of these points. based on their insurance and liability, they may say well and this forth one down here okay now it’s going to be a critical lift and we’re going to need the lift director to get involved and he’ll help make some of those decisions for them but I want you to get the idea that it’s not all right putting in the hip of the lift director to make and individual call every time, we really want to make sure that management is deeply involved in the decision process, who then pass to protect the corporation its shareholders and their equipment and its assets. they will likely as a group be involved in deciding standard life category and critical lift category, the lift director in particular will want to be able to identify the skill level of the personnel involved and also the adequacy of the equipment, is it ok or not okay. Are we using the best machinery for this lift or acceptable piece of machinery? he may end up with creating an options list that instead of using a 550 ton mobile crane, he opt to come back to management that we would rather invest a little more money because of the safer to put in that telescopic hydraulic gantry system, so his job is to know all about different LHE’s and he may end up with proposing back to the organization we may be using the wrong tools for the wrong job here, let’s put another type of machinery in an it’ll maybe save us some money but certainly, potentially save us some time and most importantly, it would drive the risk down increase the safety part of it, he may be involved in the dollar cost estimations then, and then this has to do with also with the load for replacement costs and time. He could be handling a load that is maybe had a one year replacement time and that certainly can push this into a critical lift category, managements going to dislike because of that, we will assemble ourselves probably need an 8 to 10 foot person planning team at least for a short time period before we get everything off the ground and get the planning phase in full motion, but the replacement time may drive this critical lift development, percent of lift is going to a decision some folks will have to make.

I know in some of your organizations in numerous clients, you folks work on something of an arbitrary 70% value 75, 85, up to 95 or better and decide that a certain percentage we will require a critical lift plan to be developed. Also you’ll notice that if we’re going to be using dual LHE’s that a two crane pickup or four crane, I just noticed that a good client had an 11 crane pick the other day and a lot of dependence on the load indicators provide stays within the, and certainly gets down to hoisting personal. That is on most everybody’s list, lift director would jump up and say absolutely need a critical lift plan, it could be a one pager, doesn’t have to be an exhaustive massive list or  a planning document, but when we start lifting people, we really need to have our ducks in a row. We’re finding folks getting injured around our jobsites and workplaces and by lifting them in man baskets and so on, so lift plan documents are very important and somebody that drives that is really the lift director he is really the go to person to kind of make all that happen. Zack, I think we have a polling question. I’d like to have, if you can put that up on the screen.

Zack: Yup, it’s on the screen now and the question everyone is where does your company stand on the use of a lift director? Go ahead and, you can select one of the answers now, Have not started just, just started, have used lift director for one to three years, have used lift director for 3+ years, so we’ll keep it open for a few seconds. Mike, while we’re waiting there is a question that came in from Brad Peters from Super Sling that was pretty, we’ll have Mike- is what determines the lift director being qualified? You mentioned he has to be qualified but it that by his experience or does he needs to be an engineer?

Mike: Right, good question. The lift directors need to be a qualified person. Of course as we stated before, and that qualified person can get that by experience by training by knowledge and by performance and it really is going to be up to the employer to make that determination and it could be a person that has a certificate or degree in the associated work and that may also play a role in it, but it will, I will say it’s the employers choice, employers decision as to identifying their qualified persons in any category and I would put that 5 items list as the floor base or certainly maybe other items to that but the employer really is going to need to identify who are the lift directors and based on. Really name them by name in the organization that can be done, I know we have had lift director training for five years that I know of and then critical lift planning additionally the employer wants to identify a number of folks in their organization as qualified lift directors, qualified crane operators, qualified riggers, qualified signal person, it’s all driving that way and with some big certification programs. Helping to that and so on, but the employer, I got to tell you Brant it’s a good question, the employer is actually making the final decision and if someone walks in with a certified lift director card, it’s really the employers decision to evaluate the background of that card and how that certification was issued cause most likely it’s going to have to be tied to, in that case it would be certification degree, he may want to look at his training background, what his real experience is based on resume and then what his knowledge is which can be done by personal interview then what his performance in the field is, very good question, I will say ASME is taking this entire as well as OSHA is it’s going to get back to the employers decision tree, so if that helps your question.

Zack: Yeah, I think that answered it well and just so you guys can see, we have both in the spectrum here and it looks like 1 in 3 folks said that they have used lift director for 3+ years about 40% said they haven't started and then, you know, it’s 10 - 20% between so interesting results, I’ll pass it back over to Mike.

Mike: Awesome, alright. Well, there is movement afoot we’re all moving in a good direction. We really need to focus on those that have knowledge that do accept the accountability but it’s all based on a management decision at that, how we get there is we’re going to write specific plan. Here’s some of the considerations  points, and it’s starting off our considerations list that I told you was in the agenda, and as I told you a few minutes ago that, so this is our considerations point and it is it’s all about and as management they look at this list as well as lift director everybody is putting these into a basket that this is not an automatic yes or no, maybe when coupled with something else this falls into the critical lift or it stays in our standard lift category no matter what else happens, are friends in our industry are make some of these decisions but almost everybody would say at least when we’re transporting folk with an LHE of some type that’s going to call for some type of critical lift plan, we highly recommend that that folks that I’ve meet around the table with in the last two years would certainly stand on that as good strong advisement and then it gets down to a bit of how’s management and how’s local state provisions feel about their risk level and comfort level, and we have folks that are in significant hazard potential, and that might be somebody that’s down in a hole and they got to work and make a connection we’re about to lower a big object down here and place it and we’ve got to mount it up on a bolt pad and at some point we have to access that to get it placed and landed so it may be that that load goes down in the chamber and at certain point you take one foot off the base we have a lot of access and send an employee down to make that last connections so he is in a potential hazard area, many times you just have to go do the leg work, and sometimes somebody is going to have to be in a bike, and he’s going to have be in that area to make that connection and jump in deciding when do consider that to be a critical lift activity or is standard lift cause we did all the planning, the main thing obviously we don’t want to get a swing motion with that crane or boom up and down to send that load crushing into the wall potentially injuring that person and so that’s what we call when folks are in hazard potential that’s when they’re really don’t have any running room and that’s going to get down to the organization decision of, yes, we’re going to call that critical lift in those particular categories or, no, that’s standard lift with these special provisions, no swaying, no up and down and for radio communications relay etc. etc., that’ll be everybody’s decision as to when we it falls into their lap. Folks in the fall zone that’s pretty common, that’s going to be generally a standard lift activity, we don’t want that in, we don’t want the general public obviously in a fall zone below the load but it’s almost impossible.

OSHA and AMSE allow for assigned personal with one or two riggers and a signal person that’s assisting with that to be in the fall zone while the load is into its final placement. we don’t want people under the load, particularly under the footprint of the load but OSHA  and a lot of folks have this decision, well what is the fall zone and it’s typically the area immediately under the load, I know other folks will paint some lines out like that and said well that starts to get you well outside the work placement work area and I don’t really agree with trying to get this cone, safety cone underneath the load cause you just, with a load 80 foot up in the air, you’re going to cone this clear out 300 foot perimeter so really doesn’t make sense it’s really that area right underweight the load where can if they have a break failure or if we hoist line failure or for some reason all kinds of things can go bad and wrong but we end up with. This is the most risky the most highest risk point right here and if somebody have to reach in there to do something maybe that’s the time to lower the load down put some blocking down to support that load or to rest that load then make your connections that get out of the way and remove that blocking an so on, so maybe provision how we deal with folks in the fall zone of the load constructions very typical you’ll fly loads over, beams over folks and it’s just avoiding that long term hanging part that sometimes the Passover is going to be happening no matter what we do, you just can’t get people out of the way, but they need to be hopefully assigned to the rigging task and the crane activity.

Personnel hazards can get considered also, certainly would be for things that are suspended or swung over the general public, quite often this will be a likely in the critical lift category not in the standard lift category and that will up to management’s decision that certainly happens a lot as it. I was in downtown New York today and lots of power cranes up and picking loads up at street level and taking them up 20 stories, 30 stories, 60 stories but they’ll have a landing zone or work zone that is completely barricaded off, the truck pulls in and then we pick that load straight off of that and this is the entire area completely conned off so that flight vertical elevation is then taken over the building. Then it’s cordoned off so the general public isn’t really over, or underneath that load while it’s flying so some of those considerations have to be made and we’re looking to try to reduce the risk to the general public and certainly to the employees as much as possible. Loads containing hazardous material and that might be chlorine could be, we’ve got folks that work in chemical plants, so sulfuric acid and all kinds of things, and a lot of times you’ll hear folks that will have a particular critical lift plan precautions and things for liquids versus vapors and gasses and that may falling into in some environments, and this will stay into the standard lift category for liquid and maybe into the critical lift category because of the vapors and gasses because if that is punctured and we have a release and we have to evacuate certain part of the community then we, most folks are going to be deciding but when it falls into that category we’re going to be writing a critical lift plan and make sure all of the homework and all of our data is gathered and we’re going to perform exactly to the plan when those conditions arise, so this is the decision tree point that management groups will need to be going through and this will. I believe will end up in front of us in a year, year and a half as some of the documents come forward. Proximity hazards of course we all know about prohibited phone and power lines and this also proximity hazards talks about process lines tanks and work products that we just discussed gasses and vapors getting out into the atmosphere and environment. so it’s not only for electrical but also proximity hazards have to do with things beyond electricity that can get people hurt as well. Where does this fall into in your organization sometimes we’ll work with folks that have a standard lift for us every day of the week. Some folks it scared the living broad out of them and it’s a critical lift no matter what else is playing. Also some proximity hazards we talked about, radio frequency, electrical discharge and shock and those things we just covered that so let’s move on to complexity of lift activity. This, again, is in your decision tree so folks will potential looking at these as bullet points and deciding, we got one of those, we got one of those, we got one of these, we got one of these and all of a sudden it’s into now critical lift planning. so that’s the list we’re really looking at and in this case for complexity of activity just the shape of a load, these are sort of intertwined probably no single item here is going to immediately cause us to go to a critical lift plan over a standard lift plan, it’s all about potential instability during the lift which could reshape, and I  tie this thing to shape and fail area have a lot with, I know Larry is on our P30 committee and he’s done marvelous papers and presentations on when loads are on cranes and suspended loads there are, the bigger the load gets more bigger fail area and higher pounds per square foot of push ends up, it’s a huge issue I just want to work with a client actually here in New York here in the 77th story building and looking to try and fly panels off and offered to take those panels to the top of the building and then dismantle them, and take off all the sail except the steel beams and lower them back down, so they won’t be flying these big sails and three to skinny them down right down the street level, they’ll take the sail area away, so they’ve opted to call that a critical lift plan when they’re moving it up and then it’ll be a standard lift plan when they take those beams down cause they’ll be in very minimized sail area so if each one of those is going to get into how do we approach this work activity and how is this going to effect and what’s our potential for survivalist and potential for injury.

The load integrity is also another one for complexity of lift, we know that load come in sometimes and their crated they may have a steel frame base and they could be in the 100 ton range, but they’re on a big skidder or plat rack and how those get rigged up certainly can cause issues in this case we would be looking at like a spreader frame from up above to be able to rig and to be able to come down off that spreader farm to be able to not crush or do side load damage to that and potentially crush the item that’s inside of it, so load integrity we may have specific lifting point that are going to maintain the integrity of the load and not do damage because we’ve miss rigged it or we’ve used a different rigging method that going to cause injury or damage to the equipment, I hope Jim is on line with us, Jim is owner of liftplanner.net, it’s a great website, I’d encourage you to go take a look at it, Jim I know that Jim was involved in a project a few years about just about lifting a statue up off a state capital and I’ll tell you it’s really difficult when you start in with the high center of gravity and this thing is up and there’s almost no where to rig that except at the base. And so to get the rigging up and to maintain of course a high center of gravity up here and to try to keep that thing from being tippy or flipping over or all those things they ended up creating four pick points and girthing at various connection points girthing their slings and basically creating a basket, from wall and base to be able to support it, but center of gravity the pick points used for stability are really something to consider where is the CG in comparison in height and my pick point, obviously horizontal left right north south east west makes a big difference on sling loading and pick point loading etc., but center of gravity and its height makes a huge impact on survivability of that load of being successfully completed, and of course we got that can be, that can go awry in a lift activity and it’s another consideration point is there anything that can move shift or readjust itself while we’re lifting or moving it, we know we have loads sometimes we’re called on to move tanks with some liquid in them, we just pick up even a small one the other day and probably about 6 ton, and it probably had 300 gallons in it, but it make some change in the center of gravity as it reorganized itself, while we were well rigged all the way through but out of six tons, 300 gallons isn’t much reaction but it will certainly move that center of gravity and if you can evacuate that it can cause some problems with it, and with anticipation is really the secret answer there, draining or securing anything that might move in advance might hopefully take it out of the critical lift category and move it back into standard lift category if we can say, yeah that is going away because prior action.

Let’s take a look at the next one, complexity of lift and we’re using complex load handling systems or methods in some cases they may be new machinery, something we haven’t used quite often or new technology in our worksite and it may be, of course later on we’ll see a multiple LHE’s but it may be a transfer load from a gantry system to a mobile crane and that can present all kinds of issues by where is the center of gravity where is it supported how are we taking care of the horizontal movement, these all pay a large role and typically in that case and in those situations we would likely get into the critical lift family and not anywhere near the standard lift effort that some folks might apply if the load handling activity can count obstructions, that just means pipe clearances, pipe areas and the load may just be skinny enough, we’ve had loads that went through with one inch clearance on the left side and right side so it takes a lot of pre anticipation of what any wind might be inside of a building if at one end they open a door at the other end we have a huge wind tunnel effect going on, tag lines obviously have to use in many cases could be a multiple overhead crane life and so clearances can be a huge issue in that case, what a critical lift plan will do to for us is drive us plan and talk and make sure that we’re able to discuss everything will our members and our operators so that everybody is on the same page, and I think that’s the most, best side benefit you get out of a critical lift plan developed is that discussion by all the parties involved and it’s really important for the successful outcome.

Let’s take a look at the last one on our page here, the load is to be manipulated rotated or turned, you know Zack I got a good call the other day on load handling with two hooks on the same mobile crane something that is done quite often it might be so in this case we have a rooster assembly up here and coming off a mobile crane and hydraulics outriggers the whole works so we’re lifting off on the main block and then we have rooster assembly and we’re lifting also off the headache ball, these are kinds of things that when these devices get down they actually get a manufacturers approval to do it, we did a pick and turn the other day we rigged up to the center using a spreader bar to make sure we didn’t end up with contacting the sling edges against the load and then we rigged up the whip line and another spreader bar at the far end to make sure this could also clear the top as we started to make that pick and turn so this entire unit was going to be taken from this orientation then turned up and finally then finally turned up in a vertical orientation. To do that we had to get the manufacturers approval because we had to check the lift, double check the load handling parts of the whip line based on the tailing operation check the main hoist, the header operation and then make sure we had clearance for all the slings and all the rigging and to be upright that and to get their approval to use two hooks at one time, it does take in our case, takes manufacturers approval to do that with the specific crane, you don’t want to just start doing at the drop of a hat and I noticed in the B30.5 there is discussion right now about providing some guidance within that and that may be a few years away, about doing two hook pick, and provisions might require a LMI for both the whip line and or any main hoist or any of the things in the operators cabs, so just load turning is pretty complex and it can get you into a bind pretty fast, I know that a number of folks we’ve done investigations for and they end up cutting the rigging cause they didn’t use spreader bars, cutting slings as they make a rotation like that or a turn up and all of a sudden the slings are on the edge of the load and cut the rigging drop the load so this is really complex activity and something I would encourage folks, hey don’t just go out to your, out to the back yard there and start well say, hold my beer and watch this.

This is something we really want to take precautions on and anytime we’re talking about load turning or rotating, manipulating the load it may easily go from what some folks might consider standard to go into that critical lift category and the finally with the complexity of load handling activities is the multiple LHE’s that we described before, this is  a new category that a number of us in the industry have talked about is, it’s not that our folks are not qualified, you know we have qualified riggers, signal persons, operators the whole works and serving in most all of those roles qualified lift director but it may be getting down to a certain situation that you know this is, you got coming up has never been done and that should already open up a bit of a flag for consideration by management groups, or it’s something that it was done, we did it 12 years ago and we have nobody left in our facility that was around and actively involved when we did that 12 years ago so this thing that we have it a unique item yeah, it’s infrequently performed and there is some evaluation, we have to decide if we have the skilled folks the knowledge and experience of the personal involved in this task to be able to accomplish that, and that’s where a good planning activity will really knock down a lot of those things cause they do understand center of gravity and load manipulation, LHE capacity all those things start to play, if they just haven’t done it for a long time or never before, doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, you just have to slow the circus down a little bit and let’s get our planning in place and do it right with the equipment that we have. There may also be a place that you hire a contractor to come in or an outside lift director that’s done that  work before, and the outside lift director may be able to come in and provide some good assistance and there are a number of those types of groups out there, I know Kevin O’Neil with   Associates works with us on the P30 group, there are Steve Sparrow, there’s a number of folks that are in the industry that are heavily involved and folks like Jim Yates at Barnhart crane and rigging, they all come in and do some advisory group and consultation with folks, so there’s a lot of ways to skin that cat and sometimes this particular category might be some assistance with some other folks.

Let’s take a look then at the impact of environmental conditions so here’s, remember that all that we’re really doing is working down this list a decision tree, do I got this way, does it go standard lift or do I got this way to this side with critical lift and that’s what we’re really talking about when you know your wind limitations, certainly when you’re on wind farm construction or turbine, they’ll get into sometimes approved higher capacity for higher wind speeds and you know most of the time it’s 20 and then they have provisions to go to 33 miles per hour or the equivalent it is in some job sites because of the approval by manufacturer they’ll be allowed to go up to some higher value but only when critical lift plan has been put in place so those are considerations you want to stick with your existing wind restrictions for you LHE and only, and they would only be negotiated to go higher only with approval by the manufacturer, so this isn’t anything you mess around with, we know wind is a big deal and really have a detrimental impact on us, so something to take into deep consideration I know that there are probably a dozen folks that are in the industry that do ground bearing pressure evaluations, in fact I think we had a question on ground bearing pressure in the initial sign up for this webinar, this isn’t something we just want to go stomp our foot on the ground and say yes or no to, we’re going to often need a geo tech support and end up doing some serious evaluations of the area and we’ll need to have some professional service groups come out potentially do some evaluations for us.

We’re working with an outfit that’s a good client down in Louisiana right now, they like to restrict all their lifting activities to 2500 pounds per square foot and it can be difficult it creates a lot of matting, a lot of crane outrigger blocking and matting and spreading that load out. they work in some swampy conditions or marginal conditions so sometimes the entire site will have restriction as to their maximum pounds per square foot and we’ll have to live within those and that may be for standard lift activity to go to any, to achieve any lifts that are going to pose greater than that given value we may, we’ll certainly have to go into a lift planning engineers approval to do that. You know temperature has some big impact on our lifting conditions assuming surface is typically water so we’re lifting on and off water on barge cranes to dock on dock cranes to water high issues to barge to barge issues, also floating vessel to floating vessel all those things can get involved and some environments folks work with that as standard lift and many cases other folks said a little unusual then move into this critical lift category, visibility is always an issue, precipitation, we won’t spend much time on that, those are pretty obvious but radio communications is key and critical we know that when we get a 300 foot tower crane up here and he can’t see anything when he’s lifting a load up from street level up to building level he may have easily have an entire fog bank below him that he has everybody is out of site and everything is all blocked out so a lot of times visibility is going to be some issue in many cases and that’s where we’re going to lean on the technology of drum counters, rope counters, trolley measurement, hoisting speeds, all those things have come into play, the operator and the lead rigor, and lift director want to be tight in communication on how we’re approaching those load handling activities. This sounds kind of funny but essential to exceed LHE, when would be ever do that, well you know sometimes what happened, I told a large of clients, a really good client over in Saudi working and as we started lift planning discussions with them on certain tasks and activities, to so installation is almost the simplest of all work and we pick up 10 ton load, pick it up go over and set it down, no big problem and we understand radios or distances, we got a tail of that load etc., so I tell you when we get into this extraction and removal of equipment sometimes folks are ending up that they can’t use wedges or jacking, jack screws to get things broke free that sometimes they’re using the crane or a gantry system to actually separate that piece, so there is going to be exactly a time when they’re going to actually above that loads actual dead weight, let’s call it again 10 ton, they may be for an instant over here in 12 ton range and it is going to be a big deal for confirming, can we take that extra load for an instant while we break that thing free because that may be right at the end or limit of that LHE so when we start extracting things and removing things from service it’s quite likely to get in to some small overload, and I we’re already at 100 percent we could be in big trouble.

We can really do some damage to equipment and have some catastrophic failures or catastrophic event as a result so it is a particular category and you really want to pay attention to it, and it is a consideration point you want to take keep to heart cause it really is a place that easily get into overload of equipment, we know that it starts and stops acceleration, we worked in Texas this summer down in, in an area where they were thinking  a 200 foot shaft, and they were thinking 35 ton buckets of muck, and they were moving a tunneling system so hoisting all at one time and then sending those buckets back down and really they really able to work at it 400 feet per minute on the hoist and that abrupt start and stop if that ever happen could do a lot of damage to that crane number one, but also the hoist system, main boom, main hoist, everything starts to take a shot and you really want, you know that’s, I guess you know, God love everybody here but it’s a cowboy operators are really, if the guy gets up in the crane and got big spurs on goes ye ha, probably will want to go pick another operator, things can really happen fast and it’s not about speed, it’s about condition of your equipment and taking care of the people that are working with you and let’s not get too out of control here, we’re just slowing, nobody wins the race and something’s we share with some of our clients is that all of our complete crane and rigging job, it’s about 90% of time are spent making the decisions, making all the information, getting the crane organized getting the rigging attached and doing all those things. Then about 10% of the time are we actually suspended, so if you take that kind of approach 90% of the time we’re spending minutes if not an hour to get everything ready and then 10% of that time is spent actually hoisting or lowering that load.

This is no time be fast, this is absolutely the time to go slow for this 10%, because that is when accelerations chalk loading dynamic loading, everything starts to happen pretty darn badly and things get out of control so, we’ve already burned up a lot of time over here in this preparation and there’s no reason to try and gain all that back just while we’re suspended and everything so, slow and steady wins the race, I can’t’ tell you how often we get calls for accident investigation when somebody really wants to get too happy too fast to quick and all of a sudden they pay a really severe price for it. Certainly in that type work we can have unexpected blind spot, but that only leads to, and we’re going to be overloading a lot of equipment in a hurry so slow is the way to go. Potential to exceed LHE is, and also we want to double check on brake settings and clutches are they able to take all things we’re asking them, accuracy of the weight estimation, that’s going to keep that LHE standing up not falling down, what is the equipment and history information, we all know that cranes have their annual physical and all the monthly’s and daily’s that take place but we do know we have some older equipment in play and there may be places and locations that we don’t want to be operating equipment because it might be high cycle or dual cycle activities, so serious decisions and if we’re going to use specific crane of LHE for a specific work again in this case based on the value of the load this has got to go but the dangers and risk to personal all of sudden, that changes from standard lift and it moves over here to the critical lift family because even something like this aging equipment and conditions adverse conditions which we just discussed briefly and then load shifting and handling we want to minimize those certainly and that can lead to LHE capacity challenges, let’s go to the last one here under this one.

Load redistribution and that’s transferring load to from one LHE to another and or as it’s lifted or tilted. Sometime tilting the load can change the center of gravity’s position in its relationship to each LHE and can shorten it up on one side or lengthen on the other so those are all big issues. Then moving and we talked about barge mounted cranes and how they are effected by current and tide and buoyancy so picking loads up that are in the water and getting them out of the water we have to make a transition for 63 pounds per gallon and weight per cubic foot, that’s 63 pounds and what that’s going to do to us is we’re going to be lifting that load out of water and once that’s clear what that has for the effect on load handling equipment. Zack, I think we had another question polling question I think on percent of lift as an issue for people to establish critical lift, something in that neighborhood.

Zack: Yep, I just put in on the screen. Does your company use a designated percent of LHE capacity to initiate it a critical lift plan, so it looks like we’re getting a lot of responses so far. You might want to take one of these questions really quick I think regarding crane set up, then one was from Scott asking about how do ground bearing, how do you ground bearing calculations by hand, and the other one you were referring to I think is, let’s see, oh any discussion on maximum out rigger loading, you know would be essential but looks like we’re getting, we got about 60%, I’m going to keep it open for another minute if you want to chat about any of those.

Mike: Okay, sure. I have asked a number of civil engineering groups on ground bearing pressure questions on doing field evaluations and I tell you, it really gets sticky, without proper equipment and we’ve got to have the proper equipment I know I can pre fall a bowling ball on the ground and I can measure indentation or that may be one thing but it’s also about ground mapping and doing underground subsurface areas with faults, cracks, voids, all those kinds of things, we want to, that’s something you can’t just determine from doing a drop test or a hammer test, anything on or tire impression test as you drive a piece of equipment across the ground, it’s really going to take some, a civil group to decide and most, I got to tell you I haven’t found any way to really do competent ground bearing pressure evaluations, just with crane operators riggers and site folks without using geo technical assistance from professional service group so, only thing I can tell you is I’d really be wrapping my arms around these folks and getting them deeply involved in it, I don’t have an easy answer for you cause there just isn’t. I would you encourage you to start getting in good discussion with a number of geo tech groups and finding out what they use for these procedures and equipment, but typically it’s one of those that would probably left up to the experts and Zack I think you had another question on.

Zack: Before we do that, let me close out this poll, so they can see your screen again, but just so you know there 76 and 90% that’s the percentage capacity that 50% of the group actually uses to initial a critical lift plan.

Mike: Okay.

Zack: The number 8% over 90% capacities, 25% do not have a process like this. So, I’m going to hide these results and your screen is now visible again.

Mike: Okay. Thanks for those results everybody. You know, it’s really interesting we’ve polled our P30 lift planning members about a week and a half ago and actually we found about half of them use a percentage within their organization and somewhere in that 75% range and probably that came from an old OSHA definition of what a critical lift might be and but sometimes corporations decide that and certainly in some organizations run 90% and so on, but we’ll talk through that in future webinars but it is where you’re comfort level is and may actually be based on some of the age of your equipment and so on, or these soil surface and those kinds of things that may be setting on and ability for leveling the unit all those things start to play a role in it, so it’s not a bad number, I mean it’s a good target point and it’s good thing to put in your hip pocket and it just needs to move in with some of the other its ties with all the other consideration points, so if you can see the screen I talked about ground bearing pressure and using geo technical services really that’s only smart way I know to go about it but I just field evaluation by, I’m just going to say non-qualified personal and or personal without using time proven equipment we’re going to get into a bind here in doing some of these bumper tests and I would really be cautioning against that particularly because of the underground potential we have in some of those areas with the mapping systems that are out and available today really huge help in identifying sub surface void, faults and vaults. I’d really be using professional services, I would not really endorse or encourage anybody to just decide to go out and thump on the group and decide, well that can handle 2000 PSI, so be really careful with that. Here is a question about matting or outrigger bearing pressure.

Zack: Yeah, Kerry Cocker from Dika, he asked any discussion on maximum outrigger load would be interesting.

Mike: Yeah. That’s a good question. We do get into conversation what you want to do is there are a number of folks that are in the, and that is manufacturers outrigger pad and it isn’t. A lot of folks build an old 4 by 4 through bolted and I mean just do this and so they got plywood tops and bottoms and it might be a 4 by 4 or 5 construction and on any given day these might look like they could have say 3000 pounds per square foot. All of a sudden you through one on the ground and it’s all crumbling and it’s all falling apart and doing ugly things and all of a sudden we punch an outrigger right through it and bend all the bolts in it and you know that 3000 PSF goes right up the window so you want to be really careful about identifying or giving an absolute value some of the blocking that gets created by 4 by 4 6 by 6 that’s through bolted because you really want to. When that’s done, you really want to top those and firm those values and have an engineer really do some calculations on compression values to make sure that they’re going to be satisfied and suitable for that work, I’m very impressed with the synthetic outrigger pads that are being produced today and we have a number of them and we’re looking to purchasing an additional but they come in all different sizes and shapes, these synthetic ones will get into very high capacity and pretty good span and they’re stackable, are fairly light weight and very dependable comes to having a repeatable compression value so, I would encourage you, and Dika is one of those that manufactures those and they’ve got some great units that are available and I’d take a hard look at those, we’ve started to phase out a lot of our blocking that has really gone to this entire synthetic arena because of the long term dependability and low maintenance and light weight it helps our people in the field from dragging big heavy mats around so it might be something to investigate, hope that helps answer that.

Let me get back and we’re just about done, I know this looks funny to you, lift plan considerations, but it’s definitely what can make or break an organization. Again as we discussed at what point do we decide standard lift or critical lift, and this corporation made decide what the placement time effects, if we don’t get this replaced, if we drop this, and we have a crash and burn and all of sudden this thing is out of service and if it takes three months to replace this, we’re going to be paying penalty of $4000 a day or something because we’re stopping a job so that actually would go away from a standard lift category and immediately go to the critical lift category because of the replacement time of the specific item about to be lifted or needed to be handled falls into extra attention discussion and consideration calculations and engineering review potentially, the replacement time is defiantly a big ticket item and I would think this is really your risk control folks, we’re going to get involved in this entire discussion about commercial impact on the organization that is going to be handling the load, and it’s not so much that you can pay this off or shove this off on to a contractor and figure out what they’re, but if this is your insurance policy but it’s still a job and your reputation on the line, so commercial impact, cost of replacing the load and sometimes the load is irreplaceable like the one off and it’s never going to be made again, that might be a decision that will take that out of the standard lift category and over into critical lift, and is failure to comply with it because a shutdown of the work activity or disruption of general public.

I know a lot of folks that do bridge repair placement and bridge work every time they’re putting a bridge section over a major interstate, and typically it’s going to be a night and they’re going to do all that deck setting and all of those will be in that critical lift category because a general public shutdown of a major highway and interstate cost you so many dollars per hour per day and they just won’t mess around with having Bill Joey and Bobby just going out there and deciding after we cross the highway we’ll be good to go, they’re going to put a significant details with the entire team behind them to decide that definably be out of our standard lift category and into critical lift category, also unique set requirements and this falls into, maybe a nuclear plant could be a refinery corporate policy rules, I know the Shell, Bechtel, BP, a lot of folks have corporate policy and they supersede almost everything that’s happening at the local level and so given their guidelines it may just end up be having nothing to do with OSHA, ASME or the State, County, Province, Country, it’s their corporate policy that those decisions will define and generally drive folks almost always into a critical lift when there is a question versus a standard lift we obviously have to attend to standard regulations and then a potential for interruption with infrastructure this typically will drive it up to the critical lift family as well, so there’s part of our decision tree starts to get answered, and the repetitively lifting as we stated earlier first frame there that we can have repetitive lifting in standard lifts and critical lifts and this is what our current thinking is nationally on this is that what falls into place and what start to happen are these three things, complacency, fatigue, and distraction and because of that they, and any of those can happen in either one of these categories, standard lifts or critical lifts and we’re going to want put something into place that helps take away the risk related to complacency and certainly fatigue for folks swapping operators in and out, swapping riggers in and out, but on long term repetitive lift activity and or distraction we know what all those are about so repetitive lifts can enter into either category, but because of the length of the project, length of the work activity it could be a 16 hour pouring job of concrete or 24 hour 36 hour pouring job they may call it a standard lift but they’re going to have, then they’re going to write a specific requirement that they’ll have change out of either personal within a specific clock cycle etc. and to make sure they are maintaining a fresh crew, that everybody is on their toes, everybody is doing their job and their trying to minimize and lower the risk at all times in getting everything dealt with and dialed down to minimum risk, safety operation in the most efficient way to do it.

Alright, let’s take a look, this is something unique that one of our customers requested. I was down in California and this is at a chemical plant they make fertilizer and so they said can you help us, these things mean the most to us, and these are what we run into in our fence and our date this is our playground. These are conditions we’d like to have a look and so I, instead of these using a bullet lift, ended up creating for him a score card and I know that’s probably a little difficult for you to see on your screen, but this is an excel document so there are 24 items that we listed out for them. We had a counseling session with them with about 10 of them in a room and we down through and created a list of 24 items that in some cases they are a no brainer critical lift and in other cases we tell them you have these combinations of things that gets to be a bigger issue and we’re going to need to tackle it. So, there are 24 items here and certainly the list can grow and you’ll notice there is this whole center section that talks about value of the load right in here. Each one has a point score system and notice that the lower frames right down here when it gets to be 5 points or more in this bottom box, then we go to LP critical lift plan, so you’ll notice that item 8, I know it sounds  screwy but for their environment release of, accidental release of sulfuric acid will only count for a 1, to them that’s a liquid, it comes from the ground the risk inherent with the operation, their employees equipment and so on, but they accept that risk everyday they come to work, that’s not a big deal to them, but if you tie that number 1 risk item with a load that’s going to be, must be rigged in a chocker or basket hitch, which means we’re not directly connecting to the load, and then we add that to personnel that are in significant hazard location to that then all of a sudden we take that number 1 number 2 and 2 and that become a 5 point lift and that all of a sudden will do a critical lift plan for that, so this is what they asked and came out of our total discussion. You’ll notice that some of you have indicated in the poll that was taken item 4 right here in this case, particularly multiple crane lift and needed to be used in 75% that’s an automatic 5, on theirs for a single crane lift you’ll notice that item 2 right here single crane lift greater than 85% then gives them a 3 points and that’s a pretty big push anything else that goes with that will just about push it into a five point final line item and so this is how they use, this is just a little load lift determination scorecard and it’s excel for them and they decided that this is how we’re going to make our decisions so that if safety department looks at it and rigging department site management director, everybody that looks at it they can come up with a pretty quick determination how close and quick we get a five, if so we’re going to get a little CLP. So it’s just a unique card for one site, doesn’t work for everybody just sort of, and a lot of folks have something like this but it may not be in a specific scoring or point system, but it sort of gets you there and gets you to discussing and talking about some of the real risks related to that. Zack I think we have another poll coming up for our last one, and then we’re just about done.

Zack: Yep, launching it now. It says, does your company use some form of critical lift plans scorecard?

Mike: Oh good, Okay.

Zack: So everyone, the poll is open, we’ll keep this one up. I’m pretty sure. So make sure to get your answers in there. Looks like everyone is answering it pretty quick. Okay, I’m going to close it here in about 5 seconds. Alright, so the results overwhelmingly about 80% have said that no, they don’t use a score card about a quarter, almost a quarter said they do, so I’ll hide those results, and you’ll have the screen again.

Mike: Okay, Excellent. Alright, well here’s an idea I mean that’s just one approach, it can be dollar value and really this is really the culmination of a lot of things we’ve talked about today is risk to general public, risk to personal, overloading LHE, or potential high percentage of lift. Folks in the fall zone a pressurized materials that can be released to the general public all those kinds of things can turn into a CLP, so just an idea and something you might consider down the line, and see how it works in your organization. Okay, well I’d like to open it up Zack and I’ll take questions and I’m not sure about all the answers but I’ll entertain all the questions I can and do my very best and if we need to get back to you on something, we’ll do that so let’s go forward with a few questions and see what we can do with them.

Zack: let’s see, question came in from Technical Oil Field Supplies, how important are ground leveling considerations in heavy lifts?

Mike: Okay, ground leveling is every LHE. I’m going to  step outside a back and say LHE whether it’s mobile crane, tower cranes, telescoping hydraulic gantry systems, work on extreme requirements for ground leveling and ground compaction and load bearing capability, just about everything all the way down is critical for the ground to be within one percent grade or certainly less than in some cases. In some cases for mobile cranes we’re looking at one degree at a level that can be required in some circumstances, so it a huge issue at being out of level is quickly if you, a lot of you have taken a lot of mobile crane courses of course and you the old setting up a mobile crane on an incline like this and then of course a hoist line is dropping down like this then all of a sudden the side loading of the boom is huge and you can lose 50 to 70% of the capacity very quickly by being out of level it’s very big hill it is really laps fast and really can do some damage, we’re picking a load uphill and as we swing it around downhill, just swing the crane right around all of a sudden the load looks for the further radius and I mean this thing happens very fast and some people, being out of level is huge issue and can be deadly, you know in most cases so make sure we have the machine properly level and everything, it may take those to work ground compaction may take some 5 inch 3 inch to quarter minus and a lot of compaction work to help build that foundation and get it level, I think every manufacturer will tell you that our equipment is intended and has been tested on level ground and that’s how you should operate it. Good question let’s go to the next one.

Zack: Okay, Pam from Kimberly Clark asks about critical lift definitions for inside manufacturing facility instead of the construction side.

Mike: Okay, Great question. I would like to pull up, so all the same considerations and I’ve hope we’ve covered those inside those weren’t really restricted to the outside load handling. All this morning items that we’ve covered really do address inside handling as well as outside handling but I did preload a little bit a little bit for you, I’d like to take a look, Pam, here is a critical lift document that we used in our consulting services and so on as well as some of our lift load handling train, so here’s a critical lift plan for overhead cranes, this is really the first page of 4 pages but you’ll notice that this sort of a left and right layout to it, load is here, crane is here, which hook are we going to use big hook on the bridge  or small hook over in the right hand column consideration could be multiple crane, and then pretty much that list is all big part of that and as we go down the front of the sheet here of course we have the rigging consideration and the operating area instructions and other others, and I take it to page two because we have an entire fill in the blank and  draws your own load path and this may be that the bridge is here the trolley starts here and the load is underneath and so we need to do a full drawing within the facility and we’ve got man doors in here, we got take that load from this point over an obstruction and then work it down through the bay and so we’ll bridge trolley and bridge to get it down through there so if the load travels path, where do we want our people stationed and we want somebody stationed by that door cause it might be a high consequence or critical lift or something in between where is our signal person going to be, question mark, where is the operator going to be? so we’ll draw that right on the sketch and so personal placement path and we can schematic that right out, I’m just going quickly here, what’s the load look like, load schematic and rigging method so we want to double check our rigging plan. We’ll have a quick kind of, you can even do a photograph and lay that up and do some sketching over and confirm your load. It may be 18 tons and we have some known distances with it and of course that will have some calculations to help identify what’s the minimum rigging based on tension is there rigging shackle and controlling the tag line and so on, so this load schematic and rigging method will be detailed out and it’ll talk about x number of slings shackles and can this can all get transferred to the front side of this document right over here to the front bottom portion where we’re gathering all of our data right in here. So you do a load and rigging schematic page and then on the last page are pretty important because this is actually where the discussion with the crew and the teams come up. Item one two three, four five and when we get down to we want to barricade all the area. We’ve already alerted safety or securities to make sure we don’t have any incoming traffic we want to position the crane over the load center of gravity attach the rigging. It may be that we end up with detailing who assigned and who’s responsible to do that and it may be different folks that are assigned those tasks so it’s a load handling sequence and procedures. It really goes down through and this entire page is dedicated to, we’re going to do this in 12 steps and this is how we’re going to do it, and we may do a dry run to make sure this is all doable so there is a lot of different lift plans. Certainly, these can be types out but in the field they may be hand written in some cases and fill in the blank and make sure don’t miss any of the boxes that are necessary to achieve that appropriately so.

I hope that gives you some comfort that not only can we do this, you know this is the standard one for mobile cranes and that’s, we’ve always seen a lot of those, but we can do that for overhead cranes and then we even got one for wrenching. pulling a load sideways so here’s a load wrenching plan for a box, notice we have rigging blocks over here and we need to draw up a block position on the, where it’s connecting, pipe makers would use this type of system to pipe makers all the time using wenches, what’s the load description  and what size wenches are we using all the capacities block requirements, all the load data’s here, all the wench data is here, how many blocks we are using multi-part system lifts mechanical advantage and get what’s out loading to columns and beam and so on, so this same format for load wrenching detail or rigging system load schematic and rigging method and personnel and assignments, it’s a 4 page document just for load handling for load wrenching sideways with a load so, it’s kind of regardless in that I started earlier today on this presentation it’s really regardless of the LHE, we still go to move that load from area to another and you can, we can substitute those forms I just showed you for overhead cranes, mobile cranes, and load wrenching, can be substituted for with stand jacks and can be substituted for telescopic hydraulic gantry systems and I mean it’s just really useful. If you take a piece of equipment and that lift plan will work with that piece of equipment, great questions and thank you for that. What’s the next one?

Zack: There is a question from Mike, from Disney, but before we jump into that, I wanted to do one more poll question if that’s okay. One’s going to be hopping off here in about 5 to 10 minutes I suppose. Everyone we’re just looking for future webinar subjects, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback for instance this subject was requested long ago, so if you have any feedback for any of these future subjects you’d like to have or view, we’d really appreciate it. We’re getting a lot of feedback here. Options, I mean there’s obviously more options than just these 5 but just want to see what the current populous would like to see in the future so, I don’t want to keep this open too long, I’m just going to do another 5 seconds and the question from Mike from Disney is, when is a written plan required and is there a standard form the lift plan provided by ASME? So, maybe you can start answering that and I’ll close off this so you go back.

Mike: Sure, Okay. Alright, great question, and the gentleman’s name from Disney again is? Mike?

Zack: Mike as well.

Mike: Okay, great question and thank you for that. Written plan and most folks are going to get down to it, we’re not settled on the fact yet, but I think that we’re going to be looking for standard lifts verbal or written. I think we’ll probably get to a point that we will be enforcing the idea that critical lifts will likely be written recommendation and not verbal category and based on the election criteria. I just went through just a little bit ago at which will drive us to doing a standard lift which means we can verbally determine all the information we need and we’re able to produce it without producing a document that can be done verbally, otherwise you can do a written plan certainly for a standard lift many organizations don’t allow and lifting without a lift document of some type. I know that a couple of our members on P30 that’s the standing through the corporation, so in their case they don’t allow this. It’s got to be written for everything. It’s up to your organization and their risk level and by management decision with lift director and operators and riggers collectively and we do that with verbal, and a lot of folks do obviously verbal is done quite a bit so but really it’s restricted and restrained to the standard lifting category, Zack, there was a second part to that question.

Zack: Yeah, it was.

Mike: Oh, it’s if ASME is going to come up with a plan, right?

Zack: Yes.

Mike: Okay great, and that’s a great question. At the moment I will say that our current thinking is that within P30 it is a currently it is a chapter 0 is definitions and scope and definitions chapter 1 is sort of the decision tree and this is our current thinking, and this may change downstream there. Chapter 2 is rolls and responsibilities of personnel, chapter 3 is standard lifts, chapter 4 is critical lifts and then we have an appendix that is kind of a non-mandatory appendix but we’re considering right now and if you would like, I don’t know if we can do a poll on this Zack, but if you would like to run a poll and maybe in the future or now we are considering putting in, like a 1 to 2 page critical lift plan example in that non mandatory document and something that may approach 10 plus page CLP example, but folks can look at to get an idea if we’re going to develop CLP’s in our company does anybody have something we could use as, not as a boiler plate, but as an example or sampler or so, it is, we are considering this ASME P30 non mandatory appendix that will have some critical lift planning documents and examples in it for you.  The movement is there and I think we’ll have some traction on it. Once we document it as finished, we will go after public review as an ASME requirement and we’ll also get a public evaluation on all of the chapters and also standard lift planning example. Good Question. Yes, we are moving that way. We hope they have that in the P30 document. At the moment, everybody is shaking hands on it and making it happen. Good question.

Zack: Okay. Bob Barry from Simon’s Crane Op asks, is there a place to find a copy of the proposed P30 standards?

Mike: That’s a great question, Bob. Thank you for that. At the moment, the ASME cannot release anything that’s a work in progress until we’re all the way done with it. At the moment, we’re still in the writing stage. I will tell you this – in September we end up doing a review with the common about, which we’re doing right now, private committee. October, we are having an official 1st Ballot within the group. I would say, by the time we get to February 2013, we’ll have the public review stage. At that point, will be time everybody takes their shot at that document and be able to comment back to the committee. At that point in time, this committee will need to go back and confirm if any of the items need to be re-addressed. Of course, if we change anything, it will go back to the ballot stage again and then it goes off for public review again. So, nothing gets finished until we are done with the public review and satisfy all those comments and questions. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you – the P30 documents cannot be released. It is against ASME requirement, rules, regulations, and policies – we can’t release any of it through all the voting and is ready to go for Public review. I wish it was different, it is different, and I apologize as I cannot do anything about it. I am the chairman, and I can’t do anything about it. It is ASME policy we have to live by. Good question.

Zack: Alright. Richard Goddardam, heavy lift specialist asks, what are your lift criteria to allow two or three crane lifts? For example, when lifting a pressure vessel with two main lift cranes, and with steel cranes?

Mike: Hi Richard. It’s nice to hear from you. I heard you’ve been visiting us on almost every webinar we had. The question is criteria for two cranes up here in the head, and one crane down here in the land. So we got header up here and tailing on the same load. Richard, I think the key here is – most management groups would make a decision as to what percentage. I think the biggest issue is what percentage would be set the lift capacity for each of these three cranes. I would have to say, without knowing anything else at this moment; most folks are going to limit their capacity of the cranes just taking a shot in the dark right now. 75% of the capacity of the crane at maximum working radius. This crane actually has to crawl forward during that up riding, and heading and tailing process. No matter where this crane goes, generally a lot of the folks are in the 75% category. I don’t really disagree with it. Some of the shifts have been working 90%, but it’s almost production lifting for them. We’ve been using corridor or boiler crane, and they run at a near 100% lift that they’ve got the ability to roll with the load. The load stays under the main boom point. So, on flat ground where the base is not able to keep up with each other very well, and limited. Of course, 75%, could be 60, could be 80, but 75 is a good target point. If somebody understands, the biggest spear in that crane operator/lift director is fine to set the hoist line stay plump, they say vertical because if the hoist line starts to get loaded, out sideways, or pulled away, we are likely going to have a catastrophic event in most all directions.

About keeping the hoist lines plump and vertical so they were able to maintain capacity with target capacity. That 75 is a fairly good starting point. Arguments can be made either way to go up or down, based on the machine, the operator and the basic working environment criteria for you. That answers you questions, Richard, I’d say that’s a place to start. Most certainly add this one last comment, the load meter indicators are going to be the best friend for a live readout, all three of the crane cap, I have worked on sites where they have a load meter indicator be able to be read from a master box, at the lift director’s location, so he can immediately read out the load on crane 1, 2, and 3, and he has the knowledge, along with the crane operator, on what the load of crane is. The loading instructions may be, you must work with 180-200 ton for each of these two cranes, and this one may be you can work with h40 to 50 tons, say, center of gravity may be right here and light tailing. The instructions are, if you start to pick up too fast or as we make the turn, and you’re experiencing some higher loads here, you’ve got to wait for your partner here, you’re going to load up and he’s going to load off the crane and fall over with you. Or, if you’re not fast enough, you got to keep up with 180 ton so you’re not overloading him. The load meter indicator goes a long way to help keep everybody informed as to what values they should maintain, a working range they should keep up with. Once we start to peak out in either direction, we got to stop all operations till we get everybody squared off. Great question, Richard, I sure appreciate it. I sure hope to have you in future programs. Zack, do you have any more questions?

Zack: Yeah, just a couple more. Just to get back to Richard, he says thanks, I agree. When a detailed plan is drawn up it measures are used to monitor each crane we can allow to 90 percent, was his opinion. Want to just close out there. There is a question from Mike Dina, from Miko, and he asks, any suggestions when you crane equipment are placed on ice?

Mike: We’ve got to create friction and we may end up having to cut through the ice and create small piling to help remove or stop movement, best possible. We have to create the possibility to stick that crane on that surface without a horizontal movement. Outriggers are down, hats are here, we’ve got to work real hard just make sure that crane doesn’t go anywhere. The load on ice has something like a .01 co-frictions or friction and it is nasty. Anything gets just slightly run on the surface, not perfectly leveled, it’s just a disaster. We’ve seen cranes slide on ice with the slightest of incline. We’ve got to create fiction and stop the movement at all points, and that may be small half inch layer of sand is laid down, blocking or some high friction blocking is laid, and cranes are laid. The traps of outriggers may be placed on top of that. We work hard, and it may need dried pens to restrict the movement of the outrigger pads or nodding that is into the hard surface. They may have to drill. They’re going to have to keep everything from moving and keep that crane in one place. They may be driving pens or drilling to try to restrict any side to side movement because it’s pass the crane’s life and it’s going to cost the load its life, and possibly cost some ground people’s lives if the crane decides to move up in any direction. Good question. Very tough environment, no doubt about it. Excellent, any other questions?

Zack: Yeah we’ll do 2 more.  Brad Brussels from Tonsil Philips. Hi Brad, how are you doing? He asks, what guidelines do you use when making a lift at or near an excavation pen with a mobile crane?

Mike: Okay. That’s a great question. If we do what we consider as compacted soil. There are some rules  for three times fork lift that tends to be – it’s a 3 to 1 type distance back for setting that crane up to be working. That leaves 3 times run for 4 ft. of height that is something of a general industry approach. That is really for compacted soils. If it weren’t for compacted soils, we’re talking about 100 percent compaction. This particular area right here is thresh excavation – so if this excavation comes back and slope in ground, and some is disturbed, we’re going to need at least a 3:1 vac, if not greater. It’s really dangerous, if that surge and soil is terrific. If you have to work in uncompact soil, vac still, and other conditions, and/or closer than this 3:1 on compacted soil, we’re going to really have to get a soil engineer involved. Like Steve Perk & Associates, Hagen Engineering, there are a ton of groups out there, but I’ll tell you, they’ll worth their weight in gold and they won’t cost you very much. Once we get up to any of those conditions, there is no good rule of thumb because of the weight of the crane, the outriggers, the full load on the crane, because the bearing pressure is so huge, right up at that front point. Realize that we can take 80 percent of the combined crane and load on one outrigger right here on the corner. So crane plus load, 80 percent, one foot crane. We’re pushing that soil and if we’re anywhere close to fresh soil, or any of those situations and circumstances, we’re really going to need soil engineering to give us the heads up as to, do we need to get back for compaction. Get a crane and move further back so you could reach a greater radius, it’s really very dangerous. I will say that crane tip over, there is a lot of studies done but certainly we know that the personnel, and I’ll share this really quick, but personnel there is electrocution. With crane, from the people side – we electrocute people not just issues with cranes. Issues with cranes are loss of foundation, and that is the number one cause of crane accidents – the loss of foundation, a crane goes over. That soil condition that you broached on is probably one of the biggest contributors to that. I really want to encourage that, any time you’re working on an evacuation area, we’re going to have to keep pushing back and build up. Building a bigger map isn’t always going to solve it. I hope I haven’t danced around the subject with you; I really tried to give you some good target points to go after.  I’m going to say that we’re going to need engineering services if we get anything closer than that. With uncompact material. Good Question, Brad. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Zack: okay. We have time for probably one more; so, let me pull that one up. It’s Calm from Austin Wind. I just want to remind everybody that if you have any questions, or your questions didn’t get answered for the sake of time, we’ll be able to e-mail you afterwards. There will be some questions in the pre-webinar that were asked. On top of that, you’re going to get an e-mail of where to access this recording and the presentation. You’re going to be in this group of folks, there are probably 1000 people that have gone to this webinar since started in March, and there’s a discussion board on the website you can actually visit and discuss, and continue the conversation. That’s where you will see the presentation as well. Be sure to check your e-mails on that, and let’s check the last question so we can get on with our day. It’s Calm from Austin Winds, critical lifts taking place simultaneously on the same site, within the same lift plan.

Mike: repeat that again. I’m sorry, Zack. We broke up just a little bit.

Zack: Yes. Should critical lifts taking place simultaneously on the same site be included on the same lift plan? They’re different lifts, but they’re on the same site.

Mike: No, they would not. If we’re putting up a wind turbine over here, and another one that is on the far distance over here, and the far area access, even the length of the boom can’t get close to each other, they’re going to have a lift plan a, lift plan B that would be two separate lift plans. They can be managed simultaneously. The big issue would be, from ownership/property ownership standpoint, if we had two wind turbines being constructed within a close proximity of one another, and we’re parts and pieces of the crane itself could fall and disrupt, or contact the other one, then we would say – no dual lifting. We’re going to be very cautious about two major lifts simultaneously in the same foot printer zone, that even by crane or having some kind of incident could actually cost you both activities, both cranes, both times power. If we can distinctly take a line between them, they can’t even reach each other, and then we’d go with two separate lift plans, two separate lift teams, lift director, operator, rigger, and ground crews. So, if we have those conditions, then management will likely feel that the risk is pretty low. Very manageable in that case, but definitely not in this case. They can reach each other, I think the management will be just crazy to go forward and try to get too much done in the same footprint where that crane has the working radius to contact. Even remotely contact each other, even by accident. I think it would cost ourselves a lot of money and almost always result in fatalities. You just can’t run far enough, fast enough. If we lose ground foundation and soft surface on this crane, that’s just working right here, and we lose this crane – it goes over and knocks down this – there’s just steel and parts flying everywhere. You can’t get pass enough, and you don’t know where to run because you got two opposing cranes coming down from either direction. No, we wouldn’t want to have dual lifting on the same zone. We wouldn’t want to do that. When they’re separated but acreage, footprint, and space, they should be able to manage that – they do that all the time on different sites. Great question, I appreciate it very much. Okay, Zack, I really appreciate everybody participating and working with us. I look forward to being with you on future lift planning program and activities about this downstream, if this is a subject of interest to you. I would say that, Zack, our next one is about B30 and a little about P30, but a lot of the emphasis will be about advancement  and work activity, product that’s been produced by the B30 group. Some of the updates of the documents. We’ll only be able to cover with you what’s been published. You may not know about it, or may not have the most recent documents. So, we’ll be covering a lot of those things that are new in the library for B30 item, and there are now 30 volumes. Couple of them still in development, so we have .1 through .28 that are approved. We have .29 – which is self-directing power crane, and .30 – ropes. So those are under development and we’ll share those. Self-directing power crane is 29- and that’s about to be public reviewed and released pretty soon. So we’ll cover the 28, and new items with those. A little more update on P30 which we can give you, which we’ll do that at that time on our next webinar. Zack, what’s the day on that?  It’s September, right?

Zack: Yep. It’s September 7th, on a Monday, at 1 o’clock.

Mike: Okay.  Alright, excellent. Well, thank you for letting me be here and be with you, and I look forward to our next time together. Zack, I’ll let you close out. Thank you for helping narrate and facilitate this.

Zack: no problem, it was good. Thank you, everybody, for coming on today, and thanks for coming back. We really appreciate you coming on, and working with you, learning with you. Again, just so you guys know, the presentation is now live on the website by going on iti.com/showcase and clicking the past presentations recordings area. The video, the recording, the actual recording won’t be up for a few hours – we actually need to download it. Get through all the technology. Again, I encourage you all to join the forum there if you can log in through LinkedIn. It’s a webinar tomorrow to continue this discussion, and continue to learn together, make the industry better. So, great talking with all of you. We’ll catch up soon. Thank you.