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Though it happened across the border, April’s collapse of a tower crane in Downtown Seattle wasn’t far from the minds of B.C.’s crane community Wednesday at a safety conference in Richmond.

In that incident, crews disassembling an 85-metre-tall crane had removed too many connecting bolts too soon, against manufacturer instructions, and the structure toppled in a gust of wind killing two ironworkers who rode it down and two people in cars on the street below.

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“It’s a wake-up call for sure,” said Fraser Cocks, executive director of B.C. Crane Safety, the agency responsible for certification of crane operators in the province and co-organizer of the Richmond conference with WorkSafeBC.

“You always hear about them in the news and the question comes up, can it happen here?,” Cocks said, adding that such disasters always get the industry examining how it operates.

So with 300 tower cranes at work in B.C., 250 in the Lower Mainland alone, and no sign of the sector slowing down, B.C. Crane Safety and WorkSafeBC co-hosted their second annual safety conference for 160 industry leaders.