On February 5, a windy day in Lower Manhattan, a 565-foot crane collapsed and killed a man when it struck the parked car in which he sat. Crews had been planning to secure the Worth Steet crane because the forecast projected sustained winds at stronger than 25 mph, but they were too late.

After the collapse, Mayor Bill de Blasio required crawler cranes, the mobile type of crane that can move around a work site, to cease operation and transition to safety mode anytime there are sustained winds of more than 20 mph or gusts of more than 30 mph forecast in New York City. "No building is worth a person's life," de Blasio says. "We are going to ensure the record boom in construction and growth does not come at the expense of safety."

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The fact is, though, that deadly crane crashes are far too common. Some of the largest crane collapses on record have the most devastating effects in big cities, such as a 2008 New York accident that killed seven people and destroyed buildings when a 200-foot-tall crane collapsed. Such events highlight the awesome and scary power of cranes, especially in dense urban areas where these ever-growing machines (record-holders now stand more than 300 feet tall, telescoping to more than 500 feet) work right next to pedestrians and drivers. It's a recipe for danger if crews aren't exceedingly careful.

So why does this keep happening?

Web of Complexity

"We are in an age where we have extremely sophisticated equipment," James Pritchett, president of Alabama-based Crane Experts International, tells Popular Mechanics. But here's the thing: "I come across people all the time that are operating these cranes and using the mindset that it works as one back in the 1990s worked," he says. "These cranes are very sophisticated. It will do everything the manufacturer says it will do, but it has to be run and maintained (properly)." Tom Barth, owner of Barth Crane Inspections of South Carolina, echoes that statement, saying operator error lies at the root of most crane collapses.

This sounds like a blanket indictment of crane operators. But consider that as recently as a few decades ago, cranes—especially the mobile cranes that now dominate the sphere—were much simpler machines.

World Trade Center 1, 2 ,3, and 4, Museum and Memorial, Reflecting Pool,Transit Hub construction Site, New York City. Getty Images

No longer are smaller mobile cranes asked to do one job. Now, ever-growing cranes must serve multiple purposes, transform into differing configurations to handle varying work conditions, and provide a new level of sophistication on our country's job sites, whether they're working on moving heavy trusses to high-rises in a city or shuttling high-tech equipment into a shorter, more expansive project in a different location. New York alone has more than 350 crawler cranes plus more than 50 of the high-flying fixed tower cranes.

Cranes can do more. But added complexity also means that more can go wrong. As cranes have grown in height and girth, the controls to operate them have intensified in number and complexity. Pritchett says the crane units in use these days have libraries of intricate manuals, packed with details he says some operators may not have time to fully understand or read completely. Same goes for the maintenance team. When something does go wrong with such large machines, Barth says, the "mess and carnage" gets magnified.

"No building is worth a person's life"

Yet for a variety of reasons, keeping to what the manual says isn't as easy as it sounds. For example, take high winds—the trouble that brought down the NYC crane this month. Every crane has what's called a sail affect, which is the way wind grabs an object and uses continued force to push that object, sometimes lifting it depending on the direction of the gusts. The manufacturer's specifications will dictate when a crane needs to be brought down into safety mode to protect it from toppling over. But there are no blanket regulations about this, and that number may be higher or lower than what a city mandates, creating confusion. (Pritchett suggests having the city set a level, but deferring to the manufacturer's specifications if they recommend lowering the crane even in lower wind speeds.)

According to Barth, there's more to consider. Sure, high winds and sudden storms have been known to tip crane booms, but high winds can also create side loading of the crane boom, another reason for collapse.

Aviad Shapira, professor of construction engineering and management at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, tells Popular Mechanics that securing a crane under high-wind conditions is more complicated than it appears, especially if wet snow gathers on the crane, adding weight. So many factors come to play with wind, such as the fact that wind speed is generally greater the higher you go and that wind funneling between buildings can speed up gusts.

Even the very act of taking down a crane changes these dynamics. Cranes are designed to handle their highest wind loads in their built and secured state. The process of pulling them down takes them out of that state, opening up room for even more uncertainty regarding the wind, sail effect, and weight loads.

A construction crane lies on a street in downtown Manhattan in New York on February 5, 2016. Kena Betancur Getty Images

Wind isn't the only worry, of course. Another key crane experts point to is the need to fully understand the work site conditions.

"Site conditions can not be assumed," Barth says. "They must be verified by an engineer. However, it is the crane operator's responsibility to ask the site superintendent about any hazards such as utilities, fresh uncompacted fill and more. They may not be recognizable to the eye but could pose a threat of ground failure."

Whether you're working in downtown New York or on a windmill in Arizona, Pritchett says, every site carries its own hazards, which is another reason generic regulations simply can't handle the diversity of conditions. "That is where you have lift supervisors—management and other people who know the area" he says. For example, some parts of a city may have soft ground. Everything about crane setup, from wind considerations to loads charts, must account for that.

A lot has to go right.

Big Crane, Tight Street

Statistics from the United States Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the United States suffers nearly 90 crane-related deaths per year. But crane collapses and their consequences—everything from property damage and lost time on a project all the way up to injury and death—aren't new to the modern-day crane, of course, with data showing a fairly consistent pattern. What's changed is the size of the machines.

Crane and construction crew working on the 3rd Avenue elevated train in 1918. Getty Images

Shapira says accidents involving today's bigger cranes may indeed be more dangerous. But it isn't because larger cranes are falling more, it is because when larger cranes do fall, the outcome of the fall can prove more daunting. "Crane size does not make the machine more prone to accidents," he says. "It may affect the outcome of an accident. This is particularly true in dense urban settings."

One of the largest failures in crane history came from the collapse of "Big Blue" in 1999. The 500-foot-plus crane was installing part of the roof of Miller Park, the Milwaukee Brewers baseball stadium, when gusts up to 35 mph sent it toppling, killing three workers. If this type of collapse were to happen within a tight downtown core, the death toll would have been even higher.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that taking down a crane proves time-consuming and costly, so operators don't want to do so unless there is clear and present danger. Some cranes require smaller cranes to help assemble and disassemble them. Some even require special foundations to support their weight. The disassembly of cranes can last days, weeks, and even months for some of the largest projects.

What We Can Do

We've already reached the next step in safety. Crane manufacturers are now trying to build in new automatic features to keep disaster from striking their eqiupment. Modern-day mobile cranes have load moment indicators that, when they are properly programmed, act as limit switches. These switches limit operators from moving loads deemed too heavy for the crane. The high-flying tower cranes have controls to limit loads in various places on the hoist line, depending on the function of the crane at any given point.

Tower and mobile cranes now can come equipped with video cameras to show views of the loads and work zones in the operator cab—the newest cranes include this technology in "head-up displays" that require no looking down to see the images—to manage blind lifts. Additionally, crane operators can expect to use anti-collision systems to stop a crane from moving outside its engineered zone.

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Shapira says cranes are now "optionally" equipped with these operator aids that can make the performance of a crane more impressive than a couple of decades ago. However, he says, research has found no correlation between the age of cranes and their involvement in accidents, and the only reason to limit older cranes from use is for uncertainty regarding maintenance quality control. "If maintenance is as it should be, then crane age plays no role in safety," he says.

Modern cranes have the power to build more, the nimbleness to work in dense urban environments, and the ability to handle more variety. But even with the millions of accident-free workhours of cranes worldwide and the inherent safety that leads Shapira to climb tower cranes for his research—"rest assured I would not do this if I had the slightest distrust of the crane's safety"—when a modern crane does collapse, the very things that make them a key component of modern construction also make them dangerous.

Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.

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