The Human Cost of Construction
19th September 2006.
The whole building shook, and the windows rattled. I’d have thought I was experiencing my first earthquake, if it weren’t for the thunderous boom coming from the project jobsite next door to mine. Construction’s a loud business, but you get comfortable with the banging and pounding and grinding noises that come with it. This one was different. I wandered up to the roof to see what was going on.
My co-workers stood around the edge of the roof peering downward. A couple of them were on radios talking excitedly. I reached the edge, and without any way to truly describe what had happened, there were simply exclamations. The crane at the jobsite next door lay on the ground where it had collapsed. Blue scraps of metal were were strewn about across the site, giving the appearance that it had exploded. The crane boom still stood part way up, but bent and twisted in a sickening way, which was like seeing one of those videos of someone bending their knee in the wrong direction.
We later found out that the crane had been trying to lift a load that was too heavy, and it simply failed. The crane operator, realising what was happening, jumped out of the crane and made a lucky escape with only minor injuries. Luckily the crane had fallen on its left side and an unoccupied open area of the project site — immediately to its right were the jobsite sheds where many of the staff were located at the time. All that was lost that day was the crane.
I’ve been thinking about cranes a lot lately. I wrote about them a few months ago, and how they are not good barometers of the success or failure of the building industry. More recently, a crane damaged by winds hung precariously over Richmond, Victoria for a few days until it could be safely taken down. It forced closure of a section of the main thoroughfare Bridge Road, and caused people to have to evacuate from their homes in case the crane decided to fall.
No one was hurt, but that wasn’t the case two weeks ago. On a project site in Box Hill, one person died when one of the crane cables snapped and the load of concrete it was carrying dropped onto two workers. One died and the other is still in hospital. A third escaped with injuries.
Cranes may be terrible at predicting the future, as I’ve written before, but they are great symbols. Strength. Power. They illustrate our ability to extend beyond ourselves. They are a sign of prosperity.
Cranes also show us how dangerous a business construction is, something it’s been showing us far too often lately. According to WorkSafe, there have been 18 workplace fatalities in Victoria this year. Of those, seven — an inordinately high percentage of the total — have been in the construction industry. These are unfortunate numbers.
We’re awash with daily news about real estate prices climbing, developers putting up apartments as fast as they can, towers rising all over the city, and Chinese money flowing into Australia to fund it all like some giant pipeline from the north. Of course there are costs to all this, the greatest one being the human cost. Is all this worth people dying for? Definitely not.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget this or put it in the back seat. The building industry is big business, and an important one to Australia. But it’s stupid to hurt people in the name of bigger, faster, and a few extra dollars.
Stay safe out there.
