A Connecticut contractor, Concavage Marine Construction Co., has been fined $165,200 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) after one of their cranes collapsed in a Stamford marina- on top of a yacht.

Ouch.

This past May, an 80-foot tall boom from a barge mounted crane fell backward in Avalon Bay Marina, bounced off the stays of a nearby sailboat and ended up crashing on a yacht. The crane was removing and replacing pilings that had been damaged in a storm. They are cited with serious violations involving a significant lack of inspections which led to the failure of the safety devices. Although, they did not even have all of the necessary safety devices in place to begin with….

The office says the crash could have been prevented with basic precautions such as boom stops and a boom hoist limiting device. The director of OSHA said that without these measures, the crane should not have even been in operation. Other violations included failure to ensure that the correct load charts were in the crane and failing to account for the changes in the load capacity (since the crane was now mounted on a barge), as well as failure to set control rails to mark the crane’s “crush” zone.

“This crane should not have been operating. Not only did it lack required safety devices, it had not been inspected for these and other defects that should have been corrected before the crane began operating. The employer deliberately failed to adhere to basic crane safety standards, putting at risk the lives of its employees and anyone else in the vicinity,” said Robert Kowalski, OSHA’s area director in Bridgeport.

They have 15 days to pay the fine. If the yacht owner is anything like Judge Smails, I’m sure this company will learn their lesson.

The Stamford Patch