Steady Hands, Nerves Keep Them at the Top

Take a fishing pole, tie a line to it and cast the line off a cliff. The object: to hit a target a couple of hundred feet below.

“Try to be accurate,” Dick Clark said the other day. “It isn’t easy.”

That, the 47-year-old Clark explained, is what it can be like operating what’s known in the construction trade as a tower crane.

He should know. As a crane operator for the past 17 years, he sits for hours at a time high above the ground, angling for the stuff that high-rises are made of.

Since July, Clark and three other tower crane operators--members of a cadre of about 200 such operators in Southern California and Southern Nevada--have manned the two giant cranes at Hawthorne and Torrance boulevards in Torrance, where work is under way on an eight-story office building and adjacent parking structure.

Taking turns behind the controls of the giant machines, Clark and his companions swing thousands of pounds of building materials over the heads of their co-workers. While they work, motorists gawk.

It’s old hat for the operators. Among the four of them, they have 80 years experience piloting tower cranes, and have worked together on at least six different construction jobs during the past 12 years.

Vern Gulledge, 56, said that when he first climbed to the top of one of the machines 25 years ago, “we used to think when we were 75 feet off the ground, that was big.” The two cranes used on the Torrance job are 179 feet high (about 18 stories), 146 feet high (nearly 15 stories), spanking new and worth about $1 million apiece, he said. It takes two days to set up a crane for operation.

The operators said you must have good depth perception to operate the machines. And you can’t be afraid of heights. Clark nonchalantly described how on some cranes he has walked out on a 4-inch-wide rail to inspect a crane’s 230-foot-long gib, or arm.

“I love it,” he said.

For their efforts, the operators said they are paid handsomely--about $26 an hour. And there are more aesthetic rewards. On a clear day atop the cranes in Torrance, the operators can see the ocean, skyscrapers jutting up from downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach and the suburban sprawl in between.

As jobs shift, so does the scenery.

“When we worked in Hollywood, we saw a lot of people’s pot growing,” Gulledge said.

The down side is that the job can be dangerous. Last year eight people were killed and 302 injured in accidents in California involving cranes of all types. High winds always pose problems. Clark, who now lives in Torrance, recalled the time when he worked in Las Vegas. He swears he could see the “wind coming across the desert” before it reached his crane, rattling the windows in his cab and causing it to sway.

Operator Dick Torres, also 56, remembers the time 12 or 13 years ago when a large piece of steel fell out of a concrete slab he was moving. The steel flattened a pickup on the ground. Fortunately, no one was in the truck.

“Your heart can start throbbing quite a bit,” Torres said.

The cranes will be needed on the job until February. Then they will be disassembled, packed into truck trailers and moved to another job site.

The crane operators will follow.