Crane Crushes Supervisor to Death After Cable Snaps

A construction supervisor was killed at a Port of Los Angeles work site Thursday morning when a cable snapped aboard a construction crane and its boom came crashing down upon him.

David Pollock, 48, who flew out for the job from his home in Cleveland, was apparently standing beneath the boom when the accident occurred about 9:30 a.m. He had been motioning for the crane operator to lower it slowly.

“It was definitely a fluke,” said a worker who was sitting aboard the Manitowoc 4000W crane when the cable broke, but who was not operating the machine. He described Pollock as “the most careful [worker] on this project,” who always avoided standing under the crane.

“He lived for this job,” said the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The construction job is part of a $44-million rail overpass commissioned by the port that will eventually form the harbor end of the $1.8-billion Alameda Corridor transportation project.

The hulking machine was leased by Hayward Baker, a Santa Paula-based subcontractor that employed Pollock. Port officials and investigators could not say for sure what company owned the crane. Pollock had been working at the site for six weeks.

Moments before the accident, crane operators had suspended a huge steel tube that was being used to build a foundation for the overpass. A worker said the construction team was attempting to lower and inspect the tube, which apparently was partially clogged.

“What caused it to break, we have no idea,” said Bruce Seaton, the port’s director of construction management. He said two safety personnel were in the immediate area when the cable broke.

Pollock had overseen the cable’s replacement a little more than a month ago and inspected the crane nightly, according to fellow workers.

A spate of crane accidents six years ago, including one in San Francisco in which one plunged 19 stories and killed five people, raised the question then as to whether construction cranes were sufficiently inspected and regulated.

After the San Francisco accident, Cal/OSHA, the state’s worker safety agency, conducted a sweep of the state, inspecting all the tower cranes in use at the time. Three-quarters were found to be in violation of state industrial safety laws. Of the 29 violations, 14 were deemed serious, including some that had no way of measuring load capacity at the construction site.

Then-Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) introduced legislation in 1990 that called for tighter regulation of the cranes.

Rick Rice, a spokesman for Cal/OSHA, said the safety record of crane operators had improved significantly since the legislation was passed. He also said the kind of accident that happened Thursday, in which the cable snapped, is very unusual.

“This type of accident is extremely rare,” Rice said. “No one I talked to can remember this kind of thing happening in at least 10 years. Typically what we see most frequently in cranes of this size and smaller is toppling.”

Rice said investigators would be examining maintenance records, as well as trying to determine any evidence of disrepair. He said a sample of the cable had been taken to test whether it was of the proper strength.

Rice did not rule out possible procedural violations before the accident.