Six Car Crane Crash

Six Car Crane Crash

Samantha Crowson, Cougar Tales and Feature Editor

A story that sounds like an irrational fear hit the news on Saturday April 27th, when a crane fell and killed four people. During the construction of the new Google campus in Seattle, Washington, the crane began to lean  (as shown in a dash-cam video below) before it came tumbling down with two iron workers inside. It landed on 6 vehicles, killing two separate people in different cars: a freshman nursing student, Sarah Wong, and a retired deputy director Alan Justad.

According to an article by CNN news, wind and human error may be the cause of the fatal accident, “I think there’s a 99% chance that this is a human error cause and not a structural or mechanical failure by the machine,” said Timothy Galarnyk, a construction safety expert. In another article with NBC news they state that iron working is “among the most dangerous professions in American industry,” as well as “almost 21 percent, 971, of the 4,674 worker deaths in private industry in 2017, were in the construction industry.”

Although an accident like this seems like some kind of aberration,  “construction identified an average of 71 fatalities each year.”