Photo courtesy of NCCCO
A candidate maneuvers the test load through the NCCCO’s service truck crane operator practical exam in Houston in 2013.
The certification of service truck crane operators under a national program in the U.S. is off to a slow start since it was launched a year ago.
As of late April, the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators had only certified about 75 service truck crane operators, said Joel Oliva, the NCCCO’s manager of program development and administration.
“It’s not a lot,” Oliva told Service Truck Magazine. “With any new program that we administer, there is always sort of a slow start.”
Meanwhile, another federal certifying body, Crane Institute Certification, is just completing development of its certification program for service truck crane operators. And when that is completed, CIC will retroactively certify about 125 service truck crane operators who undertook the pilot program and testing, said CIC’s executive director Debbie Dickinson.
“We document their work so when we complete all our filings we will retroactively credential them,” Dickinson said.
A third certifying organization, the International Union of Operating Engineers, does not have a separate certification for service truck crane operators. Nor does the union think such certification is necessary.
“If they’re out there doing construction work, they’re infringing on other trades and crafts,” said Lee Lander, certification director of the Operating Engineers Certification Program based in Riverside, Calif.
The International Union of Operating Engineers’ members include heavy duty mechanics who operate service truck cranes. But they use them only for maintenance and repair, Lander said. And that use is specifically exempted under the 2010 federal Occupational Safety and Health Association standard that will require certification of cranes exceeding 2,000 pounds capacity when those cranes are used in construction.
Certification only intended for construction
While service trucks, as the name implies, are meant primarily for maintenance, their cranes are used occasionally in construction work, such as installing propane tanks and electrical transformers. Exactly how many operators in the U.S. use service truck cranes for construction isn’t known. But industry insiders estimate they number in the thousands and possibly in the tens of thousands.
Oliva pointed out that the National Propane Gas Association estimated that its industry alone employs a couple thousand potential service truck crane operators.
“Even if a company only had one or two trucks, they may have five or six different people who could run that truck, or who might need to run that truck,” Oliva said.
Whatever the numbers, service truck crane operators have hardly been rushing to get certified. Much of that lukewarm interest is blamed on uncertainty over the deadline for certification. OSHA had initially set a deadline of Nov. 10, 2014. However, OSHA is proposing extending that deadline to Nov. 10, 2017 and scheduled an informal public hearing in Washington, DC, for May 19 to discuss that proposal.
The move to certify service truck crane operators stems from changes to the OSHA’s rules regarding lifting operations for cranes and derricks. Those changes to what is called OSHA 1926 Subpart CC will require operator certification for all cranes of 2,000 pounds capacity or greater.
The new standard, known as 1926.1400, “applies to power-operated equipment, when used in construction, that can hoist, lower and horizontally move a suspended load” and that includes “service/mechanic trucks with a hoisting device.”
However, the regulation exempts mechanic’s trucks when those devices are “used in activities related to equipment maintenance and repair.”
But it still means that service truck crane operators who use those cranes in construction will have to be certified.
Certification program launched last April
As a consequence of the new rule, the service truck industry formed a committee that included representatives of manufacturers, dealers, users, trainers and others to work with the NCCCO to develop a certification.
That effort bore fruit last April when the NCCCO announced the launch of its certification program. At the time, OSHA’s deadline was still November 2014. However, last May, OSHA announced for the first time that it was looking at extending the deadline to November 2017.
“What nobody really knows is what OSHA’s going to do and how they’re really going to come down,” said Tim Davison, product manager for bodies at Stellar Industries Inc.
Davison, who served on a 17-member working group that advised the NCCCO on its certification, said he expects that many service truck cranes might even be removed from the final OSHA regulations. “Or it’ll be modified to some degree,” Davison said. “They’re really trying to group all cranes into one category. You can’t do that.”
One group that did lobby successfully for an exemption was the National Concrete Burial Vault Association Inc. In February 2013, James G. Maddux, OHSA’s director of construction, informed the burial vault association that “the placement of a burial vault in the grave is not a form of construction.” That was a complete turnaround from OSHA’s original interpretation in 2010 that “such use is a typical construction activity.”
Tim Worman, business development manager for Iowa Mold Tooling Co. Inc., stressed that the certification for service truck crane operators is only for construction use. As a consequence, many owners and fleet managers are left wondering, “What do I need it for? Why should I have the expense? Why should I send my guys through class and get ‘em certified?” Worman said.
Worman also noted when he spoke in April that OSHA’s November 2014 deadline was technically still in effect. However, it’s pretty clear that everyone in the industry is acting as if the deadline will be extended by three years.
Training partnership stalls at launch
Nationwide Crane Training, an NCCCO certified trainer, has partnered with Stahl, an Ohio-based manufacturer of service bodies, on a five-day training and certification program. It was supposed to launch in February and then in March but stalled, “no pun intended,” because of a lack of interest, said Teri Drapeau, CEO of Nationwide.
“Really there just wasn’t a good enough response to put it together yet,” said Drapeau, who is based in Carson City, Nevada. “Everybody in the industry really believes that the ruling will be extended and pushed out to 2017.”
Venco Venturo Industries LLC, another service body manufacturer, has also launched a crane operator training program. It has a 90-page brochure of the program on its website as well as a clock that ticks down by the second to a Nov. 10, 2017 deadline. However, it wasn’t known at press time how well Venturos’ training program has been received.
“When the original program came about, a lot of the momentum was surrounding the new OSHA rules that was going to take effect at the end of this year,” Oliva said.
Dickson agreed that the proposed deadline extension has “thrown cold water on the urgency” to certify operators.
“However, I would offer this: This industry has done a fantastic job for decades of being a self-regulated industry. And if this industry is relying on OSHA to set the bar for safety, they’re probably in trouble.”
Federal standard would be the minimum
OSHA sets a federal standard that acts as a minimum requirement across the country. State standards can exceed OSHA standards. And local or municipal standards can be more stringent than state ones.
“This is an incredibly complicated situation,” Oliva said. “Before the OSHA rule came about there was no federal requirement of any kind requiring certification. So even today, there is no federal requirement. This rule hasn’t taken effect yet. But before the federal OSHA was considering this, various states had adopted their own version of a state rule.”
Perhaps the best known of those state regulations is in California, which requires certification for cranes exceeding 15,000 pounds capacity and/or a boom length of 25 feet. Oliva speculated that those standards were set specifically to exempt small cranes, such as those on service trucks.
“So the crane users were fine with it and the service truck users were fine with it,” Oliva said. “But now OSHA has said, ‘not so fast. If you meet our definition of construction you have to be certified.’“
At present, 33 states don’t have standards for crane operator certification, Oliva noted. So in those states, OSHA’s is the de facto standard. And of the 17 states that do have crane operator regulations, four of them — New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts — don’t currently meet OSHA standards, he said.
“No offense to these states but they just don’t have the wherewithal or the knowledge to develop programs as sophisticated as the certification program that we have,” Oliva said.
The deadline for certification is far from the only gray area concerning certification of service truck crane operators.
Exactly what constitutes construction activity is open to interpretation, for one thing. Take, for example, the installation of a propane tank, a common task of a service truck crane.
“The key point there is when is it really maintenance and when is it service?” Davison said. “Let’s say it’s a propane tank company. If they’re replacing a tank, then it’s service. But if they’re putting in a new tank, then it’s construction.”
