Stellar TC Series Cranes
Service truck crane operators, who use those cranes in construction, have a bit of breathing room now that the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration is poised to extend the deadline for operator certifications.
We agree with the National Commission for the Certification of Crane Operators, a.ka. NCCCO, that OSHA’s one-year deadline extension has a “silver lining.” However, we also share the position of Graham Brent, CEO of the NCCCO, in a June 9 letter to OSHA that the agency should “act with all speed” to issue a final rule within the extended deadline period “so that this matter may be resolved once and for all, for the benefit of industry as a whole.”
The new deadline is Nov. 10, 2018. The previous deadline of this November was a three-year extension of an earlier deadline. The rule itself has been in place since 2010, although the operator certification provision was originally delayed for four years, said Joel Oliva, the NCCCO’s director of operators and program development.
(Oliva also stressed that as this went to press OSHA still had not signed off on the deadline extension. So technically, the new deadline was still in place. However, the NCCCO had every expectation that the extension would occur.)
The new standard, known as 1926.1400, is aimed primarily at large construction. But the rule also captures “service/mechanics trucks with a hoisting device” of 2,000 pounds capacity or more when such a crane is used in construction. An exception is when the crane is “used in activities related to equipment maintenance and repair.” That, of course, is the primary use of service truck cranes.
In fact, Oliva said, “the vast majority of service trucks are excluded from the rule.”
Nevertheless, the NCCCO launched a special certification for service truck crane operators in the spring of 2013. As of this summer, the NCCCO had certified about 700 such operators. That’s “not overwhelming,” Oliva admitted. But it represents “some nice growth in the market.”
What proportion of service truck crane operators that covers, though, is anybody’s guess. Nobody, not even Oliva, has a solid estimate of the total number of service truck crane operators in the U.S., let alone how many are doing construction work.
Interest in certification for all crane types was increasing this year as the deadline approached. “We broke all of our testing records for our crane operator programs across the board,” Oliva said.
And the NCCCO has seen “a nice bump” in the service truck segment. But Oliva also suspects that many people would have put off certification, regardless of the deadline, until after OSHA starts issuing citations for non-compliance.
That’s not necessarily a matter of procrastination. Many industries using service truck cranes in construction applications might not even be aware that they are included in the new regulations, Oliva said.
“The propane industry is — at the least the association that represents the propane industry is — and they’ve taken some action in how to address but I have to think there’s many many other users who aren’t aware,” Oliva said.
The use of service truck cranes in the propane sector highlights the grey areas of the rule. Using a crane to install a propane tank is considered to be construction whereas as an identical lift to swap tanks is regarded as maintenance.
One reason for the new delay was a concern voiced by many industry people, although not all, that OSHA might interpret the rule as enabling certification to trump the qualification requirement of another OSHA regulation.
A second reason was the new rule, as it shook out, stated that certification had to be by both type and capacity of the crane, which was beyond the original intention, Oliva said. That concern applies mostly to the 100- to 2,000-ton cranes used in construction and is “almost irrelevant” to small-capacity service truck cranes, although Oliva noted that they “are creeping up” in capacity.
The deadline extension has nothing to do with the election of a new presidential administration beyond the bureaucratic sluggishness that typically accompanies any change of government, Oliva said.
The bottom line for users of cranes of any size is that they’d like some certainty, such as knowing the deadline, so that they can comply with the law.
The NCCCO “reluctantly” supports the deadline suspension, Brent said in his letter, adding that “every delay means that this nation’s workers continue to be exposed to risks that would otherwise have been mitigated.”
It’s impossible to disagree with that position.