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Aug 28, 2008 1:45 pm US/Central
2 City Workers Hurt In Dallas Crane Accident
DALLAS (CBS 11 News/AP) ―
Two people were hurt when a crane fell at a City of Dallas storm water pump station, just south of Irving Boulevard at Hampton Road.
Officials say the crane toppled over while lowering an 18,000 pound pump into the building just before 10 a.m.
"I think the weight was not distributed properly," said Dallas Fire Rescue spokeswoman Sherrie Lopez.
The boom of the crane fell onto the roof of the building and the pipe landed on two city vehicles, crushing their roofs. The crane's cab tilted at a 45-degree angle.
As the crane fell, the arm hit a 56-year-old City of Dallas employee who was working on the roof of a building at the site.
"We're very fortunate," Lopez said. "When you look at the scene, things could have been much worse."Another city employee, working inside a truck, received some type of head injury. Dallas Fire Rescue crews strapped him to a stretcher and walked him down an extension ladder.
Both workers were taken to Parkland Hospital and as of Thursday eveing were in the Intensive Care Unit.
The two men operating the crane, owned by the Louisiana Crane Company, were not injured.
The work being done was part of routine maintenance on one of the four pumps at the Old Hampton Pumping Station, which takes runoff rain water from city streets and pumps it into the Trinity River, said Kelly High, interim director of street services for the city.
Investigators from the crane company, OSHA, the City of Dallas and Dallas Fire Rescue are at the scene investigating the incident. Louisiana Crane is said to be bringing in two more cranes to remove the fallen boom and pipe.
The interim director of street services for the city, Kelly High, said, "Right now we're trying to gather that information. We've got to put the puzzle together."
The accident is the latest in a string of crane accidents across Texas this summer. It came about a month after another crane accident left one man dead and another injured in Smithville. A crane was removing steel beams while dismantling an old bridge over the Colorado River and became overloaded, then toppled. In mid-July, a 30-story tall crane at a Houston refinery toppled over, killing four contract workers and injuring seven others.
A month earlier, a construction crane's cable snapped, injuring three people working on the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium in Arlington. That accident came a day after a worker died at a construction site in downtown Dallas when a piece of equipment fell from a crane and struck him.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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