Hanging more than 200 ft over a jobsite in down- town Kansas City, Mo., James Hague doesn’t seem to notice the amount of air separating him from the people below. The senior technician fiddles with a dial gauge that measures the amount of play in the crane turntable, the giant gear that rotates the jib. “A bearing could go bad,” he says, suspended from a full-body harness. “And that’s something we want to know before the top falls off.”
Although this vertigo-inducing procedure is not required for a routine inspection, it is standard practice at Kansas City-based J.E. Dunn Logistics Inc., which is stepping up its safety program in an effort to cut risks, especially around its expensive hoisting equipment. Others doing similar work say the downturn provides the perfect time to increase safety controls before the market rebounds. Ensuring worker safety around heavy machinery is becoming a more digitized process, enabling new controls. After Hague performs an inspection for one of the cranes, he climbs down, slips off his gloves, sits in his pickup truck and enters his findings in a smart phone or laptop. In seconds, an electronic report shoots off to a file server in the home office.