Comment from Mostert, Charles, Mostert Cranes and Equipment, Inc.

Greetings, I believe the new rules proposed for crane safety are off base in a number of areas. In skimming the published costs associated with compliance, I believe the numbers are significantly too low. As a small crane rental company owner, the costs will be much higher than those listed. Besides additional training and the costs associated with that, there will be downtime that I will never recoup, as well as travel and lodging expenses for travel to a training site nearest my rural area. I will have to pay for not only training crane operators, but their travel, food and lodging as well. Once the certification card I paid for is in their pocket, they are free to take it anywhere. I propose listing the employer on the certification card and making the employee reimburse the employer that paid for their training if they leave within 3 years. Alternately, impose a fee of say, $1000, on the cardholder to change the employers name on the card. Another great concern to me is the fact that a person can become a certified crane operator with little or no actual experience. It has been my opinion for years that there are a lot of people operating cranes that have no business being in or near the operators seat. Without addressing this glaring deficiency in experience, "certified" will mean very little. I personally know of a concrete company that sent a form carpenter to a training seminar and he became a certified crane operator in less than a week. Total experience in crane operation? 0 hours! He had actually never sat in a crane prior to this fiasco. On top of my own expenses, the tradesman that work with cranes in my area will also be obligated for similar training and expense with regard to riggers and signal persons. Unfortunately, when faced with these expenses for labor that is ever more transient, I anticipate a total disregard for the regulations pertaining to riggers and signalpersons. For instance, an HVAC contractor that uses a crane once or twice a month for one or two lifts each time, has little or no incentive to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on training for one or more employee that may leave his job anytime. Multiply this by the number of employees that actually should be trained, depending on the number of crews employed. Even the small HVAC shops in my area employ 3-5 persons in the field. The same holds true with many other trades, especially in the residential construction market. Carpenters are one of the largest users of small cranes and boom trucks for the placement of prefabricated roof trusses, beams, etc. on housing and light commercial projects. In my 30 years of experience operating cranes for these types of rental customers, they are also the most ill equipped for the work at hand. They seldom know any standard crane signals and don't know anything whatsoever about rigging techniques,safe practice or crane capacity and how it relates to their work. In the last 10 years or so, communication has become a huge issue as well. Many times, I drive up to jobsites where not one person onsite can even speak any English. The fact that I have owned and operated cranes for 30 years without incident of any kind becomes even more remarkable in this light. I believe that if I attempt to comply with my end of the regulation, as a crane owner/operator, and try to force this compliance on tradesmen that use my service, they will reject the additional complication and simply ignore the rules. I foresee myself being placed in a situation where I will either be asked to ignore the rules for riggers and signalpersons, supplied by the customers but untrained and non-certified, or simply told to leave, whereby the customer will rent a crane from another rental company that does ignore the rules. In other words, play by the rules and risk losing your business clients or ignore the rules and risk losing your business. Either way, I am in a bad situation. I believe a better route to follow would be to award some form of mitigation or even immunity to those of us who play by the rules and have an outstanding safety record to back it up. If I comply and the persons or businesses I work for do not, I should receive some mitigation or immunity if there is an incident involving the crane or it's operation. After all, a proven safety record speaks for itself and total disregard for the rules should also. I believe one unintended result of the new crane rule will be losing competent personnel. As I have stated, I have 30 years of safe crane ownership and operation under my belt. I don't know how many more years I will be involved in the crane business, but I guarantee my time will be shorter if I face higher liability potential for work practices in the control of others who have a total disregard for new training and qualification rules. I have been asking my customers for the last year if they intend to train their personnel who work with cranes, per the new upcoming rules. To a man, they had never heard of the rules and not one, I repeat, NOT ONE had any intention of doing anything differently in the future than they had in the past. Where does this leave me, the small crane business owner? I foresee another bureaucratic morass that will only be sorted out bit by bit through expensive litigation in the courts, another cost not included in the "Cost of Compliance" chart. In closing, I believe the rule will not be of any great benefit to the industry as a whole because of a total disregard for it by the majority of small tradesmen who will disregard it, if they have even heard of it. I am the type of responsible crane owner that will be affected by higher training and operational costs, but potentially forced out of the business by those who do not follow the rules. Unfortunately, I am the type of safety oriented crane owner/operator that should be kept in the industry. I feel the rules will hasten the exit from the industry of professionals that are needed. The ones that ignore rules will ignore these, also. Regards, Chuck Mostert Mostert Cranes