One killed in Quincy crane collapse

(Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff)

A photograph taken Aug. 7 of the crew working on the Goliath crane. Robert Harvey is the man at the center of the picture in the yellow shirt.

By David Abel, John R. Ellement, Martin Finucane, and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff

QUINCY -- A section of a 30-story-tall crane collapsed this afternoon as it was being dismantled and killed a 28-year-old ironworker who was pinned by the falling wreckage.

Four other ironworkers suffered non-life-threatening injuries when a massive support leg gave way on the crane, which has loomed over the Fore River Shipyard for decades. The deceased worker was identified as Robert Harvey, a Quincy native who recently married and moved to Weymouth with his new bride.

"This is just a very sad day here in Quincy," Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating said this afternoon at a press conference. "It's a sad day when a landmark has become a tragic memorial."

Workers removed pieces from the crane to cause the support leg to fall, but it collapsed before they were prepared, said Fire Chief Joseph Barron.

"It did collapse in the manner it was designed to collapse," Barron said at the press conference. "It just did not collapse when it was supposed to, obviously."

The collapse did not affect the structural stability of the rest of the crane, Barron said.

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration has dispatched three inspectors to the scene. The federal inspectors are trying to determine the cause of the collapse and whether any workplace safety rules were violated by the workers or companies involved, said an OSHA spokesman, Ted Fitzgerald. The investigation could take several months to complete, he said.
An enormous thud echoed from the shipyard when the crane collapsed, reverberating in nearby neighborhoods in Quincy and Weymouth.

A woman who answered the phone at Washington-based Norsar LLC, which was hired to dismantle and move the crane, said the company had no comment.

"I was vacuuming and then I heard a loud boom," said Lisa Crowley, 41, who lives nearby. "I knew something was not right because I heard it over my vacuum."

Police responded to a flood of 911 calls that began at 12:26 p.m. Two of the four injured ironworkers were taken to Quincy Medical Center, where they were treated and released.

Harvey's fellow ironworkers were "very traumatized buy this, very moved," Keating said. "Our sympathies extend not only to the family but to what is obviously a close-knit group of coworkers."

The crane, for decades a towering fixture on the Quincy landscape is headed for Romania, where it will be put back to work, Emily Sweeney reported today in Globe South.

Plans called for the massive structure to be broken down into nine pieces, and loaded onto a barge. Its final destination is Mangalia, Romania.

General Dynamics Corp. constructed the crane in the 1970s and used it to lift huge pieces of ships and tankers at the Fore River Shipyard.

The Quincy shipyard, which employed 32,000 people at its peak, closed in 1986. The Goliath hasn't been used since. But it will soon be put back into use by Daewoo-Mangalia Heavy Industries, a Romanian shipbuilding and repair company that purchased the crane.

In 2005, another crane accident in the shipyard killed two workers.

The Jan. 26, 2005 collapse killed Elvis Munoz, 44, of Lawrence, and David P. May, 36, of Manchester, N.H., and seriously injured several others. The men, who worked for A-Best Abatement Inc., of Salem, N.H., were removing asbestos in a shipyard building when part of the metal frame that once held up the shipbuilding cranes fell.

In July 2005, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Testa Corp. for 15 alleged violations of safety and health standards at the shipyard after the accident.

The agency found Testa, which was hired to remove the 190-foot craneway, failed to do an engineering survey to determine the stability of the craneway.

"An engineering survey would have shown that several of the steel craneway's members had been cut through by torches and cross-bracing supports had been removed, leaving the structure overstressed," agency officials said in a statement.

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