[VIDEO] Crane Collapses While Lifting Concrete Wall

With cranes being on many construction sites, it’s easy for workers to get complacent.  Hundreds or thousands of construction materials can be lifted by cranes throughout the project, but all it takes is one time for a disaster to occur.

A video of a crane collapsing in Austin, TX surfaced on Reddit Wednesday night and shows about a dozen workers running for their lives as it drops the concrete panel wall and falls to the ground itself.

As you can see in the video, at least two of the workers on site are standing on the base of the wall as it begins to be lifted, as if they think their relatively small amount of weight will affect how the wall is lifted.  There are 8 visible attachment points on the slab which will control that. 

It should be obvious that working around or underneath any suspended material is always a huge safety concern. You will also see in the video that one of the workers is thrown off the panel as the crane starts to fail and has to pick himself up off the ground to run away. The falling concrete wall turns into a large pendulum and almost takes out a couple of the workers nearby.

The cause of the accident appeared to be due to one of the lines snapping, causing the wall to fall and then pulling over the crane. According to the Austin-Travis County EMS Twitter account, 1 man was transported to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries and another injured man refused transport. The injuries could have been much worse, but thankfully they were not.

The video of the accident below was originally shared on Reddit and later posted to Youtube by Adrian Garcia.

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