Crane collapse kills ironworker

Inquiry begins on the cause of 'Goliath' accident in Quincy

By David Abel and Emily Sweeney, Boston Globe Staff  |  August 15, 2008

QUINCY - A massive support leg of a 30-story-tall crane once used to build ships collapsed yesterday as it was being dismantled at Fore River Shipyard, killing a 28-year-old iron worker.

It was the third death in three years resulting from a crane failure at the shipyard.

Four other ironworkers suffered minor injuries when the support leg gave way beneath the crane, nicknamed Goliath, which has loomed over the shipyard for 33 years. Authorities identified the worker as Robert Harvey, a Quincy native who recently married and moved to Weymouth.

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

The ironworkers were preparing to remove the support leg as part of a larger effort to dismantle the crane, which was to be ferried to a shipbuilding company in Romania and put to work beside the Black Sea.

"It did collapse in the manner it was designed to collapse," Quincy Fire Chief Joseph 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 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, OSHA spokesman Ted Fitzgerald said. The investigation could take several months to complete, he said.

Family members and co-workers gathered yesterday afternoon outside the Quincy home where Harvey grew up. "He was just a great son," said the victim's father, Robert Harvey. "Just a great son."

At the home where he lived with his wife in Weymouth, Kim Harvey, who is married to a cousin of the victim, said he was a big hockey fan who had graduated from Quincy High School.

"He was just a really caring and giving and sweet person, always there to help someone," she said.

She said that he and his wife married about two years ago. The couple had no children.

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

Many of them stood outside the gates of the shipyard, waiting for news.

On the ironworkers union website, there was a posting about Harvey. "Bobby was highly regarded, supremely talented, and his presence will be sorely missed," it said.

The collapse of the support leg sent an enormous thud echoing throughout the neighborhood.

"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."

Quincy police and firefighters 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. The other two were treated at the scene.

Standing outside the shipyard, Don Gauthier said he spent 22 years working at Fore River, many of them as a crane supervisor. Over the years, he said, the shipyard helped build 12 liquefied natural gas tankers.

Gauthier said he had been watching how the crane was dismantled and had been concerned about the decision to take it apart from the bottom up. "It's a shame. They should have taken the main girder off first and then removed the support beams," Gauthier said. "Personally, I don't think they went about it in the right way."

Gregory Nordholm of Norsar LLC, the Washington state-based company that was hired to dismantle and move the crane, said he was about 15 feet away from the 370-foot crane when it collapsed. The work crew was preparing the crane so it could be lowered closer to the ground, he said. The plan was to lower it 80 feet today.

"I don't know exactly what happened," he said.

It appeared to be part of the leg of the crane that initially failed, he said. "That leg section landed right on him and killed him instantly."

Nordholm said he did not know the cause of the failure.

"We're determined to figure out what happened and why it happened, so this doesn't ever happen again," he said. "The crane is safe and secure now."

The crews stopped working on the crane and will not resume until investigators determine what occurred, he said.

Nordholm said that in addition to OSHA, the Quincy Building Department is also investigating.

Investigators from the state Department of Public Safety were at the scene yesterday to check the crane operator's licensing, according to spokesman Terrel Harris.

"It's early and preliminary, but they haven't found any problem with the operator," he said. "All his licensing is current."

Norsar has been cited by federal regulators before. In 2006, the company received 10 citations for workplace violations at a job site in Seattle related to health violations, according to federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration records posted on the agency's website.

And in 2001, the company was fined $7,100 for five workplace hazard violations at a site in South Carolina, according to records. The violations were related to safety issues such as wiring, equipment use, and access to deck openings.

The shipyard was closed by General Dynamics Corp. in 1986. The property was purchased the following year by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority for $49.5 million. In 1997, the MWRA sold most of the property for $10 million to Massachusetts Heavy Industries Inc., a firm led by Greek entrepreneur Sotiris G. Emmanuel, who planned to reopen the shipyard. But his plans to revive the local shipbuilding industry were never realized. After his company defaulted on federally guaranteed loans, the US Maritime Administration seized the property.

The former shipyard is currently owned by Quincy car dealer Dan Quirk, who acquired the property in a 2003 government auction for $9 million. Quirk plans to redevelop the property into a "waterfront village" for industrial, commercial, and residential use.

The shipyard, which employed 32,000 people at its peak, stopped using the Goliath after General Dynamics sold the facility

The crane, for decades a towering fixture on the Quincy landscape, has been sold to Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering of South Korea and was to be broken down into nine pieces, loaded onto a barge, and shipped to its new home in Mangalia, Romania.

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

In July 2005, OSHA cited Testa Corp. for 15 alleged violations of safety and health standards at the shipyard. The agency found that Testa, which had been hired to remove a 190-foot craneway, failed to do an engineering survey to determine its stability.

John Ellement, Andrew Ryan, Martin Finucane, Milton Valencia, and Matt Carroll of the Globe staff contributed to this report.