Showerthought: I hit 1,000 lifts on my chart last week and the number that stopped me was the tower crane

Robert Smith · 2026-10-10T01:15:05.029691+00:00

I keep a little pocket notebook where I tally every lift I make, mostly so I can look busy when the super walks by, and last Tuesday the count on the rig at the Port of Tacoma finally rolled past 1,000. What got me was not the thousand. It was that 640 of them came off one old tower crane, a Potain I ran for close to 3 years on the same apartment job. Back when I started in 2009 we did most lifts with a guy on the radio and a hand signal for anything weird, now it is all cameras and load charts on a screen in the cab. I still tap the horn twice before I swing, old habit from a guy named Marv who trained me, and the young guys on the crew just laugh at that. The other thing the notebook shows is 41 near misses I wrote down just for me, and half of those were wind gusts that came out of nowhere off the water. Makes you wonder how many of those my dad logged when he ran a lattice boom back in the 80s, he never wrote anything down. Anyone still keep a paper lift log or did everyone switch to the app the hall keeps pushing?

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Showerthought: I hit 1,000 lifts on my chart last week and the number that stopped me was the tower crane | Crane Operators - Babble Community