AUSTIN, TX—Diane Stewart, a Mueller resident, is used to the occasional construction noise coming from the site near her apartment. But on Wednesday, she heard something that made her pause.
“It sounded like pipes falling. It was a loud crash, it made me turn,” Stewart said.
What Stewart heard was the collision of two construction cranes before 10 a.m. Wednesday, which caused dozens of people beneath the cranes to flee. Medics responded at 9:38 a.m. to the 1600 block of Robert Browning Street, just north of Mueller Lake Park near Dell Children’s Medical Center.
When medics arrived at the scene, they tended to 22 people, with 16 being taken to a hospital. EMS Capt. Darren Noak said none of the injuries was considered life-threatening.
Noak said people were injured while running from the crane collision. He did not know what, if any, debris fell or hit the area near the cranes.
Investigators were still trying to figure out exactly what happened around 11 a.m., but Austin fire Battalion Chief Mark Bridges said the wires of the two cranes got tangled up. A piece of one of the cranes broke off during the collision.
One operator was still in one of the cranes when officials spoke to the media around 11 a.m. But Bridges said the operator was not in danger.
Stewart, the Mueller resident, was walking to Mueller Lake Park with her bird-watching binoculars around 9:30 a.m. when she heard the cranes crash. Stewart was walking along Aldrich Street at the roundabout outside the lake.
Stewart said she is used to hearing bangs or cement trucks from the construction site, but what she heard Wednesday morning sounded like a car crash.
“It was just crazy,” Stewart said. “First responders got here so fast. Kudos to them, man.”
A statement from Ascension Seton said the collision did not affect operations at Dell Children’s Medical Center.
Construction workers at the scene told the Austin American-Statesman that their managers would handle speaking to the media.
The two cranes were situated on a construction site in the western half of the Mueller neighborhood, which contains apartments, an Alamo Drafthouse theater, the Thinkery children’s museum and various restaurants near Mueller Lake Park.
Cadence McShane Construction recently began construction on the Alpha Building, a six-story office building and garage in the mixed-use neighborhood. The building, which will have about 240,000 square feet, is on the first of three development sites that have the capacity for four office buildings and about 800,000 square feet of office space.
Shorenstein Properties is the lead developer for the building, and Catellus is the development manager.
According to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a Cadence McShane Construction employee was killed in Austin while moving a concrete slab in August 2017.
The employee was crushed by the concrete slab that fell on the person when the rigging that was being used failed, according to OSHA.
The incident happened at a construction side in the 4700 block of East Riverside Drive. Firefighters who responded that day used sledgehammers, drills and other tools to cut away at the slab. When they finally reached the man, he was dead.
And in February, a worker at a Cadence McShane construction site in Sherman died, according to The Herald Democrat. Officials said they were investigating the incident after a worker fell at the site of the new Sherman High School campus in North Texas.
In April, the city of Austin cited Cadence McShane Construction after receiving a coronavirus-related complaint about workers not wearing masks and bathrooms not being spaced 6 feet apart at a construction site in the 1900 block of Aldrich Street. That site is next to the area where the cranes collided on Wednesday.
Although only minor injuries were reported in Wednesday’s incident, crane operations can be a deadly task. From 2011 to 2017, the most recent year of data available, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tallied 297 crane-related deaths, an average of 42 a year. Texas reported 33 in 2017.
Of those cases:
- Texas had more fatal crane-related injuries than the next three states combined from 2011 to 2017. Texas had 50 deaths, followed by Florida with 16, New York with 16 and California with 14.
- Workers were struck by an object or equipment in a little more than half of all fatal crane injuries.
- 43% of fatal crane-related work injuries occurred in private construction.
- The crane operator was killed in 22% of the cases. A worker was engaged in construction, assembling, and dismantling activities in another 23% of cases.
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