Crane falls off bridge while attempting to pull a bus out of the river.
(Warning – Movie starts downloading automatically on entering page)
Real of fake? Couldn’t find anything about this on “Snopes” …
I see no reason why it should not be real. The retrieval of a bus would be newsworthy enough in itself to send a local news team. The crane was having to lift from a point a long way from it’s center of gravity and, as more of the bus was pulled from the water, the load would get progressively heavier as buoyancy in the water diminished.
I think it’s real, but I also think their plan was flawed. There must have been a better way to lift the bus out with the weight distributed better. Didn’t they calculate at all? Maybe two cranes working together if possible? 
If at first you don’t suceed, get a bigger crane.
http://www.craneconsultants.com/images/CraneMishaps/RescueCraneRescued/LARGE/RescueCraneRescued-4.jpg
http://www.craneconsultants.com/images/CraneMishaps/RescueCraneRescued/LARGE/RescueCraneRescued-5.jpg
I think that the last picture has been altered, but amusing anyways.
Yes, it has (been altered) – the preceding sequence is labeled TRUE, the last one FALSE
(this was all I found about “cranes” when searching Snopes for my OP. Useful now :))
Now, back to our Regularly Scheduled Crane Wreck…
anybody know if the video in the OP is, actually, real?
My suspicion (assuming this really is genuine) is that they forgot to allow for a fair amount of water not draining out of the bus when they lifted it… :smack: That would add weight, FAST
Solution could have been to be more patient about lifting – let the water drain for a while after each foot or two of lifting
funny story though 
Yep, it was also a funny story when Noone Special posted that link. 
As to the separate crane crash in the OP, it looks real enough to me. (There is a lot more incidental debris falling than I would expect a CGI faker to remember to put in and the details (even blurry) look accurate.)
Ironically, in some of the shots of the bridge after the crane has fallen, one can see the boom of a second crane standing idle.
I hope the operator was not hurt, but he missed a perfect opportunity to pay out his cable when the bus started pulling back down and before his rig was up against the rail.
I watched two rigs re-right a concrete mixer last summer. It took several tries and the truck kept sliding on them, but the operators were pretty careful to slack off the instant things would begin to go wrong.
If you watch the video to the very end, there’s a close up of a fleeing crane op.
:smack:
and I even double checked!
I sat through two weeks of expert evidence on mobile crane tipping accidents for a trial a few years ago.
It’s not easy for the operator.
As the crane tips, the load moves down and out so starts gaining leverage, while the counterbalance is moving up and in, and so is losing leverage.
Going from winding in to paying out on some cranes takes a few seconds. And the crane doesn’t pay out fast.
As I recall the evidence, the operator has a split second window of opportunity if he starts to feel the crane “float” ie reach balance point, but if he misses that, she’s a goner.
The depth of knowledge and expertise on this board is absolutely amazing!
Absolutely nothing about it seems faked to me at all. Cranes tip over all the time - check out the dozen or so photos in the photo gallery of http://craneaccidents.com/ .
Lots of different reasons for tipping over - ground subsidence, crane failure, but mostly operator error.
That’s fer sure. I even saw one that had tipped over during a load test. Every so often a crane has to be tested for it’s ability to handle the rated load and at the Navy Base where I worked they tipped one over doing the test.
It would have been even better had they tipped another one over in trying to right the first, but no such luck.