Crane collapse in NYC, a couple of questions.....

[mike dub]

12. Not sure about union (and the following is a little bit in the weeds)

But another thing I'm thinking about in this tragedy is, how extensively do crane companies look at advance weather forecasts --- daily, hourly? 'The news' said rising winds and gusts the morning of the collapse worried the crane crew and they started lowering the boom immediately. I'm guessing that the crane co. had forecasts inside and out, but i wonder how closely future forecasts (shifting "isobars" and stuff) are taken into account by the operators--- taking future changing wind direction and speed into account. If the previous day's forecast is questionable for the next morning, lower the boom at the end of work the day before. I'm doing some armchair quarterbacking here, so I hope this isn't too offensive.

I work in a tall building here in North Carolina, and sometimes a huge crane is assembled and raised (contracted/hired by a big cellphone carrier to add antennas or transmitters onto leased space on the top of our building) next to our building -- its boom is at least 400 feet long/tall, and it requires a smaller, more easily road-drivable crane to Assemble this monster crane-- and I'm only hoping that that crane crew also has all wind forecasts in hand for the several days that the thing is on site. They Are able to lower the boom each night, but I have no idea if that's even doable in Manhattan. Here they close off a huge entire side of our parking lots. And in our case it's not a longer term construction crane like the one in NYC.

Conditions can change, but weather is nothing to mess with with something that tall.