IN FOCUS / UAA
ACCIDENTS COST EVERYONE A continued rise in crane accidents is driving change throughout the insurance sector, says UAA. THE LAST TWO YEARS HAS SEEN the crane sector experience stresses and strains not experienced before. The volume of work for crane hire businesses has increased exponentially for some, the shortage of skilled labour has also increased, and some crane companies are becoming extremely anxious around the availability of quality resources. According to George Grasso, chief services officer for UAA, there is a constant battle for companies to keep quality staff, manage expenses and make every effort to maintain a high level of training and OH&S standards, coupled with the ongoing pressures of new enterprise bargaining agreements and COVID-19. As such, there has been an increase in the number of crane accidents whereby incurring large losses in material damage to machines and exposure of horrendous proportions and what seem to be outrageous legal liability demands from allegedly affected third parties. Many insurers globally in this segment are reducing their capacity to insure this industry and or are forced to increase rates to remediate such losses from both material damage and legal liability (Third Party Property and Personal Injury), or have removed themselves from the industry completely, he says. “2019 was an horrendous year as far as the number of crane incidents we’ve had to deal with and almost all of them appear to be a result of extraordinary costly but simple mistakes. “We have seen a lot of these types of incidents. As the old saying goes, ‘faster the haste, slower the pace’, but incidents are occurring because operators, riggers and dogman, who were already faced with time constraints, are even more time poor. This has led to very expensive machines being damaged, not being available for work and having to go through the timewww.cranesandlifting.com.au
George Grasso, UAA chief services officer.
July 2020 CAL / 55
