Dubai: Dubai Police rescued a crane operator who was trapped inside the crane’s cabin when its arm collapsed at a construction site.
Lt Colonel Abdullah Bishwa, deputy director of Dubai Police’s search and rescue department, said the 64-year-old Asian worker was operating the crane when it collapsed inside a pit estimated to be about three stories deep.
“We used another crane to carry our rescue officers to the worker, opened the cabin and rescued him by using a safety basket linked to another crane,” Lt Col Bishwa said.
The rescue mission took a couple of hours. The worker escaped without injury.
Lt Col Bishwa said that initial investigations revealed that the worker may have misjudged balancing the weight of materials he was transferring from up the building to the ground, which led to the crane’s arm collapsing.
Lt Col Bishwa urged crane operators and technicians to be careful while operating cranes.
“They need to be able to act quickly in emergencies and know how the crane mechanism works,” he said.
Lt Col Bishwa called upon companies to alert their workers about taking precautions to prevent such accidents.
“A crane collapse not only endangers the life of the operator, but also endangers the lives of other workers in the construction site or road users nearby,” Lt Col Bishwa said.
