“They’re buying all the leftovers the United States wants to get rid of… and they sell them to Canadian subcontractors and contractors…and then they just continue to put a band-aid on them, but the crane doesn’t last forever.”
Teslia says cranes are like cars and after a certain number of kilometres, they start to break down. A crane lifespan is based on cycles, and most are built for 500,000 cycles. A crane picks up an object, places it in the desired position, and repeats the process. Every repetition is a cycle. Teslia says unlike a car, there’s nothing to monitor how many cycles a crane has completed.
“They try to maintain them,” says Teslia, “but you can’t take an old Formula One race car and keep racing it every year. It doesn’t work.” Teslia estimates he’s inspected about 100 cranes in Canada and says only a handful have passed inspection.
Teslia has been hired by Vancouver-based developer, Townline, to inspect all its cranes. Melissa O’Doherty is the director of health and safety at Townline and says they realized they had a problem after a near-miss incident involving a crane at one of their work sites in the spring of 2023.
“We ended up having to actually take the crane out and put up a new crane because they couldn’t find the problem,” explains O’Doherty. “Even if they did, our workers just weren’t comfortable working with that crane anymore, and they were always on edge around it.”
