i'm not putting the boom over anyone who is not on board with the pick and has to be there.
That's easy to say, not actually always doable. So the other day at the hospital, its seven floors of people. Evacuate all of them? Did a HVAC the other day at a old people's home. Same deal, they aren't moving all those old people on ventilators etc.
The extension we were helping with on the school building, those kids are all in school yet. I wasn't actively lifting over the classrooms, but if something went wrong, I think the classrooms beyond where we were working were occupied. We do a lot of mechanical work on occupied apartment, motel/hotel and condo buildings. We're lucky if we get a few parking spaces to put the crane in, they aren't asking 5-6 floors of guests to disappear for the day, nor are they not booking those rooms.
The guys working in any major metropolitan area face the same issues. Their tower crane might be able to reach 4 other 50 story buildings in a accident, they aren't closing all those buildings down while they build the next highrise. If it all goes bad, they are hitting some other buildings on the way down and there are people at risk.
Same story in the big refineries or a power plant, some guy running a 700ton crawler can hit half of the site at any time, the work goes on around them because there's no way to keep everyone out.
We finished up the big tree job house the other day, and there was a lady home. She asked if she could stay, and I told her I would rather she didn't. I don't think anything is going to come through the roof, but it wouldn't be the first time a big dead branch had fallen off when removing trees. She was fine with that and disappeared for the day. I don't care if she wants to stand across the road and watch, I'd just rather they weren't inside if I can help it.
I'm all for emptying the scene if I can, but it isn't a perfect world. I'm not busting your chops about this, but its easy for a lot of people afterwards to say "there should be no one in a working area of a crane". I just recertified for my crane license, and its easy to read the book and give all the book answers on how everything should be done. But there's always the book answer, and there's what ends up happening in the real world.
And while I'll harp on the fact that this guy probably didn't have his outriggers pinned, I'll confess mine, I cut my own corners:
We do our initial set up on jobsites with the 100 ton on half outriggers, no counterweight, and suspension locked. I'll leave a lot of the suspension weight on the tires, just so I don't punch through with my small mats. Then we use the crane to set my larger steel mats for the outriggers. Its kind of industry standard way of doing it. We do similar just getting in and out of the boom dolly.
But I don't lock my pins on 1/2 when we're doing that. I'm mostly making a "on rubber" pick, with extra stability from the 1/2 outriggers. I don't reach out more than 15-20' of radius setting the mats, and I'd like to think I know what I'm doing. But its not how it shows doing it in the book, because there's no configuration in the book for 1/2 outriggers with no counterweight. But I can't legal travel with counterweight on, and I've got to get out of the dolly somehow, and I've got to get on the mats to put on weights, so we do what we do....