Crane

Tom Nolley was operating a crane yesterday at the construction site of the new St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Front Street and Erie Avenue, when the crane snagged on some high-tension wires. Nolley was marooned inside the crane's cab for about an hour until the power could be cut off.

One Liberty Place topped off yesterday at 945 feet, 4 inches - a fact noted on navy blue sweatshirts handed out to construction workers as ceremonies marked the placing of the final section of spire. Then developer Willard Rouse, Mayor Goode and other dignitaries went home, leaving workers with a 100-ton mop-up chore: Bring down the crane that hoisted the spire up there. "I am more concerned about taking down the crane than erecting the spire," said construction supervisor Tom Smythe as he monitored the work from the still-incomplete 62nd floor.

Charles McCue concentrates. He sits alone in the cab of a construction crane perched 500 feet above Market Street, concentrating on the hook and the payload dangling from a 110- foot boom. His gaze could belong to a fighter pilot or a marksman. It could be Ted Williams, staring out to the pitcher's mound. McCue leans forward slightly, elbows on a rail. He peers down to a flatbed truck that has pulled onto the site, a few feet from the foot of the crane's tower. The truck brings big steel from Canadian mills for One Liberty Place, Willard Rouse's history-making office tower at 17th and Market streets that will shortly become the tallest building in Philadelphia.

A crane at the Marriott Hotel construction site in West Conshohocken yesterday collapsed onto a smaller crane, causing it to fall on a parked truck, police said. The larger crane landed across a set of Conrail freight lines. No injuries were reported. A Conrail spokesman said that the crane blocked the two rail lines but that there were no delays in service because rail traffic the day after Christmas is normally light. The accident occurred about 8 a.m. at the intersection of Front and Fayette Streets, West Conshohocken Police Officer John Bianchini said.

A. Reynolds Crane, 81, a former Pennsylvania Medical Society president who played a key role in establishing the county's medical examiner system, died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Radnor. Dr. Crane was a senior member emeritus of the scientific staff of Fox Chase Cancer Center, which he joined in 1974 after having directed the Ayer Clinical Laboratory at Pennsylvania Hospital since 1946. During a career that spanned more than 50 years, Dr. Crane, a pathologist, was president of the Philadelphia Pathological Society, the Philadelphia County Medical Society and the Pennsylvania Association of Clinical Pathologists.

Two of the workers running the lift when a giant crane collapsed at Milwaukee's Miller Park - killing three workers - say tracks on one side of the crane were sinking into the ground just before the accident. The comments came in sworn depositions released by order of the state Court of Appeals as the result of a lawsuit filed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Attorneys for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of America, which is building the retractable roof for the Milwaukee Brewers' new ballpark, have opposed release of depositions in the civil lawsuits filed on behalf of the three accident victims' families.

The construction worker who was electrocuted yesterday morning while working at a West Philadelphia site was trying to chain a concrete barrier to a crane when the crane hit a 13,000-volt Amtrak line. Francis Popovich, 33, of Audubon, Montgomery County, an employee of Buckley & Co., and a co-worker, Anthony Arcuri, were working at 38th and Pennsgrove streets when the accident occurred. Police said the two reported to work about 7 a.m. and began to move a pile of concrete barriers that were stacked in a corner.

L. Stanley Crane, 87, the chief executive credited with Conrail's remarkable rise from the ashes of the moribund Penn Central Railroad, died Tuesday of complications from pneumonia at Hospice of Palm Beach County in Boynton Beach, Fla. Mr. Crane came to Philadelphia in 1981 as the boss of Conrail, after retiring as chairman and chief executive of the profitable Southern Railway. He had 40 years' experience in the industry, enormous energy, and a quick grasp of complex subjects.

The First National Bank is no longer agent for the Natalie Leaf estate because West Chester Borough Councilman Mitch Crane withdrew the agreement. Bank president Charles Swope hinted that the bank would soon have severed the relationship if Crane had not done it first. "That matter would have gone to the board very shortly," Swope said. The publicity surrounding the rezoning of Leaf's home from residential to commercial, which had been initiated by Crane, distressed bank board members, Swope said.

Authorities yesterday identified a third man who was part of a crew that was electrocuted after a crane struck an overhead power line in Telford. Danial G. Evans, 29, of Philadelphia, was killed in the accident Thursday morning at a cement plant owned by JDM Materials Co., according to the Bucks County Coroner's Office. Robert Forepaugh, 68, of Bensalem, had been backing up the crane when its boom struck a 7,200-volt power line. Evans and a coworker, George Frederick, 41, also of Philadelphia, scrambled to aid the crane operator, who had been thrown from the cab and was lying on the ground.

LONDON - A helicopter crashed into a crane and fell on a crowded street in central London during rush hour Wednesday, sending flames and black plumes of smoke into the air. The pilot and one person on the ground were killed and 13 others injured, officials said. The helicopter crashed in misty weather just south of the River Thames near the Underground and mainline train station at Vauxhall, and close to the headquarters of spy agency MI6. Police said one person had critical injuries.

Sheriff starts school patrols PHOENIX - The sheriff for metro Phoenix has launched a plan to have as many as 500 armed volunteers patrol areas just outside schools to guard against shootings like last month's Connecticut attack. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office said Wednesday that the patrols were launched this week at 59 schools in unincorporated areas and communities that pay his agency for police services. He hopes to have as many as 400 posse volunteers and an additional 100 known as reserve deputies.

The artist Ellsworth Kelly was there. Joseph Neubauer, the Barnes Foundation vice chairman and donor extraordinaire, was also there. So were dozens of skilled movers, installers, crane operators, and art handlers. A swarm of project managers and members of the Kelly entourage talked and looked on in the shadow of a giant yellow crane angling from the parking lot of the Barnes' new gallery on the Parkway. They had all turned out Monday morning, waiting, as the artist put it, to "bring something back to Philadelphia" - a monumental sculpture by Kelly, his 40-foot-high, eight-ton, stainless steel The Barnes Totem . The Neubauer Family Foundation made the acquisition possible for the Barnes and, as Joseph Neubauer said, for "everyone in the city passing by. " It is the first public work installed here by Kelly, 88 and an undisputed master of American art, since his massive Transportation Building Lobby Sculpture was quietly removed from the old Greyhound office building on Market Street and sold in 1996.

Michael Simermeyer, a burly construction worker, came from a long line of sturdily built laborers, men whose skills lay in their rugged hands. He commuted from the Trenton area to a construction site in Manhattan, a massive pit where the Metropolitan Transit Authority is building a subway line extension. There, on Tuesday, he was working the second shift for a subcontracting company co-owned by an uncle. His father had worked the day shift. "They were always men who worked with their hands.

NEW YORK - Authorities are focusing on what caused a boom crane to crash to the ground at a Manhattan work site, killing one construction worker and seriously injuring another. The dead worker was identified by police as Michael Simermeyer, 30, of Burlington Township, N.J. He was pronounced dead following Tuesday's accident at the No. 7 subway line extension construction site. One other person was hospitalized in serious condition and three people were treated for minor injuries. The crane was set up on the second of three levels on the construction site on Manhattan's West Side, city officials said.

Emergency responders in Delaware County used a crane to rescue a man trapped under a SEPTA trolley early Saturday. Around 3:30 a.m., the man was struck by a Route 102 Trolley in Clifton Heights along a stretch of tracks near East Broadway and Ogden Street, said SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch. The victim became trapped underneath the trolley, which was approaching the Baltimore Pike Station, heading towards 69th Street Station from Sharon Hill, Busch said. Local rescue crews and SEPTA personnel worked to free the man for about an hour and a half, before the crane was used to lift the trolley off the victim, Busch said.

The future of serious music - a possible future, at least - is roaring in through a side door marked "dance clubs. " And behind that door? Miles of wires, for starters, generating synthesized sound at 8 p.m. Saturday at Crane Arts in North Philadelphia. A collection of artists from the British-based Nonclassical recording label will play hard-to-explain works involving sampling, looping, synthesizers and turntables, all staples of raves, circuit parties, and subgenres sometimes dismissed as "overdose music.

The last time Ben Crane made news, he was swept up in the Tiger Woods scandal when Life & Style magazine attributed quotes to him he never made. Yesterday, Crane made two birdie putts longer than 45 feet to build a big enough cushion to win the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego. Crane knocked in a 30-inch par putt on the final hole for a 2-under 70 and a one-shot victory over Michael Sim, Brandt Snedeker and Marc Leishman. It was his third career victory - first in nearly 5 years - and this one earned him a trip back to the Masters.

Abandoned in a Western Pennsylvania field since the mid-1990s, a pair of towering, rusted cranes bore silent witness to a national tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, as United Flight 93 plunged into the earth just a few hundred yards away. The dragline cranes, relics of the coal strip-mining heyday of Somerset County, were standing by the smoking crater when first responders arrived from nearby Shanksville. They stayed there for years afterward, becoming to regular visitors part of the hallowed landscape.

One week after the Center City crane crash that killed the operator and injured several pedestrians, notice of the first lawsuit has been filed in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. A summons announcing intent to sue was filed yesterday on behalf of Dorothy Ramos, 76, against Masonry Preservation Group Inc., of Merchantville, the crane operator, and First Presbyterian Church at 21st and Walnut Streets. A woman who answered the phone said MPG president Brent Schopfel was not available to discuss the suit.