Crane

Three firefighters die as truck plunges 800 feet A fire engine fighting wildfires in the Klamath National Forest in California tumbled 800 feet off a steep, dirt road into a ravine yesterday, killing three firefighters. Two others survived the plunge and were airlifted to the Mercy Medical Center in Redding, Ca., said Brian Harris, a the U.S. Forest Service spokesman. Their conditions were not known. The dead, ages 51, 29 and 19, included two men and a woman. The crew was helping with a 500-acre backfire set to help contain another 1,350-acre fire 10 miles south of the northern California town of Happy Camp when the accident occurred, at about 1:30 a.m., Harris said.

The crash, crush and destruction of construction sounds awesome to 10-year-old Zach Mlynarczyk. His flimsy hard hat off his head for the moment, Zach stood in a darkened trailer Tuesday morning, watching a friend nudge a rubber joystick to lift boxes on a crane simulator. "Cool. Can we let go of them and let them fly?" Zach, who lives in Sewell, asked a nearby engineer. "I want to go into demolition," the boy also announced. That is what organizers of this unusual summer camp at Gloucester County College - geared toward getting young people jazzed about civil engineering, building, carpentry, and other areas of construction - like to hear.

Ships and airplanes don't often end up on course for a three-way collision with a crane. But that's what is happening at Philadelphia International Airport these days. Averting that collision is a vital task for the future of the region's economy. The ships in question are being built at the Kvaerner shipyard in South Philadelphia. The airplanes are taxiing into line for takeoff at the airport a few miles away. And the crane in question is not a bird, but a 210-foot-high, 750-ton structure that does vital construction work at the shipyard.

It's big, it's blue, and thousands of city jobs depend on it. But whose? The 210-foot-high crane at the Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard, near Philadelphia International Airport, is key to reviving the region's once-mighty shipbuilding industry. But US Airways, which has a hub in Philadelphia, says the crane could prevent the financially troubled airline from flying at least 300 new jets - jets viewed as critical to its survival now. "It has got to be dismantled and moved," David N. Siegel, the newly named president and chief executive officer of US Airways Group Inc., said Tuesday in an interview about the airline's challenges here.

A 55-year-old, 110-ton cargo crane has toppled into the Delaware River after a crack appeared in a pier that had recently undergone work to strengthen it, port officials said yesterday. There were no injuries in the collapse Wednesday at the South Jersey Port Corp.'s Beckett Street Terminal, where officials had been making plans to support the crane. Joseph Balzano, the port's executive director, said a cargo ship that was slated to unload at the pier Wednesday was diverted to the state-run corporation's Broadway Terminal at the old New York Shipbuilding Co. yard in Camden.

How do you lose construction cranes? Or houses? Or four tons of uranium and plutonium? Or dead bodies? Easily, say those who work in purchasing, inventory control, and property management. In the public and private sector, said Tom Orlowski, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, "things like that happen all the time. " So when Orlowski heard last week's news reports of hundreds of missing FBI weapons and laptop computers, he was hardly shocked. In just about every company, agency, organization or institution, Orlowski said, just about everything and anything can and does get misplaced, lost, forgotten about, or simply walk away.

A pair of rare whooping crane hatchlings followed Daddy's every move around their playpen. And when Daddy hopped into an airplane, they followed as best they could with their still useless wings. Eventually they will fly, following Daddy and that plane. For now, they are in training, learning from Daddy - wildlife trainer Dan Sprague in a white cape with a beekeeper hood to obscure any sign of humanity - how to leave the nest. To show them the way, Sprague dropped mealworms every few inches.

Kvaerner is finally putting its name - in 12-foot-high letters - atop its new shipyard in South Philadelphia, a strong sign that it plans to keep the place for a while. The shipyard has been for sale for two years, and the Anglo-Norwegian conglomerate has sold 10 of its 13 yards during that period. "This is a favorable sign that Kvaerner is going to be here and build ships for a while . . . that they believe the shipyard here has value," said Doug Peel, executive director of the Philadelphia Shipyard Development Corp.

After a three-hour rescue effort, John Wisham, 57, a crane operator for Jen Environmental Construction Technology of Southampton, Burlington County, walked out from beneath tons of wood and steel debris caused by the collapse of his crane yesterday afternoon as hundreds of onlookers cheered. A Medivac helicopter had been standing by at nearby Penn Wood East Junior High School, but Wisham, who appeared unharmed, declined to go to a hospital. Wisham was operating a 15-foot boom from the crane's cab, demolishing two houses between Yeadon Avenue and Church Lane gutted by fire three years ago, when the crane toppled.

The Kvaerner Philadelphia Shipyard's towering gantry crane hoisted its first piece of a ship yesterday, a minor milestone in the yard's effort to revive the region's moribund shipbuilding industry. The 400,000-pound double-bottom hull section of the yard's first ship was transported from the shop where it had been assembled and was flipped over by the giant crane. It then became the first ship section to be moved into the "grand block shop," the next-to-last step in the yard's ship-assembly process.