Working a Crane Safely Around Overhead Power Lines

What Is Hanging Over Your Driveway

Most people have never looked up at their own property with a boom in mind. The operator does it before anything else. On a typical lot here there is a service drop running from a pole at the street to a mast on the corner of the house, and that drop crosses exactly the airspace the boom wants to use. There may also be a pole-mounted transformer, a guy wire, and a cable or phone line strung below the power conductors.

A service drop and a distribution line are not the same animal. The drop feeds one house. The line on the pole carries far more voltage and demands far more room. Which one you have changes where the truck sits, not just how the boom swings.

Hillside lots are the worst for this. A conductor running flat against a rock face reads as one more dark line in a photo, and it can sit directly in the path of a pick that looked clean from the driveway.

• Service drop from pole to house mast
• Pole-mounted transformer and its bushings
• Distribution conductors at the top of the pole
• Communication lines strung lower on the same pole
• Guy wires anchored into the yard
• Lines crossing a wash or running along a hillside

Clearance Comes From the Standard, Not From a Guess

There is a published minimum approach distance for a crane working near an energized line, and it changes with the voltage on that conductor. We are not going to print a figure on this page, because the right number depends on what is actually over your address. A homeowner working from the wrong number is worse off than a homeowner working from none.

The operator confirms the distance for the voltage involved before the boom leaves its rest. That distance applies to the boom, the load line, the load itself and the tag line, not just the tip of the boom.

Holding clearance is a setup decision. If the only spot the truck fits puts any part of the rig inside the approach distance at any point in the swing, the fix is not to be careful. The fix is to change something: move the setup, change the swing path, or bring the utility in.

Send a Photo That Includes the Sky

When you send pictures of the job, point the camera up as well as down. Nearly every photo we receive shows concrete, a gate and the item to be lifted, and nothing above head height. That tells us where the truck can park. It tells us nothing about whether the boom can get where it needs to go.

Stand roughly where you think the crane will set up, hold the phone at chest height, and take one frame straight up the line of the lift. Then take one from the street with the pole, the wires and the roofline all in the same shot.

Two extra photos can turn a site visit into a phone call. They can also stop a truck arriving for a job that was never going to work from that side of the house, which matters most when you are a seasonal owner coordinating the whole thing from another state.