A worker is seriously injured after a crane collapses at Southampton Dock.  According to BBC:

Fire crews were called to Southampton Docks, owned by DP World, at Dock Gate 20 in Western Avenue, at 0520 BST.

The crane, a twin boom rig with the cab suspended on rails, toppled on to the ship, Nyke Themis, the coastguard said.

It is the second serious incident involving crane operations this year and the Unite union said it has “deepened concerns” over worker safety.

Matt Tipper, Unite regional industrial organiser, said the injured man is one of its members.

The man, reported to be the crane operator, has been freed from the wreckage and taken to hospital with life threatening injuries including injuries to his legs.  More video from this incident can be seen on BBC HERE or check out some more pictures HERE.

Monday, The Georgia Ports Authority (GPA) announced the arrival of four new super post-Panamax cranes at the Port of Savannah aboard the Dockwise M/V Tern.  Garden City Terminal now has the largest fleet (23) of ship-to-shore cranes at one facility in this country.

The cranes are part of the GPA’s long-term strategic growth plan to accommodate 6.5 million TEUs of capacity by 2018, doubling its current capacity.

Fully assembled, the cranes are approximately 425 feet long, weigh 1,369 tons and rise 180 feet above the water with a 34-degree incline.

Modern and environmentally friendly, the four new cranes are the largest of their kind in the world, with the capability of handling super post Panamax vessels the size of 22 containers wide. The state-of-the art cranes were designed in Finland and built in China by Konecranes VLC in China.

The new cranes are energy efficient and will be powered solely by electricity. “The cranes will generate more than 30 percent of their total energy requirements by tapping into the power of gravity and kinetic energy,” said GPA’s Director of Engineering and Maintenance Wilson Tillotson. “For every one hour each of these cranes is operational, it uses its own power for approximately 18 minutes.”

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oobject.com brings us this story on 10 of the world largest floating cranes.

10 enormous floating cranes

Aside from their spectacular size, what makes floating cranes unusual and interesting objects is that they are essentially boats. As such, they don’t exactly conjure up the idea of stability, which is the primary requirement for lifting things. They also look weird since boats usually consist of large hulls with smaller superstructure, here the arrangement is reversed making them seem very ungainly. Some of these cranes can lift tens of thousands of tons, at sea, and are engineering wonders.

The Library of Congress has announced a partnership with our favorite Web 2.0 photography site Flickr. They tell us:

The first incarnation of The Commons is a pilot project we’ve created in partnership with The Library of Congress. The Library has an enormous photo catalogue, containing over a million photos. The Library team has chosen about 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections to show on Flickr. You can see what the streets of Puerto Rico looked like in the 40s, or what King George wore to the trooping of Colors in 1911.

There are two main aims to The Commons project, starting with the pilot: firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search.

While this is an exciting application of new technology the site needs your help cataloging the historic photos. The power behind flickr is their use of user submitted tags to organize the site’s enormous collection of user photos. Tags are short one or two word descriptions that let you find the best photos of offshore oil rigs or sunsets at sea.

To effectively sort the historic photographs Flickr and the Library of Congress is asking everyone to pick a few photos from the collection and add tags. Once this has been done the photos of ships should emerge HERE.

For the curious… the above photos are of a Hulett automatic unloader discharging coal at the Pennsylvania Railroad docks in Cleveland, Ohio. The set can be viewed HERE.