MIAMI, US: Cranes atop two downtown Miami high rises under construction collapsed in the face of 100-mph (160-kph) winds as Hurricane Irma ripped through the Florida city on Sunday, days after authorities warned about dangers that the approaching storm.
Soon after one of the cranes collapsed, the chief executive of the company developing the building told Reuters he was attending the US Open tennis tournament in New York when the accident occurred and had just learned about it.
“This particular crane, some of it was taken down,” Jorge Perez, chief executive of The Related Group, Miami’s largest developer, said by telephone. “They were surprised that it went down because they felt it was one of the more secure cranes, so we’re right on it.”
A video posted on Twitter showed the crane’s boom dangling above the unfinished building.
No injuries were reported in either of the collapses, and investigations would begin after the storm cleared, officials said.
That collapse at the Related property came hours after heavy winds snapped the boom of another crane erected on top of a Miami apartment building under construction. The project was being developed by New York-based Property Markets Group, according to The Real Deal, a South Florida real estate news website.
After the collapse, the boom was partly dangling on the side of the building, attached to the crane tower by a cable, photos on Twitter showed. Attempts to reach Property Markets Group offices in New York and Miami were unsuccessful.
“There will have to be an investigation by the proper authorities to see if they were properly assembled,” City Manager Daniel Alfonso said.
The city had been in touch with Perez but the state of Florida and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had jurisdiction over the cranes, Alfonso said. No one was immediately available to comment at OSHA or the governor’s office.
Investigators would have to wait until Monday to start looking into the incidents, Alfonso said.
The National Weather Service recorded wind gusts in Miami reaching about 100 mph (160 kph) in the late morning and early afternoon, with sustained winds of 50 to 60 mph (80 to 96 kph), as Irma moved up Florida’s west coast.
As Irma approached last week, Miami officials said 20 to 25 construction cranes were up across the city and that they were designed to withstand winds of 145 mph (235 kph).
It warned that the cranes had to be unpinned, so that their horizontal booms could rotate on their support columns like a weather vane.
The city had advised against staying in a building next to a construction crane during a storm like Irma.
“The arm’s counterbalance is very heavy and poses a potential danger if the crane collapses,” the statement said.
Irma’s winds buckle two giant cranes in Miami
Irma’s winds buckle two giant cranes in Miami
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
