ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — In the pitch black, through roaring wind, twisted metal fell like a guillotine.

It plunged toward the heart of the city — apartments, bars, restaurants, an art gallery, museum and offices. Tens of thousands of pounds of steel slicing through the blinding rain.

Down, down, down.

About 550 feet. Cleared in seconds.

The massive shard had broken off a crane on the highest tower in the city, The Residences at 400 Central, as Hurricane Milton blasted Tampa Bay. The crane crashed into an empty building, home to a defense contractor, a law firm, a juice shop and the Tampa Bay Times.

Only 35 hours before, Mayor Ken Welch had for the first time warned residents in the area that the cranes could topple in high winds. Anyone below could be crushed.

But in Florida, city leaders don’t have the power to mandate how contractors prepare their cranes for a hurricane. No one in the state does.

The collapse has spotlighted gaping holes in the regulation of cranes in a place that’s booming with coastal development and more susceptible to major storms than just about anywhere in the country.

Florida has no laws on crane safety during high winds, not even for hurricanes. In fact, lawmakers have banned cities and counties from passing rules themselves — at the urging of construction lobbyists.

The use of cranes is governed primarily by federal standards, which treat such equipment as a workplace hazard — not a threat to the general public.

Construction industry leaders have said contractors prioritize keeping people safe. Still, residents have been hurt before, both during and outside of storms. A falling crane in Fort Lauderdale earlier this year left a woman with brain damage, according to her lawyers; a Dallas woman died in 2019 when a crane collapsed into her apartment during high winds.

“This is not acceptable,” said St. Petersburg City Council member Ed Montanari. “We dodged a bullet this time with this crane without a loss of life. It could have been disastrous.”

What caused the crane at 400 Central to fail is still unknown. No one besides the contractor itself appears to be investigating what happened.

Industry experts say the problem could have been operator error, faulty equipment, an uncommonly violent burst of wind or a setup too weak for a major hurricane.

After the storm, an outside firm inspected one of the two remaining cranes at the site and found loose bolts while examining the braces, or “tie-ins,” that connect the crane to the building, a report submitted to the city and reviewed by the Times shows. The contractor said it fixed those issues, and the inspection firm deemed the equipment safe to keep using.

The crane that fell broke off just above the last brace that anchored it to the building, six stories from the top of the skyscraper.

The city’s building official had said the cranes at 400 Central were safe up to 110 mph winds with 120 mph gusts. Other downtown cranes were rated for speeds up to 145 mph, he said. The city asked contractors to lower cranes two days before the storm, then issued warnings to nearby residents and businesses after learning developers planned to leave them standing.

Blocks from the 400 Central site, a peak gust was recorded of 101 mph at the airport. Higher up, the gusts were likely fiercer, meteorologists say — perhaps reaching between 115 and 130 mph.

In several statements to the Times, the general manager for Liberty, the Boston-based firm that owned the collapsed crane, said the machine “was designed to withstand wind gusts in excess of 140 mph.”

The hurricane had approached too fast for crews to take the crane down entirely, according to the statement. Chick Fagan, Liberty’s general manager, said the contractor used other measures to secure the device and a third-party firm had certified the equipment as safe after Hurricane Helene blew past Tampa Bay less than two weeks before Milton. The company provided the Times two reports from Sept. 28 showing the cranes were labeled safe by an inspector.

Fagan said Liberty has hired engineers to conduct an assessment after the collapse. But it is already blaming Milton’s turbulent winds.

“There is no reason to believe the tower crane at 400 Central collapsed for any reason other than as a result of a once-in-a-generation storm hitting the region,” he said.

By the time the city warned residents around several downtown construction sites about the cranes, many had already committed to staying. They had felt safe, ensconced in new buildings outside mandatory evacuation zones likely to flood.

City leaders recommended two options: Leave or take cover during the storm in an interior space, such as a stairwell.

The residents were left to stare up at the cranes with hesitation, trying to perform what felt like impossible math. They took videos and asked friends for advice. They answered calls from worried parents. They tried to make the right choice.

Jonathan Sheehan, who lives in the Avanti apartments a few hundred feet from 400 Central, said deciding to stay put felt like “pure panic.”

Hours later, as the rain pelted his windows in the dark, he heard a thunderous boom.

A gap in oversight

In Florida, construction firms are largely left alone to decide how to secure cranes during hurricanes. Industry lobbyists have resisted efforts by local officials to strengthen oversight.

Standards — set by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration — call for contractors to follow crane manufacturers’ specifications for using equipment properly.

The agency doesn’t offer specific guidance for handling high winds. The rules don’t mention hurricanes.

Twelve years ago, the Florida Legislature considered setting hurricane standards. Instead, lawmakers unanimously passed a bill to ban local governments from setting rules of their own.

Early versions of the legislation would have provided steps for companies to take before storms, such as removing certain rigging and locking massive counterweights. Those provisions weren’t included in the final version.

One of the former Republican senators who introduced the bill, Michael Bennett, said he couldn’t recall what happened to the tougher language. But construction trade groups had lobbied hard around the bill.

Federal workplace regulations, he said, have clear limitations during hurricanes.

“If there’s no workers on the crane itself because we all went home for the hurricane, OSHA’s out of the game,” Bennett said.

That leaves a gap in oversight.

Before Florida passed the preemption, Miami-Dade County commissioners tried to develop their own wind standards in 2008. Construction groups sued, and the county lost when a U.S. appeals court ruled federal workplace regulations should take precedence. The judges said the county failed to show that members of the general public had been hurt or killed by cranes during hurricanes.

Other places have done more.

After a crane collapsed in 2016 because a contractor didn’t properly secure it, New York City passed stricter rules, including requirements for recorders on cranes, similar to black boxes on airplanes.

In Washington state, lawmakers made it a crime for companies to violate safety standards after a crane collapse killed four people.

During Hurricane Irma in 2017, three cranes collapsed in South Florida. They didn’t tumble but dangled high above the ground. At least one loomed as a threat to people living nearby.

Afterward, the county commission passed a resolution urging legislators to repeal the ban on local crane rules. They said the law prevented them from keeping the public safe.

The Legislature didn’t budge.

A warning, then a boom

The day before Milton’s arrival, St. Petersburg’s mayor held what at first appeared to be a routine news conference on preparations.

The storm had been swirling toward Tampa Bay for about three days. But the mayor gave hundreds of residents a new reason to worry: Some of the cranes towering over downtown, he said, might not be safe.

City inspectors had begun making rounds of construction sites days earlier. There were 10 cranes around St. Petersburg across seven projects. The city’s building official said some of the cranes were rated for higher winds than others.

“Please take all actions available to lower the cranes before the hurricane makes landfall,” wrote Angie Phillips, deputy building official, in an email to contractors on Monday, Oct. 7.

It was a request, not an order.

Phillips added that if lowering the cranes wasn’t possible, they should be set to “weathervane mode,” so they could spin freely rather than resist the wind.

Engineering experts told the Times dismantling the cranes at 400 Central in a few days wouldn’t have been feasible. Liberty may have needed a special crew to help, and city streets would’ve had to be closed down. In many cases, they said, contractors can lower cranes by a couple of sections to make them less vulnerable to the highest winds, but at 400 Central, that may not have been possible without risking the crane’s arm swinging into the building.

Liberty’s general manager told the Times the company kept the crane, a Terex SK575, at its full height but allowed it to weathervane.

A city spokesperson said local officials confirmed on Oct. 7 that the cranes at 400 Central would spin freely during the storm.

The city was also drafting a public announcement, records show. Red Apple Group — 400 Central’s developer — took issue with the language.

Kevin King, a former high-ranking city official working for Red Apple, asked one of his old colleagues to make the announcement more general, so 400 Central wasn’t singled out.

Liz Abernethy, the city’s director of planning and development services, tweaked the message.

Welch held his news conference on Oct. 8, and the city started to post warnings.

The fliers were easy to miss, taped near entrances of apartment buildings when some residents had already hunkered down.

The next morning, Milton’s winds began to lash Tampa Bay.

Gusts at Albert Whitted Airport, in downtown St. Petersburg, topped 40 mph by 11 a.m.

Squalls pounded the city, turning the skyline gray. The cranes disappeared into the downpour.

By nightfall, the wind was over 50 mph, with higher gusts. As of 8:25 p.m., the city had pulled police officers and firefighters off the roads.

By 10 p.m., gusts were topping 80 mph.

Soon after, Austin Sullivan, an assistant project manager for a construction company, heard a “ripping” noise from his home two blocks away in the Ascent building. Then came a boom that Sullivan, a reserve officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, compared to the sound of a 200-pound bomb.

Through the window, he saw one of the cranes atop 400 Central was missing. He called 911.

He was the first person to tell firefighters about the collapse, records show. It was 10:14 p.m.

Liberty later surmised winds had gusted not just side-to-side but vertically up the face of the building, creating turbulence like what would jostle a plane.

That chaotic wind was too much for the equipment to take, said Fagan, the contractor’s general manager.

The arm atop the crane, and a long stretch of the tower holding it up, dropped onto First Avenue S.

Lawrence Shapiro, a consulting engineer and expert in tower cranes, said based on photos of the wreckage, it’s possible more than 200,000 pounds of metal and concrete had plummeted into the night.

Unsafe for human habitation

In the days after the hurricane, examining why the crane collapsed has fallen to the contractor itself.

A firm inspected the tallest crane left standing at 400 Central, finding the loose bolts around its braces, prompting Liberty to fix them and telling the company to check the equipment regularly.

That same day, Gov. Ron DeSantis held a press conference in front of the crushed building, criticizing the developer but dismissing the need for more oversight.

“I mean, do we have to regulate everything?” he said. He and his emergency management director called on companies and local governments to use “common sense.”

Three construction trade group officials told the Times it was important to note that outside 400 Central, other cranes and construction sites stayed safe during Milton. By a rough count, there are likely more than 20 cranes — of various types — in use across Tampa Bay.

“No crane collapse is ever acceptable, and this incident must be fully examined to ensure future safety,” Steve Cona III, president and CEO of the Florida Gulf Coast Chapter of the Associated Builders & Contractors, said in a statement.

Liberty’s general manager told the Times the contractor has retained an engineering firm to assess the crane and wind conditions. He said Liberty “has always made the safety of our people and the communities in which we work our number one priority.”

OSHA, the government agency that oversees crane safety for workers, doesn’t have an open inspection at the job site, a spokesperson said.

The city said it doesn’t have authority to launch an inquiry and has no plans for a specific report about the crane.

Several council members told the Times they want answers.

Council member Gina Driscoll, whose district includes downtown, said she is working with the city attorney to see what more officials can do.

“If you bring a crane into our city for a construction project, it needs to be able to withstand a Category 5 or be able to be dismantled on short notice, or you’re going to have to change your plans and not build so tall,” Driscoll said.

Residents are confronting how close they came to disaster.

Sara Bombela, who felt her nearby apartment vibrate when the broken crane hit the ground, said someone should be held accountable.

“Our beaches are destroyed? Got it. Force of nature. Houses demolished? Got it. Force of nature. A crane tumbling on top of our buildings?” she said. “It’s negligence, and it’s asinine.”

The damaged crane is still wedged like a cleaver into the side of the office building at 490 First Ave. S. Initial inspections show that when it fell, it ripped through air conditioning equipment and pipes, sending water gushing through several floors.

On the glass doors outside, a yellow sign warns: “UNFIT/UNSAFE FOR USE OR HUMAN HABITATION.”

Clean-up crews have ripped up the carpet. The air is still and smells of mold.

An attorney for Liberty has recommended people stop going inside, according to a letter sent to the city. Engineers determined there was a “very real possibility” that sections of the crane and other debris could shift and fall.

What comes next for the space — and the people who work inside — is uncertain.

Karma, the juice bar and eatery on the ground floor, said it is closed indefinitely. Conan Gallaty, chairman and CEO of the Times, said the newspaper is looking for alternative places to work.

Across the street, construction has resumed. Contractors brought in another crane to clean up the broken one.

The developer, John Catsimatidis Sr., founder of Red Apple Real Estate, said in a statement he was “saddened to learn about the damage to the adjacent property and the disruption to its commercial tenants.”

But the skyscraper itself emerged from the storm largely unscathed, he said.

A week after the hurricane, two cranes still stand at 400 Central — including one taller than the crane that fell.

Its long arm has started moving again, stark against the bright sky, tracing circles over the city.

———

(Times staff writer Shreya Vuttaluru contributed to this report.)

———

©2024 Tampa Bay Times. Visit tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.