Post 9 – There may be hope… (tagline story continued…)

A miracle happened on site today. I can go home tomorrow and say, “I made a difference in Iraq.”

It’s been a day or two since the tagline incident and for those few days, the tagline was utilized on the pallet when lifting the bricks, I had had a chat with the crane operator and the swinging was reduced, and they were even the bricks by creating an assembly line of workers to instead of just flipping them out and breaking half of them. But that work was done by the Nepalese and Iraqis.

Today, no bricks had arrived yet but the framework for a concrete placement was in the making. Concrete and all things related was the job of the subcontractors – the Turks… my best friends…

I returned to site after lunch to find the crane lifting a load of framework to the upper story, no tagline and one of the men teetering on the edge of the 8-9 inch wide brick wall of the second story without any fall protection. He was balancing 30ft up in the air and simultaneously trying to steady the crane lift as it came closer.

Again, I will emphasize that ALL a tagline is, is a rope dangling from the load so that you can grab it and help control the load. It is a safety pre-caution that actually makes life EASIER. But they refuse to use it!

Of course, Ahmed (the Safety Officer on site) and Bassam (The turkish subs –77 Company—safety officer) were out to lunch – not that they would have stopped them anyways.

As Mike and I pull up and see the scene unravel, I say, “How did this just happen?” Mike responds, “No, this IS happening.” With that, we get out of the truck and I march over.

First I tell the Turk that is balancing on the edge to put on a fall protection harness. To my surprise, he said, “Ok,” and put it on. Weird. He points to the rebar that he has hooked his harness to, gives a tugging motion and throws his hands up in defeat – this is Turkish sign language for “my movements are now restricted and I can’t do my work.” Well, that’s what I assumed he was saying. None of the Turkish speak English and I can’t say more than merdivan --“ladder” and terazi -- “level” in Turkish. I attempted to explain back that he’s only steadying the crane and doesn’t need to walk around. Though, due to my lack of Turkish and his lack of English, he probably thought I said “tough shit.”

Well, at least he’s not going to fall while I’m on site—he’ll take it off as soon as I leave.

Right, Turkish dude will not fall to his death in my presence – check. Next mission– crane and tagline. Hm, there’s a second crane today, one which I’ve never seen before, and with it, a new operator. This is now more than just a tagline situation.

Step 1 – I stop the crane load and make the workers to put on a tagline.

Step 2 – As they busy themselves with this, I make a quick inspection of the crane.

Cables don’t look frayed. Looks oiled (but tough to tell with crane still up), and out-riggers are on a level surface and in good condition.

(The cable snapped yesterday on a neighboring site, sending a trailer to a devastating final crash. Fortunately, no one got hurt, but I’m now paranoid because we use a crane every day.)

Step 3 – Figure out how to find out if this new guy is certified or at least has experience (anyone with a driver’s license can legally operate a crane in Iraq so I’d like to at least know this isn’t his first time behind the controls). The difficulty is that I can’t just ask. First, he doesn’t speak English. Two, if I just ask he’ll lie to keep his job and then Andalus (the company) will probably just make up paperwork to show he is certified and the crane has been inspected and I’ll have no way to prove the documentation isn’t real.

I have absolutely no clue how to approach this situation. Mike is next door at the communication and radio project, so I’m on my own. I decide the best course of action is to wing it.

So, the work continues with the new crane. I watch it for a bit and then work my way over to Kareem—the usual crane operator who is now just standing around since his crane isn’t being used at the moment. Kareem and I get along well and he loves to talk to me when he gets a chance. Unfortunately, he only knows about 5 words in English. (Whenever I want to give him instructions, there’s a lot of drawings involved.) I try to ask him about his job as casually as I can. It’s important that he sees my questions as curiosity, and not in any way threatening. How long has he been operating cranes? I ask him. Big cranes? Little cranes? (I know that Kareem is a good operator, I’m not worried about him but you’ll see my point in a moment). Turns out Kareem is licensed to operate big cranes and he’s worked in the US and in Tokyo! He very proudly shows me his license. (I’m on my way to success).

I ask about the new guy – “What about him? Good? Does he have a license like you too?” Kareem, tilts his head from side to side and shrugs his shoulders. After a LOT of hand gestures, I find out that New Guy does have a license. He’s been doing it for a few years and is pretty good, but he swings too quickly with it, and isn’t as experienced as Kareem. Besides, he’s only worked in Iraq, Kareem points out, and definitely does not have the skills to work in Tokyo or the US. I nod my head in agreement.

I compliment Kareem on his skills and experience. I bring up the tagline and explain how he understands how important it is and the he knows the correct way to operate a crane.

Yes, it may seem that I am patronizing the man, but I’m not—everyone deserves a compliment when they do well. But, yes, I will admit I am taking advantage of the situation to extract information, wouldn’t you?

I spend most of my day telling the QC, Safety officer and the workers what they are doing wrong. If this is all I did, they would grow weary of me very quickly and would only make progress more difficult. And so, I do my best to say something positive before I comment on something that is wrong (unless what they’re doing is really bad – like dangling off edges with no fall protection and a swinging crane is inches away).

All the workers pretty much assume every word out of my mouth will be comment intended to correct them, and they see most of these corrections as slowing the work down. I.e. not throwing the bricks so half of them break – is seen to them as a drawn out process that makes unloading take twice as long. They don’t see the big picture, that even though it may take longer to unload the bricks, they won’t need as many truck loads if all the bricks stayed intact. But now we’re talking about a difference in culture and way of thinking – I’ll leave this for another day, another blog.

The tagline started out as another one of those hindrances, UNTIL young crane operator showed up today. The exterior brick walls were now finished up to a height of 6 feet high, and the columns, spaced about 10 feet apart are also 10 feet high. This meant the load had to come up over the wall and between the small spaces between the columns, leaving very little room for error. New Guy was swinging stuff all over the place and making it near impossible for the workers to settle the load to get it over the brick walls and between the columns.

Now, keep in mind the tagline IS being utilized at this point because I’m on site watching. After a few loads with New Guy going nuts with the crane, they workers bringing the load in caught on, and it was like watching a miracle – they realized that rope in hand was helping to steady the load made it a lot easier and actually FASTER. That tagline suddenly became very useful. In fact, it became SO useful that about an hour later Kareem found me and proudly presented me with the new and improved tagline. It no longer was just a rope, it was a rope with a spit-shining new D hook on the end, safety latch and all.

At that moment, a trailer was about to get moved and before I could even say something, Kareem ran over, shouted at the workers (I have no clue what he said, but they all seem to listen when he gets worked up—Arabic sounds very angry all of the time), and used the hook to latch the tagline to the trailer. Honestly, this man was BEAMING with pride. Ahmed, the Safety Officer, later came to me and said he’d like to use TWO ropes on the pallets because he thinks it’d be easier. I smile at him, and say he can use 10 if wants, whatever makes the job easiest.

In the days following, Kareem will claim the tagline as his and keep it with his crane. It took a few more reminders, but a few days after this incident, I was over at communication and radio building, looked out across the way, and there it was. It was a site for sore eyes…I hadn’t stopped by Housing yet, and they didn’t know I was in the area, and yet, a load of bricks was up in the air, and there was a beautiful rope hanging down…