HOUSTON -- More than two years ago, the Investigators exposed how crane operators across the city were violating a state safety law. Since then, changes have been made not only in the Houston-area, but also across Texas and the nation, Local 2 reported Tuesday.

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Worker's Death Sparks Life-Saving Improvements

"How many other sons out there or daughters are going to be killed because a company said, 'I don't have to follow the law'?" mother Sara Moore said.

That question sparked our investigtion more than two years ago. Moore's 21-year-old son, Rory, was killed when the crane on which he was working came in contact with power lines, electrocuting him. But what happened to Rory went beyond just an accident.

"It hurts deeply to think that someone had so little regard for your son's life that they knew what should have been done and didn't care to do it," Moore said.

Rory was working on a crane that wasn't equipped with a safety device called an insulator link. The device is attached between a crane's load line and lift-hook and is designed to ground up to 40,000 volts of electricity. More specificially, Texas law requires all cranes to be equipped with insulator links. The Moore family sued the owner of the crane and won a $4¼ million settlement.

"The family was quite clear from the beginning that the only reason they wanted to go down this road was to try to make a difference and try to make change," said Richard Mithoff, the family's attorney.

Since Texas law requires all cranes to have insulator links, the Investigators decided to check more than a dozen cranes working around the Houston area. Not a single crane had the device.

The No. 1 cause of death for those in the crane industry is electrocution because of contact with overhead power lines. So, when Texas created the insulator link law, it was ahead of the rest of the country. But the Investigators found that while Texas may require insulator links, no one was assigned to enforce this law. As a result, most in the crane industry either did not know the law existed or just ignored it.

"Over 30 fatalities that I've investigated, I saw 25 to 30 percent were electrocution crane events," said Tara Hart, with the Compliance Alliance.

Hart is the president and CEO of the Compliance Alliance, a company that provides safety services to nearly 1,000 companies nationwide.

"On every one of the cranes I investigated, an insulator link would have prevented the fatality in those events," Hart said.

After seeing Local 2's initial investigation, Hart alerted the Department of Labor. After a series of meetings to revamp federal laws regarding crane safety, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration has decided to require all cranes across the country to be equipped with insulator links when working within certain distances of energized power lines.

Even before this development, Local 2's investigation prompted OSHA to order its inspectors in Texas to begin reporting any crane operator who violated the state law. Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal promised his office would prosecute the cases.

One company has already started selling insulator links throughout our area and held a series of seminars to teach crane operators how to use the devices.