Doyle Peeks spent nearly 50 years working with cranes and other construction equipment. His jobs included machine operator, master mechanic and equipment manager before owning a fleet of equipment. In short, he knows pretty much all there is to know about the sharp end of the construction equipment industry.
Now Peeks, 67, is still working as hard as ever, spending up to 18 hours a day on his website CraneAccidents.com which he launched in January 1999, and its sister site CraneTalk.com. Together they comprise a collection of photos, news stories, discussions and warnings about safety in the crane industry. Anybody can log on for a look, although there is a subscription charge to see more detailed articles.
‘I saw the need for something like it,’ says Peeks, ‘so I started by posting a few pictures up and it went from there’. The site registers around half a million hits a month, Peeks claims, and runs to 500 pages.
He can boast a very loyal following. One of them goes by the name of Bandaid 33, who says: ‘Many crane operators know the loneliness of challenging a fuming boss’s decision to make a pick. And many operators have left a job with the lonely feeling that refusing the pick may not have been the right decision after all. There is no lonelier feeling than that of a good crane operator who refuses a ranting boss’s insistence that he take a chance, and then have no one to talk to who has been in the same situation. Doyle Peeks and CraneAccidents.com has changed all that. And thanks to Doyle and his passion to right a very long standing wrong, crane operators around the world now have a place to come and share their experiences, learn from others’ experiences, and grow in their professionalism.’
Peeks says that 85% of site visitors are from the USA but that more and more people from other parts of the world are logging on. The log-in book for the site reads like ‘a who’s who of the crane industry’, he says, and most big American companies log on at one time or another.
Peeks has not been afraid to court controversy in his campaign to promote safety in the industry. ‘There has been lots of trouble,’ he says. ‘A lot of people have tried to close the site down.’ One of the site’s features is operators reporting accidents and safety lapses, often about their employers. ‘Lots of companies have been exposed,’ says Peeks. Needless to say, enemies have been made.
Peeks is also ‘disappointed’ that crane operator unions in the USA have not got more involved, something he feels could be beneficial to the industry.
Now, however, faced with escalating health problems, he feels unable to continue to give the site the time and attention it needs so he has decided to sell the site. He is adamant, though, that potential buyers are carefully vetted, to ensure that the future owner builds on his progress. He has already turned down one bid because he suspected that the plan was to shut the site down. ‘I’ll only sell to somebody I know is going to keep it going,’ he says.
He admits that some people have complained to him about the subscription charges. Although he does make ‘some profit’ from the site, it is barely proportional to the hours he puts in. He insists that he is motivated by a love of cranes and a determination to improve safety standards, and not by money. ‘It is the most gratifying thing I’ve ever done,’ he says.
Peeks says that the mission of the site is to spread the word about crane safety and get more people involved. ‘It’s doing some good,’ he says, citing the accident comparison charts on the site which clearly show a decrease in accidents. Peeks is quick to share the credit with other safety organisations, although he is very proud of his contribution.
