A crane’s-eye view of UNMC

Troy Whitehead, a tower-crane operator for Hausmann Construction, spends his day, all day, about 118 feet up. You’ve seen those yellow cranes all over campus? That’s where Whitehead is, six days a week.

The view from Whitehead’s “office.”

The height doesn’t bother him. He was an ironworker before he was a crane operator. It’s the movement he had to get used to.

“When you pick up heavy objects,” he said, “the whole crane moves.”

Does that make you nervous?

“I wouldn’t say nervous,” he said. “It’s just a weird feeling.”

If you don’t take the time to stop and watch these construction sites, the cranes, at first glance, may seem to be fairly motionless. In reality, they never stop working. Whitehead never stops working.

The cranes “pick” everything for the job sites. They get equipment inside the buildings, materials for setting the iron, etc.

“I’m busy all day,” Whitehead said. He goes up, and he doesn’t come down.

He has a bunch of bottles with him. Some are for drinking, and some are for — well, you work on a medical campus. You do the math.

Crane operators communicate with their co-workers via two-way radio.

“I actually have two radios in here,” Whitehead said. “I have to have contact with the crane south of me because he’s so close. He’s taller than me, but if he’s working in my area, I can’t spin all the way around.”

Sometimes, he’s lowering in stuff without being able to see where it’s going, with just the voice on the radio guiding him in. “Blind picks,” these are called.

“You gotta be pretty precise,” Whitehead said. “A lot of the stuff I’m picking up is pretty big and heavy and I can’t bump into stuff, it’ll break other stuff. All of those glass panels, you’ve got to be careful.

“They’re on the radio with me constantly,” he said.

He was trying to remember how long he’s been working up in this tower crane at 42nd and Emile, overlooking the Ruth and Bill Scott Student Plaza grassy field. It was right before winter, he decided. November 2014.

Has construction gone as quickly for the crew as it has seemed to us?

“It’s a tight job site,” he said. “There’s not much room to store stuff and everybody’s on top of everybody. So far, it’s gone pretty smooth.”