These days it takes Ray McArthur about 140 steps to get to his office. All of them pretty much straight up.
Not that he counts them. When your job is operating a tower crane at a construction site, it’s best not to dwell on the details of verticality.
McArthur has been the guy in the sky for dozens of big construction jobs, including a half dozen at the UO. He just finished a gig at the Student Recreation Center, and this week he’ll start making a daily climb up the tower at the EMU project site.
Most likely, those climbs will be his last. Retirement beckons, but McArthur wanted to take one more 360-degree spin around the UO campus before climbing down for good and spending some quality time with the earth.
“I’m just an old farm boy,” says the man who works with his boots 150 feet above the ground.
McArthur has seen campus from all sorts of angles. His first view was from Autzen Stadium, where he worked on the 2002 expansion. After that he flew cargo over the Casanova Center, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Matthew Knight Arena and Global Scholars Hall before moving to the Student Recreation Center and now the EMU.
He likes the UO jobs (and not just for the paycheck). All the people moving around on the ground keep life interesting during the slow times, he said, and when it’s busy – and things get very, very busy – the work is challenging.
“It calls on everything you’ve got,” McArthur said during a chat atop his crane while it was at the rec center. “Everything’s got to be dead on the money. And you have to go just as hard as you can go.”
Crane operators know that precision counts. The safety of the workers below is largely in their hands, and since there’s only one way down at the end of the day, the last thing they want to see is a bunch of ticked-off roughnecks waiting at the bottom of the ladder come 5 o’clock.
But Dave Quivey, the construction superintendent on the rec center job, said there’s almost no one’s hands he’d rather have on the controls than Ray McArthur’s.
“It’s a limited pool of people qualified to run these cranes. Ray just happens to be one of the best,” Quivey said. “He’s got a touch. He has a gift.”
That means being able to swing several tons of material halfway across a construction site and bring it to a stop right where it’s needed. That’s no mean feat given that the arm of the crane and the load hanging beneath it don’t arrive at the same time.
McArthur does it all while sitting in a cab smaller than a porta-potty for days that can run to 16 hours. He put in a lot of days like that on the Autzen job, a go-go-go project that he says was the most intense he’s ever worked.
He was in the taller Autzen crane, about 200 feet up, when the February 2002 windstorm hit with gusts up to 70 mph. The crane’s warning beeper starts going off when the wind hits 20 mph, then the beeping speeds up when it hits 40 mph. By the time McArthur hit the ladder, it was making a sound he hadn’t even heard before.
“When I bailed out of that crane it was showing 67 mph on my wind gauge,” McArthur said. “I left my lunch pail in the cab because I knew if I dropped it they’d be picking it up in Corvallis.”
Who knows whether this last job will have any days like that, but McArthur will be taking that 140-step walk every day with no more concern than the rest of us have walking out to our cars in the morning.
And he won’t be counting the steps.
“I don’t do that,’ he said. “Then you’d be counting them every day.”
―By Greg Bolt, Public Affairs Communications