Getting Certified to Lift in Fast-Growing Athens

Growth that shows up on the skyline

Athens started as a cotton and railroad town. Since the aerospace boom of the 1950s and 1960s it has been drawn steadily into Huntsville’s orbit, and the Mazda Toyota assembly plant on the Limestone County side of Huntsville pulled suppliers, housing and traffic toward this end of the county. Midway between Nashville and Birmingham on I-65, the city also works as a distribution location.

For crane crews, that means a mix: tilt-up and steel warehouse panels, precast box culverts for new roads, water tanks, church and school additions, and truss packages for housing tracts. Few of those are huge lifts, but they are frequent, and general contractors increasingly want certified operators on all of them.

Working around Browns Ferry

TVA chose the Browns Ferry site in 1966, and the plant came online in the early 1970s, at the time the largest nuclear plant in the world. It supplies much of the power for the Huntsville-Decatur area and is a major local employer. Nuclear sites run on detailed written procedures, and contractors who support maintenance and outage work there face strict expectations for documentation, lift planning and qualified personnel.

If you hope to work around large utility facilities, a current operator card, a rigging qualification and comfort with written lift plans make a stronger application.

Rules that apply in Limestone County

There is no Alabama crane license and no Athens city license. Federal OSHA enforces 29 CFR 1926 Subpart CC on private construction sites here: operators must be certified by an accredited program and evaluated by the employer under 1926.1427, signal persons must be qualified under 1926.1428, and riggers must be qualified under 1926.1425 and 1926.1404 for the tasks those sections cover.

One wrinkle: Alabama has no approved state plan covering public employees, so city and county crews are not covered by federal OSHA the way private crews are. Many public agencies still ask for certification as a matter of policy. Our requirements guide explains more.

Things that change a lift here

• Spring tornado season in the Tennessee Valley, with a second storm period in late fall.
• Hot, humid summers that slow riggers and push operators toward fatigue.
• Flat farmland converted to building pads, where fresh fill may not be compacted.
• Rural overhead power lines along county roads near new subdivisions.