Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The: `Russian roulette' played

`Russian roulette' played, crane expert says

He says Mitsubishi supervisor, 2 others should have heeded wind conditions

By KENNETH R. LAMKE

of the Journal Sentinel staff

Tuesday, October 31, 2000

Victor Grotlisch "was playing Russian roulette, but not with his own life" by ordering a 450-ton roof piece to be lifted at Miller Park on July 14, 1999, a crane expert testified Monday.

Grotlisch was the site supervisor for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of America, the subcontractor in charge of building the ballpark's radial retractable roof.

Also Monday, the widows of three ironworkers who were killed when the roof piece crashed in the accident tearfully told a civil court jury of their strong relationships with their husbands and how they are coping with the men's deaths.

Patricia Wischer, 37, of Pewaukee, Marjorie DeGrave, 37, of Kimberly and Ramona Dulde-Starr, 50, of Milwaukee are suing Mitsubishi and Lampson International Ltd., the firm that leased the project's Big Blue crane and a crane crew to Mitsubishi.

The "Russian roulette" opinion was offered by crane expert Howard Shapiro, who has 30 years in the field and is the author of a textbook on crane structure and operations.

Shapiro said Grotlisch and Allen Watts and Fred Flowers, the crane crew chief and crane operator for Lampson, were all negligent in allowing the fatal lift to be made in high winds.

Flowers' disregard for wind conditions the day of the fatal accident "reflects very poorly" on him, Shapiro said.

Shapiro said he was aware of Flowers' testimony, given in a deposition, that the wind speed indicator on Big Blue at the exact time of the accident was 17 mph, within the 20 mph planned limit for the crane.

But Flowers also testified that gusts were above 30 mph earlier that afternoon and that he would not have alerted the supervisor of the crane crew unless winds reached 25 to 27 mph, Shapiro said.

Flowers had testified in the deposition that "I wasn't worried before that."

Flowers' lack of action to halt the lift was partly responsible for Shapiro's opinion that Lampson was negligent in the accident, Shapiro said.

But, as another expert, William Keefe, did previously, Shapiro mostly blamed Mitsubishi for the accident because, he said, it was the firm in charge of roof construction.

Shapiro said his calculations showed that the fatal lift should not have proceeded in winds higher than 11 mph, given the weight of the roof piece and the area subject to a wind sail effect. The fact that no calculation was made of the wind sail effect on the roof piece was evidence of negligence, Shapiro said.

Monday's testimony came as the jury trial began its third week and marked the end of the plaintiffs' case. Mitsubishi is expected to begin its defense today, followed by Lampson.

Richard Levy, a psychiatrist, also testified Monday that the three ironworkers realized they were going to die for about 13 seconds before they crashed to the ground in a man basket and that they suffered "terminal psychological pain" during that time.

The man basket was suspended about 250 feet in the air by another crane, which Big Blue struck, sending the three men plummeting to the ground.

"I'm sure they were terrified. They knew they were going to die. It must have been a horrible experience for them," said Levy, of Scarborough, Maine.

Levy is a former Air Force psychiatrist who has counseled pilots who survived crashes and who said he has analyzed cockpit voice recorders of at least 50 fatal military aircraft crashes.

Wischer said that she married her husband, Jeffrey, in 1980 and that they had three children, Shauna, 17, Zachary, 11, and R.J., 9.

Her husband apparently had a premonition of death three or four days before the accident, she said, because he told her that if anything should happen to him, she should call Robert W. Habush's law firm. Habush is representing her and DeGrave. David Lowe is representing Dulde-Starr.

Her two older children have had therapy because of their father's death, Patricia Wischer said.

The youngest child, "he's Mommy's boy. He talks to me a lot. He says, `I just think about the good things, I don't cry,' " she said.

DeGrave said that she married her husband, William, in 1994, and that they had two children, James, 4, and Maggie, 3.

She said she received a phone call at the time of the accident and, when she was unable to reach her husband on his cell phone for 50 minutes, "I knew he was gone." She then received a call confirming his death, she said.

"The pain is an open wound," Marjorie DeGrave said. "It doesn't stop. It doesn't stop."

Dulde-Starr said she married her husband, Jerome Starr, in 1994. She has children from a previous marriage and he had one, but they had no children together, she said.

Dulde-Starr introduced her husband's two adult sisters and his brother, who were in the courtroom. Starr "was pretty much the center of the family," she said.

"We were together for many years before we were married. We were like one person. I miss everything about him," Dulde-Starr said.