I remember footage of an excavator on a river barge using its bucket as an oar…one “stepped” over an exposed water line…another carefully filled a tiny Tonka toy truck without spilling a grain of sand.

I don’t believe that can be taught.
You either have a golden hand or you don’t.

I don’t know how to trust this but seems more helpful than most of what I have seen written about this crane falling over in other places. Quote below is from the linked post.

“We call this “cutting free while rigged” in my corner of industry – and it is one of the most dangerous parts of controlled or piece by piece demolition.

Usually (as the operator), you run quick math to figure out the total volume of what you’re hooked to, +/- 10% MoE, and multiply it against your handy-dandy specific density chart for most base materials.

Unfortunately, a lot of times the guys that are willing to risk their lives way up high in manlifts with a 10′ oxy-mag lance slicing through beams and plate work – well, those guys aren’t exactly the best communicators in the heat of the moment. Sometimes they cut the wrong joint, or misunderstood and cut you off a bigger chunk than you wanted once you are already rigged and in tension.

Once the chunk is free, you have no choice but to ride it out, even if your load cells are indicating critical OL and every alarm in the cab is screaming at you. All you can do is try to get it to the ground as quickly as possible.

Ideally, this should never happen – but in practice, it’s not common, but also not rare. Been there twice personally, but I think so has everyone with significant seat time.

The same can happen if you’re suspending something and demolition cuts cause it to collapse, particularly if it tilts intact and drags its own CG off-axis from your reeve-head. Cranes are obviously meant to withstand and carry load in line with a particular geometry as one would consider vertically planar w/ counterweight. Loads outside of this narrow corridor tend to do really unfortunate things to a structure optimized to withstand insane fatigue cycle, but also not contribute too much against its own limits with flown weight.

I’m assuming this is the second of those two scenarios, as it appears the operator is above a 35° boom angle, but the boom remained intact. Normally, exceeding structural maximum limitations to the point of tip over, at least on a rough terrain crane (assuming but cannot quite make it out) – it’s more common for the boom to collapse, than the crane to tip, especially sideways.”

Blackwing1: You need to reread the rules about commenting. Just glance up a tiny bit. They are there as plain as day. No obscenities allowed.

I have deleted the curse word from your comment. You are warned. Do this again and I’ll ban you for a week.

At this site I had a construction manager trying to talk me into approving them bolting these components together on the ground and then doing a single one-piece lift “to save time and money”. After throwing a complete [deleted]fit, I carefully, in front of witnesses, explained to him that not only would I not approve that as an advisory engineer, but that our structural engineers had explicitly prohibited doing this, and that it was spelled out that way in the erection manual. I made it painfully clear that not only would he be experiencing sole liability for it, I would find the site structural supervisor and have him completely stop work on the entire site until a more responsible construction manager could be found. He backed off.

Just looking at the video (through some amazing heat-shimmer) it appears that the crane toppled forward in the direction of the load, indicating that it was probably not correctly counter-balanced, or that the outriggers were poorly placed, or that it was simply over-loaded for the lift and/or reach they were attempting. Whoever was in control and charge of that lift is in deep doo-doo.

A further relevant question, as you note, is the matter of whether or not the failed crane was being operated by a contractor or by an actual SpaceX employee at the time of the accident. I suspect it won’t be long before that question has a public answer.

Whether due to operator error, poor engineering at worksites or forces of nature, crane accidents – including many involving pieces of equipment quite a bit larger than this one at Starbase – are common enough that videos of dozens can be found easily on YouTube.
Compared to some of those readily findable there, this one at Starbase looks to be pretty small beer – especially if, as seems the case, no one was seriously injured or killed. Sadly, that is not the case in many of these incidents. There were two fatalities in the collapse of a much larger crane three weeks ago on Merritt Island, FL, for example, in an incident blamed on inclement weather (wind).