Crystal Powell 28

Crane Operator

My father was a truck driver and I always liked being with him when he did his deliveries around our area.  He taught me to drive his truck and I liked it a lot.  He never actually told me a girl shouldn’t be driving trucks for a living but I think he thought that.  I actually got my AZ license and was going to be a tractor trailer driver like him but then my brother told me about a job at his company learning to drive a boom truck.  He’s nine years older than me and he operates a tower cranes in one of those tiny cabins way up high.  He loves it.  He says it makes him feel like he’s running the whole project and he’s the only one that gets to see a high rise building go up from an aerial view. I could never do that but he’s in the Operating Engineers union that also represents boom truck and mobile crane operators and the company was looking for some trainees for its mobile equipment. At first I was just driving a repair truck that serviced the company’s crane equipment onsite, but if I took the apprenticeship program I could start driving and operating the boom trucks and maybe later the mobile cranes. The starting pay was way more than I was making at my old job and went up to twice that much when I got my certificate so it was a no brainer to me. A lot more money and a career operating a vehicle doing work way more interesting than delivering carpets to hardware stores. I finished my apprenticeship about a year ago and the boom truck I operate now can handle a load of 18 tonnes. It gets pretty tricky on some jobsites. I’ve had to learn about how to maintain my truck and how to operate it safely and I take great satisfaction in doing both very well.