CHAMPAIGN – Operating a tower crane isn't for everyone – especially if you're acrophobic, claustrophobic or clumsy. Your whole day is spent in a compact "cabin" about 200 feet in the air. Part of the ...

Jason Prorok has a view usually reserved for birds. The Humphrey man is an operating engineer for International Union of ...

Chris Stephen doesn't have a job out of this world but it's way up there. "I've been running tower cranes on and off since 2007," he told me in his "office" three hundred feet in the air. Chris is one ...

There’s only a couple of workers among the several dozen on the 2200 Westlake construction site, near Westlake Avenue and Denny Way, who can get away with not wearing a hard hat. One of them is Willie ...

Joe Mondloch’s workplace hinges on where his employer deploys him, confined high in the air like a bat in a cage. Navigating a crane while mounted anywhere from 150 feet to over 800 feet above ground ...

Raymond "Paul" Lacrouts' workday begins with a cup of coffee from 7-Eleven and a brief chat with co-workers. The Lehigh Acres resident then grabs his lunchbox and heads up to his office. Way up. As a ...

LA GRANDE — Cameron Rousseau doesn’t need a jolt of espresso to get his blood pumping each weekday morning. The last 130 feet of his journey to work in La Grande does the trick. Rousseau is the tower ...

Welp. I know what job I can never do. And that’s be a tower crane operator. To even start operating a crane, the guy has to make the scariest climb up the entire thing while carefully switching ...