Crane? Which crane? I guess there’s nothing to see here

Hello from 3:24am, where I’m typing a version of this message by the light of my phone in the bathroom. I woke up from a dream:

People were crammed into the elevator of the Tampa Bay Times building in downtown St. Petersburg. You know the building. During Hurricane Milton, a giant crane fell in from the city’s tallest tower? Yes, this one.

In the dream, the elevator crashed and we were begging to go up to avoid the hurricane’s flooding. Little did we know that a crane would soon crash through the high floors.

I’m not what you would call me rested. I’m so angry I can’t sleep. Not just about what happened to the building, but about the reaction to it, the blatant disregard for life and safety, the vomiting of hands. I’m angry at the generations of leaders who could have taken protective measures but instead continue to bend over backwards and get beaten up by Big Condo.

We Times journalists may talk about the loss of our office more than anyone else, which makes sense. We are professional chatterboxes.

But the building that once belonged to the Times but was later sold is not just about us. It’s an ecosystem home to a government contractor, a law firm, small businesses, and a cafe where customers with cute dogs bought pink smoothies. There are floor sweepers and security guards and people watering the plants.

This Frankenstein office was full of life. Having been there myself for around 20 years, I admit to a large amount of nostalgia. Other tenants had chandeliers and espresso machines, but not the newsroom. The carpet was strange, the furniture was from the late 1980s, and the toilet flush could be hit or miss. Our framed Pulitzer Prizes hung on the ugly beige walls.

Since the crane incident, some in the community have used images of the collapsed facade to unfold a metaphor of a quality last heard in a 10th-grade literature class. The crane! It symbolizes the death of the Times! And you see, criticism of our business is allowed. We literally lived in a glass house; we have to put up stones.

But this grim chatter felt particularly half-baked at a time when our journalists were hunkered down in hotel rooms 24/7 as a free public service, publishing hundreds of severe weather updates, or being wheeled around on dangerous roads with military-grade gas cans. They could file stories from 20 locations .

That brings us to one of those scenes.

Not only did these journalists capture the real-time account of tens of thousands of pounds of steel scattered on the streets of St. Pete on the stormy night, but they also set out to learn the larger story behind what happened.

Yay, this is a classic.

Florida, the promised land of hurricanes and evaporating coastlines, has no laws when it comes to making cranes safe in inclement weather. In fact, local governments are prohibited from making their own rules.

Why? Because when lawmakers considered setting standards a dozen years ago, lawmakers, under pressure from construction groups that greased the wheels in hallways and bars, said no.

This kind of greedy political nonsense has real consequences. Incredibly, no one was killed on October 9th when a crane fell from the future residences at 400 Central. It’s especially incredible considering the series of wishy-washy press conferences surrounding the disaster, a veritable buffet of undercooked chicken.

As the hurricane’s cone headed toward Tampa Bay and residents braced their windows and slowly retreated amid gridlocked traffic, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch announced that cranes could come down during the storm. The paralyzed city officials had asked, not ordered, the cranes to shut down.

The developers said there was no time. The city said residents could choose to leave the house or, you know, go into a stairwell or something.

It’s getting even warmer, there’s even more listeria. After the storm, Gov. Ron DeSantis stood in front of the gaping, dilapidated building and said: Bad developer, bad, but there’s not much to do. He had all the tact of a surgeon leaving a corpse with scissors and telling the family, “Um, I’m sorry.”

“I mean, do we have to regulate everything?” he told a crowd of reporters.

Well, maybe not. But can we start with heavy machinery falling from the sky during deadly weather events? After all, DeSantis was able to regulate the word “climate” out of state laws, eschew renewable energy targets and virtually suppress environmental movements like a lit cigarette, just as meteorologists were predicting this year’s “exceptional” hurricane season.

But cranes, that’s a bridge too far.

Let’s recap: Hey! Florida! Nobody cares! Nobody cares if a giant piece of construction equipment crushes your skull or destroys your business! That may sound extreme, but honestly, what are we left to think when hundreds of people are no longer in office and no one in any position of power is stepping in to do anything? It appears that not a single government agency is investigating the incident. Hardly anyone asks questions, no one except the developer, not what you would call a disinterested party.

We learned that St. Petersburg doesn’t wear big pants in its ongoing effort to get out of God’s waiting room. Meanwhile, Florida leaders don’t wear pants at all and wolf down margaritas on a developer-funded bill.

Sensible Floridians know that this will not be our last hurricane. Reasonable people know that storms will become stronger and more unpredictable as buildings in Florida get taller and there are no stricter regulations. There is still time to investigate this accident, time to consider creating mandatory evacuation zones in high-density areas, time to make another attempt to close the regulatory gap between federal standards and what happened here.

Unless? Hey. At least the luxury residences are safe. I wish the people who move in there when they open good luck.

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