This Is Why You Firmly Anchor Your Construction Crane

Ever stare up at a sky-kissing construction crane and wonder what's stopping it from falling over? The answer is at the very bottom, where work crews have fixed the tower in a massive concrete pad days or weeks before the building's begun.

That's the theory, anyway, and it doesn't always bear out in the real world. The importance of a structurally perfect crane anchor was on display this Sunday in Kirov, a city of 474,000 people located about 500 miles northeast of Moscow. Forceful winds blowing through a construction site began to move a huge crane sideways, setting it up for a destructive date with gravity and an apartment building.