  Big Blue (the crane) was brought into milwaukee to assist in lifting the roof sections to the top of miller park, the newly constructed ball park built to replace the aging milwaukee county stadium. the job was to build the roof sections for the reductive roof on the ground, and then have Big Blue lift them into place. since the ball park stood at 295 feet tall when fully assembled, they were going to need a crane almost twice that height in order to lift the 400+ ton slices of roof.
Big Blue's mast was 557 feet long and stood at 450 feet tall, and was well capable of lifting the comparably light 400 tons. at the time, this was the tallest, strongest crane ever produced. up until this point, every lift went off without a problem. on July 14th, the had decided that it was too windy (30+mph gusts) and that it was unsafe to do the pick that day. but then mitsubishi, the creator the roof, decided that it was more important to complete the stadium than it was to worry about the safety of their works. sure enough, the crane stood to full mast, moved about 30 feet, and toppled over onto the nearly complete building, setting construction back two years, and taking the lives of the three men who sat in a cherry picker attached to the crane that were spotting the lift. 
