アメリカ(海外)不動産投資で利回り２０％以上

ネバダでは、こんなジョークが、定番になっています。

　What is the State Bird of Nevada ？

ネバダの州鳥に指定されてる鳥はなんだい？

Answer: The crane!

Craneとは、英語で、鶴。

しかし、日本語で、そのまま、「クレーン」といえば、、、、

もう分かりましたか？

そう、建築ラッシュが、続いていることに対し、ネバダで、一番ネバダを象徴する鳥は、工事現場の「鳥」だ、というわけですね。

私がベガスに初めて行き始めた時に教わったジョークですが、現在も、健在らしく、レビュージャーナルに、下のような記事が。

長くなりますが、原文も引用しておきます。

原典はこちらから。

Sep. 02, 2007
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

IN DEPTH: The State Bird of Nevada

The ubiquitous construction crane has become an offbeat indicator of a booming economy. With $30 billion in projects planned or in the works, Las Vegas' crane population has grown to around 60.

By HUBBLE SMITH
REVIEW-JOURNAL

Down on the Strip, where reality is blurred with fantasy and anything seems possible, tourists in shorts and sandals gawk in awe at the massive amount of casino development under way.

The growth defies economic constraints and makes fools out of bearish Wall Street analysts.

Las Vegas has hit the wall. The boom is over. The bust is near. You've heard it for decades.

Yet never in the history of Las Vegas have so many construction cranes, jokingly referred to by local residents as the state bird, swarmed the skies as they do today. (For the record, Nevada's state bird is the Mountain Bluebird, a member of the thrush family.)

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The construction cranes are seen as offbeat indicators of the city's economy.

The number varies from day to day, but a rough count shows about 60 cranes on construction sites throughout the Las Vegas Valley.

"We don't have that many in Florida," visitor Scott Hancock of Tampa, Fla., said as he, with his family and friends, watched a mishmash of cranes working on the $7.5 billion CityCenter project. "This is neat if you like construction. It's just another attraction."

The Strip has always been the epicenter of crane activity in Las Vegas. With $30 billion in projects under construction or planned, it continues to fuel Southern Nevada's economic engine.

About two dozen cranes are clustered on the 66-acre CityCenter development by MGM Mirage. Another 20 or so are working on Fountainebleau, Palazzo, Wynn Encore, Trump, Cosmopolitan and Planet Hollywood Towers by Westgate. Panorama, Turnberry Towers and Palms Place have two cranes each.

Eight cranes are operating downtown, a place where nobody had developed for years. The World Market Center and Juhl, a mixed-use development, each have three cranes on the job, while Streamline Tower and Las Vegas Premium Outlets each have one.

They've even reached the suburbs. Cranes were recently dismantled from One Queensridge Place, which is finished, and Spanish View Towers, which has halted construction. There's one at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a couple south of the Strip.

"I don't think there's ever been this many," Las Vegas native David Dieleman of Dielco crane and rigging company said. "This town's definitely moving right now."

Dick Rizzo, vice chairman of Perini Building, general contractor for CityCenter, said the concentration of cranes on the Strip is more than he's seen in nearly 30 years of building in Las Vegas.

"It's very difficult right now to even find a crane," he said. "The last I heard, there's a shortage nationally. To order a new one is six to nine months. The other side of that is finding operators. There's a huge demand for operators and a limited number of them. We were a week without an operator on our Sheraton (hotel) project in Phoenix and brought one down from Las Vegas."

Cranes come in a variety of categories and sizes specifically designed for certain tasks. They cost anywhere from $600,000 for a basic small crane to upward of $5 million for cranes that can handle up to 700 tons, Dieleman said.

The most commonly seen cranes in Las Vegas are hammerhead tower cranes used to build hotels, casinos and high-rise condos. You've also got your ground cranes and mobile cranes, all-terrain cranes and rough-terrain cranes, crawler cranes and hydraulic truck cranes.

"They're all a little different," Dieleman said. "A lot depends on the job requirements and where you have to go, if you work up at Mount Charleston or if you go to work at the dam. The other thing is capacity, what you have to pick (up) and how high you have to go."

It takes two to four days to set up larger cranes and at least eight hours for smaller cranes, he said. It's usually pretty easy moving into a job with wide-open spaces, but it gets a little tricky to dismantle the cranes when everything gets built tightly around them.

"You've got to go up so far and then you've got to go in so far," Dieleman said. "That all depends on boom length. Those dimensions determine how much boom you need to make the pick. When we built the Eiffel Tower (at Paris Las Vegas), we had 620 feet of boom to set the last pick."

As scheduling and logistics manager for Perini at CityCenter, Scott Gorley has to look at how everything is being pieced together and then lay out the building plan accordingly. His challenge is setting up a pathway to get the cranes in and out of the site, figuring out what work they'll do, what their reach needs to be and how they can move about freely without impeding the work of other cranes.

"The amazing part is every job is different, the way you build it out and how you end up and get the last pieces out when you're done," Gorley said.

San Diego-based CityMark Development had to build the 15-story condo tower and nine-story midrise at Juhl before starting on the six-story townhomes, project manager Alex Beaton said. For occupancy purposes, he would rather have started on the townhomes.

Swing radius was an issue because safety cables that hang in front of the crane would conflict with lower structures, he said.

"With such a tight site, we had to have room to handle the numerous amounts of form work due to the complexity of the concrete structure," Beaton said.

By starting with the taller buildings on Bonneville Avenue to the north, CityMark was able to perform underground utilities work, which was mostly located on the south side of the parcel. That allowed general contractor Turner Construction to go vertical before the site work was finished.

Most construction companies rent tower cranes from businesses like Dielco or Jake's Crane, Rigging and Transport in Las Vegas. They deliver the crane to the site, assemble it and charge a monthly fee.

The typical fee for installation and disassembly runs around $60,000. That includes shipping the crane to the site, renting the mobile crane used to assemble the tower crane and the cost of the crew that handles the assembly. A typical monthly fee for a 150-foot tower crane is around $15,000, with an additional charge to rent the climbing frame and extra mast sections.

Perini owns three of the tower cranes at CityCenter along with some of the rubber-tire mobile cranes, Rizzo said. The others are rented.

Dieleman said crane operators make $35 to $40 an hour after certification, which requires at least 1,000 hours of experience and passing a written test. Most of his operators are hired from International Union of Operating Engineers Local 12 in Las Vegas.

"You need to have talent to be an operator," he said. "You need hand-eye coordination and good depth perception. You're not going to just hop up there and pull levers. You've got to know what's going on and have a little coordination."

Darrell Dieleman said construction cranes tend to capture people's attention because they're easily visible and they're moving such huge and heavy objects. Why doesn't it tip over? How can such a long boom lift so much weight?

"People wonder how they do it," he said. "I've got a little 2-year-old and she's already pointing out cranes when we're driving down the road. They just stick out. You look at construction sites and one of the first things you pick out is the crane."

David and Darrell Dieleman have been around cranes all their lives. Their grandfather, Jake Dieleman, came to Las Vegas in the 1930s to work on Hoover Dam and eventually founded Jake's Cranes in 1946. Their father, Richard Dieleman, broke off to establish Dielco Cranes in 1981.

Jake's has three tower cranes on top of the World Market Center and about 33 ground cranes around town, director of engineering and fabrication Mark Sovocool said. The company is bidding for jobs at Echelon and Caesars Palace Villa Tower. A 400-ton truck crane is headed for CityCenter.

Jake's 230-ton capacity tower gantry cranes are used to build high-rise hotels, dams, power plants and other large-scale projects on a fast-track schedule, Sovocool said.

With their height versatility, heavy lift capacity, hook line speed and boom and slew rates, these machines typically outperform conventional hammerhead tower cranes, he said.

"In your approach to buildings, the amount you can lift is based on your distance from the location. With a tower crane, you get up to the edge of the building and work over it, but you don't have the ability to bring the boom up and down. It isn't just picking up. Getting the empty hook back to the ground is paramount to speed," Sovocool said.

Gantry tower cranes cost more than their counterparts, but on a large project, their performance efficiency translates into significant cost savings to the general contractor and owner, he said.

"The crane is the heart and nucleus of the job, pumping materials to where it's needed, so every hour saved for a 40- or 50-man work force is a huge savings for the contractor," Sovocool said.

Not only are cranes expensive to purchase, they're high-maintenance, David Dieleman said. Operating costs include insurance, permitting, inspections, oil, fuel and periodic cable replacement.

"They're a mechanical piece of equipment with a lot of moving parts," he said. "Now they all have computers on them. Electronics and construction don't get along. Dust and heat affects computers. If we didn't have some of the best mechanics, we probably wouldn't be where we're at. It's on their shoulders when something goes wrong."

Dieleman said a crane broke on the Cosmopolitan project, shutting the job down while a part was flown in from Wisconsin. His crew worked all night to get the crane up and running the next day.

"That's what you're up against. You talk about late openings. You get to the end of a job and they start pushing to open the doors and start making money. That's what it's all about," he said.

Sovocool recognized the impact cranes have on children when a woman contacted him while visiting Hoover Dam with her grandson, Jake.

After the child saw his name on one of the cranes working on the bypass bridge, the woman wrote a children's story about Jake's cranes, complete with illustrations of construction work at the dam.