Are There More Cranes in Seattle or Dubai?

Yellow and orange cranes tower above Seattle's landscape like an army of dinosaurs. There are a lot of them here. So much so that Ben Lang asked: "I have been told that the only place with more building cranes is Dubai," Lang stated. He resides in the University District. "Could that be true? The number of building cranes that are up in Seattle today, how does that compare with other cities worldwide?"

Well, Ben, Dubai resembles Las Vegas and Disneyland, which are cities always under construction at the same time. We're talking about the highest structures on earth. Fantastical tasks. Numerous cranes. Like, more than 900. How can anybody compete? Seattle has 60 cranes. But our city does not even have the most cranes in The United States and Canada. That title goes to Toronto, which has 80 cranes. Toronto is a little like Seattle. It has million dollar homes and individuals who cannot afford them, which is why architects are developing houses and apartments. On the other side of the world, in Australasia, the crane hire in South Australia and the state’s companies do not have nearly as many as either Toronto or Seattle.

But Ben should love to hear that Seattle has more cranes than San Francisco and Los Angeles. We're also a little ahead of Chicago, which has about 50. And we're not even counting the cranes in the residential areas. Christopher Reid of Renton spoke about the construction near his place. "I can see three huge cranes and two low loaders from my home today," he stated. "They're all yellow and they illuminate red, green and blue in the evening. It looks quite cool."

Garner Construction provides for a lot of the city's cranes. Jackie Garner states that they run 17 of the city's 60 cranes. By spring, they'll be supervising 27 crane tasks. At Garner's business, they do everything. "We are able to lease out the crane, we set up the crane we run the crane, we preserve the crane and we take the crane down."

And how DO you take a crane down? "They're removed in pieces and after that they're returned to the lawn, which remains in Salem, where our workers go through them and prepare them for the next task." So the cranes reside in Oregon, but they're not getting much time to rest. And looks like they'll be reaching even greater heights into the Seattle sky. The city is raising its structure heights, starting in the University District, then downtown and South Lake Union. The council is dealing with zoning one area at a time. This is a part of the grand deal with developers - exchanging height for more inexpensive units.

However, you'll never ever hear anybody state they're developing the world's highest high-rise building in Seattle, or undersea hotel, or turning condominium structure that is its own wind power station. That's occurring in Dubai.