What's that building growing out of the Bay Bridge?

No doubt you’ve seen the growing towers on the San Francisco skyline, and one of them will be the tallest residential tower in the west. One Rincon will be 60 stories high, and it’s up to 540 feet right now. By next year when it’s done, it’ll be 640 feet tall. The Chronicle has been publishing stories periodically about the tower, and today’s piece is about the guy who runs one of the cranes on the site. The next time you think getting to work is a challenge on the ground, consider what he has to do, every day:

To get to his workplace, Rubio rides a hoist attached to the outside of the building. He gets off at the 30th floor, then climbs over some piping and crosses to a plank a dozen feet long to the open steel frame of the crane. A series of ladders leads straight up.

Then he climbs, hand over hand, up 24 rungs of a steel ladder, to a platform. There are seven more platforms, 192 rungs on the ladders in all. At the top is a shorter ladder leading to the spot where the crane’s arm pivots. Here the operator must scramble up over the steel pivoting mechanism to the top, to the crane’s arm and control cab. Below is nothing but air and the cold wind of late winter. The view is breathtaking.

He can see the curavture of the earth from up there. That’s pretty cool.

And on another note, I wonder if he would have felt the earthquake up there.