About five tons of mechanical equipment inside a container dangled off the side of the Bank of America building, near the top, right over Kearney Street.
Workers told ABC7 they were installing new window washing gear on the roof of the Bank of America building and have been doing it for the past three days, but they said the load that got stuck was the heaviest load they've lifted so far.
The weight proved to be too much for the crane. The container weighs 11,000 pounds and it was dangling over 500 feet in the air.
"It contains two spools of wire weighing about 11,000 pounds and the winch snapped, so now the only way they can get it up there is they're going to have to hand crank it. It's about 100 feet they have to bring it up. It's going to take about 3-3.5 hours. There's no danger right now. We've got everything locked down, we've got traffic and pedestrians out of the area. We've got officers at all the corners to make sure that nobody gets in there," said San Francisco Police Sgt. Joe Fisher.
There were two men cranking the container up and around 6 p.m. they were moving it at a rate of 20 feet in an hour. This caused traffic jams all over the area and Chinatown.
