Workers had been dismantling the 25-story crane known as Goliath for several weeks at the Fore River Shipyard in preparation for its shipment to Romania.

The workers were removing pieces of the crane to force the support leg to fall, but it came down before they were prepared, Fire Chief Joseph Barron said at an afternoon news conference.

"It did collapse in the manner it was designed to collapse. It just did not collapse when it was supposed to, obviously," Barron said.

The victim was identified as Robert Harvey, 28, of Weymouth. Authorities said four other workers suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Two were treated at the scene and two at a hospital.

Greg Nordholm, the president and co-owner of Norsar, the company supervising the demolition, told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy: "Everything was progressing normally, and then suddenly, without warning, a connection of one leg to the body seemed to fail."

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration will investigate.

Barron said the 12:30 p.m. collapse did not affect the structural stability of the rest of the crane.

General Dynamics Corp. constructed the Goliath crane in the 1970s and used it to lift huge pieces of ships and tankers at the shipyard, which once employed 32,000 people. The crane has been a fixture in the skies over Quincy for decades, but it's been idle since the shipyard closed in 1986.

Daewoo-Mangalia Heavy Industries, a Romanian shipbuilding and repair company, purchased the crane for an undisclosed sum.
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