Working Safely?

[IJL]

H&S may have lost the plot but its worth remembering that 1 person a week is fatally injured in the construction industry. I don't suppose that their families think H&S all nonsense.

 

[status]

Take the offence by the boatyard that the OP highlighted, a small tower such as http://www.scaffold-tower.co.uk/Miniscaff_Folding_Towers/
would have saved the day and for the use a boatyard would get from it the cost is negligable,

Then there is the PASMA training for each employee who will put the tower up, renewable every three years at £400 a person. The tower will have to be inspected for damage by a competent person, and possibly be scaff tagged on a weekly baisis which is a four day training course (call it £1000 pp), you will of course need a minimum of two employees trained, again renewable every three years. So yes the cost of the tower is negligable!

 

[Joker]

I recently visited a certain nuclear power station. It has an admin/office block, just like any other admin/office block. It's a two storey block. BUT you MUST hold on to the handrail when walking upstairs [a perfectly normal set of stairs]. My guide told me he'd been ticked off by someone earlier that day for not having his hand on the rail - he'd got a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other, naughty man.

 

[DJE]

H&S may have lost the plot but its worth remembering that 1 person a week is fatally injured in the construction industry. I don't suppose that their families think H&S all nonsense.

I don't think anybody is saying it is all nonsense. When I left university it was 100 fatals per year in construction so we must be doing something better. A couple of years ago I was giving evidence as an expert witness in a case where somebody fell down a lift shaft. I know there are real people involved.
But you do see a lot of stupidity forced on the industry to comply with the letter of the regulations but which does nothing to improve safety.
The problem is that just about anybody can make a situation safer. The clever bit is knowing where to stop.

 

[prv]

I don't think anybody is saying it is all nonsense. When I left university it was 100 fatals per year in construction so we must be doing something better.
[...]
But you do see a lot of stupidity forced on the industry to comply with the letter of the regulations but which does nothing to improve safety.
The problem is that just about anybody can make a situation safer. The clever bit is knowing where to stop.

+1 to all that.

Pete

 

[johnphilip]

Then there is the PASMA training for each employee who will put the tower up, renewable every three years at £400 a person. The tower will have to be inspected for damage by a competent person, and possibly be scaff tagged on a weekly baisis which is a four day training course (call it £1000 pp), you will of course need a minimum of two employees trained, again renewable every three years. So yes the cost of the tower is negligable!

You are making my point for me to some extent. Yes I favour use of safety equipment but as I said the paper trail is often the problem. We used to have in house training at the "Tool Box Talk" level and this we assessed as adequate. Part of the training was not to use defective equipment. Only if working in an highly regulated environment was this not adequate and successful. Our Site managers were to add the towers to their weekly inspection. Big expense, hardly. The only accidents we had with tower were in the 80s with an outdated Climalite system that we traded in for something a lot better. Since we made a point of providing a better system it was looked after by the operatives and lasted well.
Don't use unnecessary complication as an excuse to work sloppily.

 

[prv]

I learned (too late) about noise. The consultant hearing specialist assessed me as having very sensitive hearing. This she explained accounts for the difficulty I have with listening to, say a telephone conversation with a radio playing nearby. I hear everything.
She warned it was also a thing which would make me susceptible to hearing loss when exposed to loud noises.
She claimed she wore ear defenders to mow the lawn.

I have two friends who work as sound technicians. The three of us became friends through the shooting team at school. Of course we always wore ear defenders while shooting, but these guys were already well into their sound-teching (doing it for school events) and considered their hearing an asset worth protecting. So they used to also wear ear defenders while working targets in the butts.

Nevertheless, one of them had a hearing test a while ago, and the doctor could not only tell that he used to shoot, but could make a good guess at the calibres we used (.22 and 5.56) based on the specific frequencies that were affected.

When I had a hearing test about ten years ago they put me down as 20/20 or whatever the hearing equivalent is.

I "forgot" to hand back my ear defenders when I left school, and still wear them if using a router or angle grinder. Wouldn't occur to me to use them with the lawnmower though!

Pete

 

[Flying Penguin]

I recently visited a certain nuclear power station. It has an admin/office block, just like any other admin/office block. It's a two storey block. BUT you MUST hold on to the handrail when walking upstairs [a perfectly normal set of stairs]. My guide told me he'd been ticked off by someone earlier that day for not having his hand on the rail - he'd got a cup of coffee in one hand and a sandwich in the other, naughty man.

Sounds like a previous oil company client I spent some time with. Not only would they enforce the handrail rules, but they wouldn't take the stairs if they were carrying a laptop and in my first month on site I saw someone publicly and loudly dressed down for.... shock horror.... carrying a small cup of lukewarm vending machine coffee between two desks without a lid!



To be fair, they did have a habit of blowing people up offshore, but in an office block in Reading where 95% of people have never and will never set foot on an asset, it's all a bit much.