Health and Safety – go nuts!
In the last few weeks we’ve had a few incidents where stuff has fallen from height. The list of “stuff” includes a helmet, a 7 foot scaffold tube (which it a bloke’s arm), a screw jack, a sheet of plywood, reinforcement spacers, a length of rope, a section of edge protection barrier and a bolt. The length of rope was actually thrown off the side of the 6th floor intentionally!
It could be worse, on McAlpine sites across London so far this year even more stuff has fallen including: a scaffold board, a drill bit, a washer, a mobile phone, a metal plate, a brick, a lifting strop, 225mm concrete core, scaffold spanner, sheet of insulation, a pallet truck (how?!) … the list goes on. 95 objects in total. And that doesn’t include the bloke who fell off a scaffold!
In an attempt to curb this we got everyone together and gave them a little presentation about how bad it is when stuff falls from height. The presentation will be given to them again in their own language too, which will be a significant undertaking considering the number of languages spoken on this site.
When walking away from the presentation I hear one scaffolder turn to another and say: “The thing is though mate, their not accounting for stupidity!” But he is wrong. These issues are not caused by stupidity. Well not all of them anyway. Some of it is an attitude problem. I’m sure we’ve all been to places where the value applied to life is less than it is here. Some of the people from that place have come here and now work in the construction industry and have brought that attitude with them. They’ve done it that way wherever they’ve come from and that’s what they’re used to. This is not to point a finger at migrants. Some of the old and bold from the construction industry are just as bad. Others do dangerous things because they are too lazy to do the right thing. I saw a bloke climb over a barrier because he couldn’t be bothered to walk around it. It’s not about nationality, or intellect, it’s about discipline! I’ve said this before and I’m sure I’ll say it again: at least in the Army all the idiots do as their told!
One problem that we have is that there is so much construction work in London that there is a serious shortage of competent skilled labour. We have forced our blockwork contractor to only use their own full time lads, not agency, in an attempt to ensure that the quality is maintained. Other sub-contractors have not made the same commitment and so staff turn-over is high as workers move around to whichever site is paying the most that week. This has a serious impact of things such as quality, but also safety as it takes time to indoctrinate the new workforce into the McAlpine way to doing it.
In others news: Our site now looks like a small child has got a sign making kit for his birthday and has just gone nuts!
Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog 
And we’ve been getting excited about four shutter ties falling from the bridge deck…
By far and away our best worker on site is a lad from India. He grafts like 10 men and has to be told to take breaks…brilliant you say however, his work ethic focusses on the job and not H&S. As such we have to tell him over and over to use the lanyards attached to his harness and stop wearing them like a fashion accessory whilst he climbs around the falsework. He is not lazy, nor trying to cause problems, he is simply focussed on doing his job and pleasing the GF. He is quick to rectify his errors however he regresses time and time again. He was actually awarded the monthly safety award after a spell of ‘doing the right thing’ in an attempt to educate by positive reward.
Should the GF threaten to get rid of him…probably, but in reality, managing his lack of personal safety in reward for his hard work will be the favour option I expect. This completely contradicts the ‘Beyond Zero’ approach that BAM have adopted but like we discussed a while ago….do anyone in the construction industry truly desire for a zero incident profile given the high cost (£millions and millions) it would take to achieve it. The 99% solution is achievable but 100%…I’m just not sure!!!
Guz,
I like the ‘Squadron Parade’. With respect to the different languages a demonstration like the below video would probably get the point across:
http://www.climbing.com/video/climbing-magazines-unscientific-helmet-test/
I have used this video for climbing courses to get people to think about both wearing helmets and not dropping stuff, kicking rocks whilst climbing. The point translates well to falling objeccts in construction,
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, discipline is important. Its difficult i guess to enforce with a ‘stick’ when there is so much work about.
Work here is slightly more scarce and the guys employed on site like working this project because its government, therefore wages are regulated. There are also the security pre-requisites, both of which mean slightly higher wages than other non-government projects. This is interesting because the ‘stick’ approach works slightly better. We have had 2 instances recently of people having their site access pulled, totalling 4 personnel. The second was due to a crane safety fail which resulted in a lifting strop ‘explodoing’ due to exceedence of capacity. Whilst it was a near miss and no one was injured it wasn’t reported by those involved. That is one of the main reasons they were removed from site.
We’re not sure why it wasn’t reported but I approached the PC and suggested that it be communcated site wide that the protagonists were removed from site because of their failure to report, I was hoping to foster a mentality of reporting mistakes as opposed to covering them up. I think i’ve been chinned off, but I tried!
What precautions have been made to stop things falling of the high level floors? We are going to be installing a massive screen which jacks up the building to protect the workers and their tools from falling off. At over £100k it is a serious piece of equipment to mitigate the hazard. Have you got tethered tools or k-guard as edge protection?
We’ve got tethered tools. We’ve got a screen. We’ve got edge protection. Loads of stuff. I’m not really sure what else we can do. And as I alluded to, it’s not just our site. McAlpine sites across London have all had a real issue with this in the first half of 2015.
Guz, what it just a verbal presentation? I only ask as John Holland recently got an award for the work they did towards highlighting the dangers of falling objects. I saw a video of the presentation which involved placing a hard hat on a water melon and dropping various items on it. I thought the video was quite effective at getting the message across and because its so visual it would be useful for sites where language barriers are an issue. It would probably also be useful to show to a military construction force who perhaps not used to wearing civilian PPE.
I can’t get on to YouTube at work but you may find it on there somewhere.
http://www.johnholland.com.au/who-we-are/latest-news/wicet-wins-safety-award
It had an associated PowerPoint presentation that we projected onto the side wall of one of the building cores. We also had a video that we showed on repeat in the canteen for a whole day.