Making the dash

Rick Raef is a heavy construction safety consultant for Willis Group Holdings, San Francisco, Calif., a global insurance broker. Raef has been with Willis since 1996, during which time he developed a crisis management program called, "Character Based Crisis Management: A Contractor's Survival Guide." He is currently the editor of WCSN-The Willis Construction Safety Network, an electronic safety bulletin distributed to contractors in the United States and Australia . You can contact Rick Raef at raef_ri@willis.com.

April 21, 2004 -We've seen it happen before.at 6:15 in the morning or 6:15 at night. It is a highway job straddling live traffic lanes, and the construction worker needs to drive a boom lift across.

In the safety meeting, consequences were discussed for employees crossing equipment without a flagger or other means of traffic control.a written warning, a day without pay, or even being fired.

Yet, a day or two later, someone (maybe even the foreman) takes a chance and noses the basket across open lanes-taking a shortcut rather than going to all the trouble for a flagger. Then the boom lift stalls or loses traction on one wheel, and what was supposed to be a quick dash across a dark highway turns into something with severe or fatal consequences.

I wasn't at the accident described in the newspaper article below, so I have few details of what really happened. I don't even know if it was a self-propelled aerial work platform, but it sure sounds like it. But I have seen enough of these spur-of-the-moment dashes across the road with boom lifts or other slow-moving equipment, without proper safety precautions to see this accident in my mind's eye.

The article mentions that the worker was ejected from the machine during the collision. Perhaps he wasn't tied off in the basket with a full-body harness and lanyard, as the law requires. So at your next safety meeting, ask your crew to consider whether making the dash is really worth it and reinforce the rule about tieing off in the basket.

http://newsobserver.com/news/story/3389293p-3014450c.html

Note: Website link courtesy of www.newsobserver.com . "Construction worker injured on I-440" reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh , N.C.