Posted By John Battye MIOSH, MRICS Can any provide examples of accidents that have occurred due to failure to wear a hard hat, preferably in low risk areas on construction sites where the risk wasnt originally "forseeable" I'm preparing a talk for my building surveyor colleagues, most of whom control small lower risk building sites where I am coming up against the difficulty of enforcing hard hat provision

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Hold on I think I get it now... You are looking for totally unexpected & unforseen accidents where the wearing of a hard hat could have or did protect the wearer from injury. Then you can say: "It's important to wear your hard hat at all times because you never know what's going to happen." Yes?

Posted By Jonathan Breeze Thanks for clarification there Robert, Moral: Just because someone says there is no risk, doesn't mean there is no risk. I agree with your penultimate paragraph though, there should be no exceptions to the rule as this just adds layers of difficulty for the site manager: "Why should I wear X, when so and so isn't." John, I'm not sure of it's relevance to surveyors, but I have just remembered an incident at one site where an employee was disposing of waste into a skip when part of a broken pallet was catapulted out and struck him on the head. The employee was saved from injury because he had been wearing a hard hat having just left a hard hat area at the time. Sorry I misunderstood the initial question.

Posted By Des Daly Jonathan, Took a call one day from a client's SA who asked me ,'What I thought of people wearing cowboy hats on site?'. I thought he was joking and replied that 'I thought all cowboys wore cowboy hats'. He was really not amused and tore into me about one of our employees walking around the site wearing a cowboy hat. I found it hard to believe but accepted what he was telling me. I replied that is was unacceptable and the person in the cowboy hat be told to go and get his Safety Hard hat etc, warned of behaviour etc. Reminded of Site Rules etc. etc. Anyway on investigation I found out that a local agreement between our site manager and the Principal Cont. whereby our employees working inside a building ,snagging,would not need to wear their safety hard hats - as there was no foreseeable risk of injury to their heads had been struck. One of our blokes wore a large Trilby type hat to work and kept it during his work on site after the agreement was made. But, the agreement not to wear hard hats inside the building soon extended to not wearing safety hard hats out on site. Hence the man wearing a cowboy hat phone call. After gathering the facts I called the client's SA back and told him the whole story. Together we nullified the agreement forthwith and re-established the wearing of safety hard hats at all times whilst on site. So in my experience trying to introduce compromises or dispensations does not work. Site Rules applying to all persons in the work area is the only and best way. As a footnote; I visited the site later and found our man wearing his Tribly and his hard hat at the same time - he looked simply ludicrous and keeping a straight face as I ordered back to get his hat was quite diffcult.

Posted By Steve Sedgwick Well done Robert, there should be more of use with this frame of mind. If the rule is implemented there should be management commitment towards enforcing it. Don’t let people pick and choose which rules they will apply and which they will not that’s poor management. Steve

Posted By Alan Barthrope I work for a construction company which carries out new build and refurbishment work. We find that most of our head injuries stem from persons putting their heads up into ceiling voids either whilst inspecting the area or whilst working with their head & shoulders up in the void. Most of the persons receiving these injuries believed that they were personaly not at risk and our site management still can't get the enforecement message into their heads, because they too believe there is no foreseeable risk. This is despite me keep telling them that there is. I hope that this gives you another practical example.