Posted By Heather Aston Kevin You're right - this isn't a matter (for your staff) of knowing how to use an excavator, it's more of a general H&S awareness thing. I would brief all the staff involved (asuming you can't determine who was the culprit) about their responsibility for their own safety under HSWAct and MHSWRegs. You know your workforce best and can determine what will have most effect, but if it were me I would then go on to use some examples where employees have been injured through such carelessness and also some prosecutions under s7 HASAWA to drive home the point. It's also important to emphasise how seriously your company takes this kind of issue and to make sure they know that taking short cuts with safety for any reason is not condoned. Heather

Posted By fats van den raad I had an incident on site in similar vein. The MD reported to me that he da seen an operator in the warehouse riding on the forks of a reach truck. Bothe driver and the "rider" had just completed a RTITB refresher course in FLT driving three weeks prior to the incident. In this case it would be pointless to say "re-train and refresh" as the incident happened so soon after training. Both admitted that they knew what they did was wrong and both could state the risk involved in this operation. So you are right.. retraining isn't always the answer, as it will not tell them anything new. The problem is that they still choose to take the risk knowing of the potential outcome. In the case of these two, their flt licenses were suspended for two weeks, and because they had to use an flt in their normal duties, which they now couldn't, they had to be redeployed fortwo weeks. They ended up order picking and packing for the fortnight, including getting paid the lower hourly rate for order pickers. They have been model FLT drivers since!!!

Posted By Richard Altoft Sometimes when wondering what to do in a safety situation especially one involving misbehaviour or management attitudes etc I reverse the problem and say "what would we do if this was a quality or production issue and sales or copmplaints or business image would be affected". The answer is then often clearer and would be that management would get tough and someone would get seriously disiplined or worse. Just a thought!