Posted By Healthy Debate
CONSTRUCTION / MAINTENANCE FOLK

I had a safety improvement suggestion reported on an On Track Record card yesterday for "Placing more warning signs on scaffolding because it's a playground for kids doing freerunning."

Bemused I dug a bit deeper and sure enough 'freerunning' exists. It is a popular urban sport also known as Parkour where 'practitioners' (as they are known) use physical ability to overcome obsticles in the natural and built, or nearly built, environment.

It would appear that construction sites and scaffolding in particular are attractive obsticles and there are plenty of videos on You Tube showing people 'freerunning' on building sites.

Just type "parkour scaffolding" into Google and you'll see what I mean.

Has anyone experienced this modern risk on site? I suspect most activity takes place after site hours but it's one to consider when preparing your site security.

There is a general risk from scaffold collapse too, since various scaffolding components are being loaded in a manner which scaffolding has not been designed for.

Experiences / thoughts welcome.

Posted By martinw
Is this something that you will have to include in your general risk assessments then, and do you have to talk to your insurers about it in case some bright spark breaks their ankle while freerunning and decides to 'do' you under occupier liability '84?

Posted By Sally
We've had it where youngsters are running around roofs of unused buildings. There ability to get onto roofs seems to be improving as the methods we used for keeping them off no longer seem effective eg spiked collars on drainpipes - they just manoeuvre round them.