We have a crawler crane on site. When it is not in use, no suspended load in place, workers are not pulled up for walking under the boom and crane hook when walking across the site, and we don't have any rules prohibiting it. Of course when there is a suspended load everyone must stay well clear. We had a visitor on site who left an observation card who flagged this as being unacceptable....can I please have your thoughts, as it is not easy to find the answer online.

Edited by user 07 October 2023 07:33:34(UTC)  | Reason: Typo

I am of the opinion if no one has their hand on the controls their should be as much risk of the boom / hook crashing down on someone walking underneath as there is they will be struck by lightning or a meteorite.

This concept that if there is something overhead there is risk is severly overstated - dare we mention RAAC?

I wholly get and accept the concept if someone has their hand on the controls something may happen.

I also have issues with those who believe a hard hat is an absolute near cranes - if the load fails a hard hat will offer next to nothing in protection when the load comes crashing down. They are intended to deflect small items of minimal mass - 300Kg of steel is a broken neck, a bolt on the gantry is negligence.

You say you've looked online. Does this include the manufacturer's manual for your crane?  Usually a machinery manual will have a safety section that lists things to avoid.

In all lifting plans I have reviewed regarding the requirement for exclusion zones, the wording always refers to a “suspended load”. With respect to Behavioural Safety Management, though, I would advocate not to walk under the Crane at any time. This recommendation is not risk-based but behavioural-based. If workers understand safe behaviours and the rationale behind them, you are more likely to achieve safe compliance.

To contextualise my thinking. You have a carpark with safe pedestrian walkways marked on the ground. If there are no cars in the carpark (and therefore no risk), is it OK for people not to use the safe walkways? No – we want people to behave safely and use the walkways all the time, risk or no risk.

Hard Hat 100% around lifting equipment/activities.

Kate - it's the way many Behavioral [US spelling deliberate] Safety Programs [ditto] work. Probably worth noting that US accident rates are much higher than in Western Europe whatever indicator you choose.

Make rules and enforce them whatever the risk.

So, sites get blanket PPE requirements.

Last fatal accident that I actually attended site to help investigate had its blanket PPE requirements which included "gloves".

"Gloves" translated as rigger type gloves.

I got the job of taking all the photos.

So, there I am wearing entirely unsuitable gloves in terms of being able to operate the camera effectively, in a part of the site that has been shut off, so the only risk to my hands [unless I tripped and scraped them along the ground] were sharp bits of metal due to corrosion.

Now, of course, in an ideal world, those sharp edges should not have been there, but there was absolutely no reason to think that the sharp edges could, in any way, have contributed to the fatality [unless as being symptomatic of some underlying cause], so I had to think on the spot.

Could have simply applied BS philosophy and refused to take the photographs until somebody signed off an exception to the gloves policy or be pragmatic, walk past the sharp bits, remove my gloves, take the photos, then put the gloves back on.*

When you have an investigation panel of about six people, most on probably higher packages than me, you do pragmatic things as it is the sensible thing to do.

....and, in practice, similar "violations" take place on a daily basis on just about any site operating a BS program, except that some are for other reasons and perhaps often done without doing a competent dynamic risk assessment.

MOST such violations will be tolerated UNLESS something goes wrong.

I have finally got round to reading the entirety of the Telos report that BP commissioned BEFORE the Texas City explosion in March 2005 [instead of selectively quoting from the report to illustrate the difference between a blame culture and a "just culture"].

Just about every page of the report illustrates the risks of poorly thought out rules that end up being routinely broken whether via "violations" or the apparently more forgiveable "errors", often due to the unsafe CONDITIONS not being actioned.

So, as example, people report pipework that is dangerously thin, but instead of replacing it, the action was to clamp it and enforce PPE.

This on a site which had steadily reduced its OSHA "recordables" to its lowest ever incident rate, yet puzzled why they still had an average of one fatality every 18 months.

Only two likely reasons for this discrepancy:

(a) a culture that influences underreporting and/or manipulation of the data and/or

(b) only a fraction [about 20%] of the near misses and minor accidents are likely to be precursors of the so called SIFs [Serious Injuries and Fatalities] - so you can reduce the numbers at the base of the pyramid [Heinrich, Bird or whoever] whilst not doing much about the numbers at the top.

Some of those interviewed by the Telos team also pointed to another issue that is common with BS programs - insufficient attention to occupational health risks and, often, lack of control of environmental risks. Dpn't usually feature on the numbers presented to the Board or in e.g. Sustainability Reports EXCEPT when something difficult to hide happens.

*Adherents of blanket PPE policies will say that there is always a glove that will protect whatever the task, but it's simply not true!! 

Further, just wearing gloves increases the risk of skin disorders but those don't tend to feature in the numbers.

Also, in some processes wearing gloves means risk of entanglement. Those have featured in many an HSE report!

Originally Posted by: toe

You have a carpark with safe pedestrian walkways marked on the ground. If there are no cars in the carpark (and therefore no risk), is it OK for people not to use the safe walkways? No – we want people to behave safely and use the walkways all the time, risk or no risk.

I would state the exact opposite No Risk = No Need for controls

Then you look to public provision of car parks - many bereft of designated walkways or minimal non-enforced routes because the outcome based upon risk is low due to slower moving trafffic.

Originally Posted by: Kate

I felt very disturbed when, twice a day, I walked along that walkway with no hard hat, because, of course, no provision was made for storing hard hats at the entrance to the factory area and my work area with all my PPE was at the other end of the factory, and so an exception was made to the rule for when you were arriving or leaving for your shift.

There are likely less than a handful of readers who hand on heart can state their workplace actually has locker facilities at the entrance to enable the required PPE to be donned before entering site. Instead we end up with "designated paths" to lockers shoved in available spaces around the site. In one employment the designated path passed under a full width travelling crane capable of traversing the whole floor area!