Here are some basic safety tips to help avoid scaffold injuries on your job site:

• Keep your scaffolds at least 10 feet away from power lines.
• Ensure the proper assembly of your scaffold when putting them up and taking them apart.
• Try not to use a scaffold in high winds or storms.  If you are expecting possibly unsafe weather use additional safety equipment.  This may include wind screens or personal fall-arrest harnesses.  If a well-qualified, or “competent person” says it is too dangerous, heed their warning.  This is someone who has had extensive training and experience in regards to scaffold safety.
• Look for missing bracing elements or tie-ins that might cause the scaffold to be weak.
• Have others watch out for falling objects from scaffolds.  This can cause injury if something heavy falls.

These are only a few measures you can keep in mind to protect yourself and others when doing work on a scaffold.  Remember there are many accidents also due to problems with guardrails and planks.  In fact, in a study by the Bureaur of Labor and Statistics (BLS), 72% of construction workers claimed the accident was caused by their support giving away or faulty planking, their slipping, or being struck by an object falling on them.  It’s best to inspect your equipment regularly.

As an employer, you are required to provide safety training for every worker who uses a scaffold.  The Center to Protect Workers’ Rights (CPWR) says “a competent person must give safety training to any worker who assembles, takes apart, moves, operates, repairs, maintains, or inspects scaffolds.”

It’s important you choose a scaffold safety course that teaches how to erect, move or alter scaffolds properly. You’ll also want to learn how to safely work around scaffolds and protect yourself from falling tools or objects.

Please contact us today to learn about our interactive workplace safety training courses.  Offered online for the busiest professional our courses bring the learning to you and your employees.

No worker should enter a confined space without the proper support team in place. There are 3 main members to a confined space team. The first, and the one at highest risk, is the entrant. Before going in, the entrant needs to have direct authorization from their employer to enter the space. The OSHA Confined Space standard states that the entrant must:

1. Know the hazards associated with confined space entry, and in particular, the hazards associated with the PRCS being entered.
2. Know how to use all required equipment.
3. Know the procedures for communication with the attendant.
4. Know how to alert the attendant of hazardous or prohibited conditions.
5. Know how to exit the space if necessary (that is, self rescue).

The second party of the confined space team is the attendant. There must be at least one attendant on each PRCS team. The attendant, arguably has the most amount of responsibility on the confined space team, as they have the highest number of duties required by OSHA. These duties are to:

Below is a visual aid that you can use to quickly break down the individual duties of each member of a permit-required confined space entry team:

In this post, we’ll talk about the 2 main types of confined spaces – permit and non-permit required – and their differences. But before we talk about that, let’s first establish what a confined space is, shall we?

OSHA defines a confined space as being made up of 3 main parts: 1) being large enough for an employee to enter and perform work; 2) has limited or restricted means for entry or exit; and 3) is not designed for continuous occupancy.  This describes many kinds of areas a worker can come in contact with on a daily basis.  And it also illustrates what would be considered a non-permit required confined space.

Now, a permit required confined space will contain all of the above, plus one or more of the following:

• a substance that has the ability to engulf or asphixiate the entrant
• a potentially hazardous atmosphere
• inwardly converging walls within the space or a floor the slopes downward, tapering to a small cross-section
• contains any other serious safety or health hazard

Once a confined space has been identified as having any one of the above four potential hazards, an employer should identify it as such via either signs or another effective means of communication.  Any time an employer has workers that will be entering confined spaces, there needs to be a written program developed that outlines and instructs on the proper procedures for working around these spaces.

One such important procedure is drafting the actual permit for the permit required confined space.  This is called the entry permit and is defined by OSHA as:

the written or printed document that is provided by the employer to allow and control entry into a permit space and that contains the necessary information as required in paragraph (f) of this standard’s section.

I can hear you now…just dying to find out what is in paragraph f!  Well don’t get too excited, because OSHA lists 14 required pieces of information that need to be on an entry permit.  And in the spirit of resourcefulness, I’ll list each one here, but thought it might also be helpful to show an example of a typical entry permit, with all of the correct information, so I’ve included that after the list. And without further ado, the information OSHA wants to see on an entry permit:

(1) The space to be entered;

(2) The purpose of entry;

(3) The date and authorized duration of the permit;

(4) The authorized entrants within the permit space, by name or some other means that will enable the attendant to determine quickly and accurately, for the duration of the permit, which authorized entrants are inside the permit space;

(5) Names of attendants;

(6) Supervisor’s name, with a space for the signature or initials of the supervisor who originally authorized entry;

(7) The hazards of the space to be entered;

(8) The measures used to isolate the permit space and to eliminate or control any hazards before entry (i.e. purging, flushing, or ventilating the space as well as lockout and tagging of equipment);

(9) Acceptable entry conditions;

(10) The results of any initial and periodic tests performed, accompanied by the names or initials of the testers and by an indication of when the tests were performed;

(11) The rescue and emergency services that can be called on and the means (such as the equipment to use and the numbers to call) for reaching those services;

(12) The communication procedures used by authorized entrants and attendants to maintain contact during the entry;

(13) Equipment, such as personal protective equipment, testing equipment, communications equipment, alarm systems, and rescue equipment, to be used;

(14) Any other information whose inclusion is necessary, given the circumstances of the particular confined space, in order to ensure employee safety; and any additional permits, such as for hot work, that have been issued to authorize work in the permit space.

So as you can see, the differences between the two types of confined spaces is quite large, and important to know.  Confined Space work is one of the leading causes for occupational fatalities in the U.S.  A big part of that comes from workers not being properly prepared for, or even having knowledge of, the potential hazards that can be lurking within a space.

Knowing the difference between a permit and non-permit required space will help prepare you for those hazards by knowing when proper safeguarding measures need to be taken.  If you’d like to know more about this topic, and be properly certified in this area, we offer a Confined Space Supervisor and an Awareness Level course.  Or add this blog to your RSS Reader, as we will be covering more on this topic in upcoming posts!

All of these stats took some time to compile, so these numbers are from back in 2007.  Comparing this data to a similar study done for 1992, though, it seems the costs have gone up about 15%, inflation adjusted.  It would be interesting to see if this trend has continued to increase in the last 4 years.  Here is a summary of their findings:

The number of fatal and nonfatal injuries in 2007 was estimated to be more than 5,600 and almost 8,559,000, respectively, at a cost of $6 billion and $186 billion. The number of fatal and nonfatal illnesses was estimated at more than 53,000 and nearly 427,000, respectively, with cost estimates of $46 billion and $12 billion. For injuries and diseases combined, medical cost estimates were $67 billion (27% of the total), and indirect costs were almost $183 billion (73%). Injuries comprised 77 percent of the total, and diseases accounted for 23 percent. The total estimated costs were approximately $250 billion, compared with the inflation-adjusted cost of $217 billion for 1992.

And a few charts to give you a frame of reference:

That last chart really puts into perspective just how much money is spent on workplace injuries and illnesses when compared to some of the major diseases that affect so many people.  Keep in mind that, as shown in the first chart, the bulk of that $250 billion dollar number goes toward injuries, many of which are no doubt fairly easily prevented.

An interesting point the UC Davis study made was that Workers’ Comp covers less then 25% of these costs!  So who do you think foots the remainder of the bill?  You guessed it – the rest of us, in the form of higher medical care and insurance costs.

I’m not going to make the case here that it is society’s duty to lower the costs of workplace injuries and illnesses (although you can see why that argument could be made), but instead to show how truly immense the annual bill for this is.

As, we showed in a prior post on the estimated costs of an injury, when something as straight forward as a broken arm can cost almost $80,000 in medical care, you can see how this adds up quickly.  Safety training really is the less expensive route in the long run.  It’s just too bad that it is so hard to show how much money proper training can actually save a company (and, dare I say, society?) on injuries and illnesses.  Now that is a study I’d like to see.

In the vast majority of cases, radon seeps up slowly over time from the ground. It’s colorless, odorless, and tasteless so it can be hard to detect without the right equipment.  Years of this type of low level exposure can have dangerous health effects.

There was a very interesting post on the EPAs website blog recently about radon and how dangerous it is. The article mentioned that the discovery of radon as an indoor air issue first occurred when somebody set off radiation alarms at a nuclear power plant because his home’s radon levels were so high!

Radon is the second highest cause of lung cancer behind smoking and, as shown in the chart below, is in the same range, in terms of number of deaths annually, as leukemia and lymphoma.  This kind of prevalence is quite surprising and shows the need for further awareness and prevention.

The best way to tell if you have elevated levels of radon in your home or office is to test for it.  There are relatively inexpensive kits you can get for this.  It’s a small step to take to ensure the safety of your family or co-workers!

Below is a quick fact sheet from NIOSH on this topic and how you can protect yourself.  This fact sheet can also be downloaded and printed to display at your company, or distribute to workers who are exposed to the elements this winter season.

Fall Protection is needed when any one of the following occurs:

• A worker is on a walking/working surface that has an unprotected area

  

• When constructing a leading edge

  

• If there is any chance that a worker may fall through a hole in a walking/working surface

  

• When work is being performed on the face of formwork or reinforced steel

  

• With the use of ramps, runways, or other walkways

  

• When working at the edge of an excavation, well, pit, or shaft

  

• When working above dangerous equipment

  

• When performing overhead bricklaying or similar work

  

• With any kind of roofing work

  

• When erecting pre-cast concrete

  

• Working at heights in residential construction

  

There may be other instances when using some form of Fall Protection would be a good idea to provide an extra layer of safety for you but the above guidelines are given by OSHA as times when it is necessary.

An employer should select a competent person for each work site, from the pool of available workers at that site.  This selection should be made based on experience, skills, and knowledge.  Most small work sites enlist the supervisor and give them the authority to shut down the site until a hazardous condition is corrected.

On larger sites a safety officer usually enlists a competent person with recognizing hazards and correcting them, with authority to shut down the site until a hazardous condition is corrected.

If the site has multiple hazards such as excavation activities, fall hazards, crane hazards, or scaffolding operations, the depth of knowledge and experience needed may exceed the personnel available.  In this case, the employer will need to get the “competent person” candidate up to speed as soon as possible through competent person training.

The type of training needed depends on the job site.  And for competent persons, it should be specific to their job function.  For example, a worker selected as the competent person for a site where a sewer line is being installed should have either the proper amount of experience in that type of job, or a sufficient level of training to prepare that person, preferably both.

Having just an OSHA 10 or 30 Hour card does not provide adequate coverage of the more detailed training needed by a competent person.  Many courses are general and designed to meet a “ticket punch” requirement so always check the content and topics covered to make sure it is comprehensive enough and provides the knowledge needed.  An awareness level course is simply not sufficient enough for the depth of knowledge needed by a competent person.

How should the employer select the course?  First of all, select a course specifically designed for “competent persons” and for the construction topic desired.  Look at the contents to ensure it covers specific responsibilities including hazard recognition and in most cases – emergency response.  Some courses go over the regulations, which cover preventative measures, but do not cover the actions to be taken when an incident occurs.  Record the course contents of the selected course and include those in the training record to demonstrate the subject coverage.  Select courses with plenty of questions throughout and at the end of the course to demonstrate understanding and comprehension.

In short, the employer or safety manager of a job site cannot have eyes and ears everywhere.  OSHAs purpose in establishing a competent person is to extend the eyes and ears of the employer or safety officer through those workers who are closer to the work being doing, and workers performing the job.  Empowering these site-level workers to take more responsibility, and giving them the authority to act will increase the safety of any job site, helping to prevent injury, death, equipment damage, and regulatory fines.