Barricade Safety or the Hazard Behind the Barricade?
This course teaches the barrier. The hazard courses teach what the barrier is holding back, and most crews need both.
- Barricade Safety. The page you are on. Barricade types, colors, setback distances, installation and the rules on crossing a barrier.
- OSHA Focus Four: Struck-By Hazards. The hazard barricades exist to stop on most sites: vehicles, swinging loads and flying objects. View the OSHA Focus Four: Struck-By Hazards
- Trenching and Excavation Safety. Excavation work in depth, where setback and edge protection come from the soil and the depth. View the Trenching and Excavation Safety
- Electrical Safety. Energized work, approach boundaries and the clearances a barricade has to enforce. View the Electrical Safety
Take this one for the barrier itself, then add the course for whichever hazard your site runs into most.
How Far Back Does a Barricade Have to Sit?
Setback is the question crews get wrong most often, and the answer is different for every hazard. These are the distances written into the standards.
- Overhead power lines. Unqualified people, and anything conductive they are holding, must stay 10 feet away from unguarded energized overhead lines at 50 kV or below, under 29 CFR 1910.333(c)(3)(i)(A).
- Excavation edges. Excavated spoil and equipment must be kept at least 2 feet from the edge of an excavation, or held back by retaining devices, under 29 CFR 1926.651(j)(2). Many sites work to a wider setback as their own practice.
- Fall exposure. Fall protection is owed from 4 feet in general industry under 29 CFR 1910.28(b)(1) and from 6 feet in construction under 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(1), and a guardrail used as that protection must take 200 pounds at the top rail under 29 CFR 1926.502(b)(3).
- Crane swing. For crane swing, 29 CFR 1926.1424 requires control lines, warning lines, railings or similar barriers marking the boundary of the hazard area, and leaves the distance to the assessment rather than fixing a number.
Where a standard sets no number, the setback comes from the hazard assessment the course teaches in Module 4, and it gets written down.
