Did anyone see that guy in “24 hours in A&E” last night? Had half his face ripped off with an exploding grinding wheel
Everytine im on site I pick someone up for not wearing appropriate PPE… as if they wouldn’t mind losing an eye, lung, their hearing…!
On the other hand it drives me mad when you see blanket PPE policy’s and over use of PPE I saw a load of archaeologist in a secure field with no machinery scraping the ground in full PPE of hard hats and high vis the problem with this type of policy is it stops people thinking about risk
I think the point being made is if you have to wear it all, all the time then you become complacent and dont assess the risks around you.
I once had to do a risk assessment to cover every eventuality you might come across surveying sites from water towers to empty fields to gas sites. My huge multinational competitors put their teams on the same request and ALL submitted huge detailed files. Mine was a couple of paragraphs that basically said it's not possible to preempt every possible scenario so "do your risk assessment on site". Guess who's was adopted.
I walked off a site in Ipswich a few years ago after being given a verbal warning for not wearing a hard hat whilst fitting a bath panel in a completed block of houses with people moving in, they didn't have ppe on.
I'm my last job when I went on site, part of my role was to look at H&S. It used to annoy me that when I asked about what risks were being avoided by insisting workers should wear every single bit of safety kit at all times, rather than specific to the job they were doing or what was happening in site, I'd normally get a blank stare. H&S actually asks workers and managers to think about risks, but managers would often rather slap a notice board up to cover their arses!
But then the liability falls on the management that chose which rules were appropriate and there will always be folks who don’t wear PPE because someone else on the same site (carrying out different tasks ) doesn’t wear the same as they are asked to, hence the blanket type PPE
Very true and an understandable position until the ppe actually causes a hazard in itself! Don't get me wrong, I think H&S is a good thing, I'd just like peeps to use the 2 brain cells they have sometimes!
A few years ago there was a report done after it was found that accident rates on building sites were going up. One of the conclusions was that workers had a perception that the sites was safe because of all the PPE and H&S so people weren’t dynamic risk assessing
Talking of numbers of brain cells - My colleague of 40 years ago - a prim lady in her late 50s who was head of biology - having just had the bottom set in year 9 -was heard to complain - " that lad's got 3 brain cells - but uses 2 for farting!"
