Why is Fall Protection Training Highly Important to Your Construction Business?

For some people, it’s pretty normal to type in ‘construction site falls’ in the google images search bar – just for fun. But if you’re someone who has ever been in a fall at work, you will know that there can be some serious and potentially fatal considerations at work.

Falls on construction sites aren’t funny. Fall safety is a noteworthy cause of OSHA violations, and an imperative consideration for a multitude of businesses.

Let’s take a closer look at the fundamentals of fall protection training – it could mean the difference between whether or not your workers clock out at the end of the workday, or get taken out in the back of an ambulance.

What Is Fall Protection?

For every industry you are part of, thousands of falls happen each year. The industries from which workers are now at risk of falls are diverse; if chalk and cheese exists in the dictionary of economies, this is it.

While many workplace falls may be minor, they can also escalate to both serious and fatal. OSHA regulations are regulations that are established to provide a way to prevent this hazard and essentially boil down to very basic fall safety in the workplace.

When You Need Fall Protection

Certain methods of work, such as working from overhead platforms, confined spaces or elevated workstations, usually require fall protection systems to be provided. However, in many instances, a four-foot-plus jump in elevation triggers fall protection. In shipyards that is five feet, on construction sites six feet and long shoring operations, eight feet.

Four feet does not sound like much, but do the math, a person weighing 200 pounds falling at four feet, is the force equivalent of about 1,600 pounds. That’s quite a dent!

OSHA, therefore, implemented the below requirements:

Protect any floor hole that may pose a risk of falling with railing and toe-board (or a cover for floor holes)

Around every open-sided floor or platform 4 feet or more in height, ensure that a guard rail and toe-board is provided.

If you have hazardous machinery, or equipment (including a vat of acid, or a conveyor belt), then the employer has an obligation to provide guard rails, and toe-boards where there is a drop off, regardless of how high it is.

Fall Protection Systems

Let’s say, sometimes you will need specific equipment like line systems using fall arrest posts or a safety harness. These systems fall into two broad categories:

Fall Protection Systems that are needed in each scenario wherever a worker is uncovered to a fall hazard. A fall arrest system usually consists of at least an anchor, harness and connectors. When a worker falls, the systems are engineered to lock, thus averting a collision with the ground.

Retrieval Systems can be thought of as the ambulance at the foot of the cliff: they are designed to save a worker after they have gone over. While OSHA doesn’t provide explicit instructions on how retrieval systems should function, they do require employers to have a plan in place.

The two primary systems of recovery are hoists – which can be used to lift a person who has fallen – and poles. These come in handy especially when trying to extricate someone out of a small area. Other companies are manufacturing these types of systems.

The Numbers

The US recorded close to 200,000 workansagement -related injuries due to slips, trips, and falls in 2018. In total, 726 persons died due to falls on the job, or just shy of 2 people per day.

Falls are one of the top causes of on-the-job fatalities, trailing vehicle accidents. Construction sites account for the bulk of fatal falls and are the top sector for almost half of them, but the incidents are spread across many kinds of workplaces where you find fall risks.

Those statistics are a sobering thought and highlight just how critical fall protection is for your worksite. Any supervisor’s No. 1 job is to assure his workers that they could, come the end of the workday, make it home in one piece. Proper fall protection training and the availability of fall protection equipment will protect the employees of your construction company.

We Can Help!

Get your counselling fall protection training here at Safety Counselling, we provide many different classes to promote safety, and one of those is fall protection training.

Since we have a proven (almost) 50 year history with these fall protection classes, we are proud to offer the best consulting on the market and will be happy to handle any enquiries.

For peace of mind, we can help you do everything possible to follow OSHA guidelines and protect your workers.