The Scaffolding Safety Program

The Scaffolding Safety Program

The Scaffolding Safety Program is an essential tool that can be used in various activities. It can be used in renovation, removal, performing art activities, routine maintenance, and painting. The program provides a more comfortable and safer work arrangement in comparison to stretching overhead or working from the ladders or even work locations. Scaffolding offers the employees with safer access to the work locations, more stable platforms for working as well as the temporary storage for materials and tools that perform immediate tasks. Some of the accidents Scaffolding helps to prevent are the incorrect operational procedures, personnel falls, and the materials that fall due to equipment failure. It should, however, be noted that the overload of scaffolding often causes a significant scaffolding failure. The paper focuses on trying to know the best ways that Scaffolding Safety Program will successfully protect its workers as it also looks at the statistics involved with the success of scaffolding.

The Scaffold Safety Program (SSP) can simply be explained as a plan of action that is used in accomplishing a purpose that is associated to work with scaffolds. An SSP that is effective is one that is designed around the procedures, practices and processes which are usually provided to the employees. It also integrates decisions that are safety-related and places precautions into them. It is necessary to comply with the CFR 1926.451, Scaffolds. The construction contractors must maintain and initiate safety programs.

The Scaffolding Safety Program is used mainly in the construction field. It is the duty of employers to guarantee the safety of the work-site for every employee. Scaffolding is needed when working on any height ranging from just a few feet to hundreds of feet. The scaffolding helps workers in the safe traverse of the heights, whereby they are protected from falling, reducing cases of deaths and injuries. Scaffolds are divided into three groups based on their ratings. There are the light-duty scaffold that can only support a particular and limited number of hand tools and employees. The second rating is the medium-duty scaffolds that need to have the ability of holding hand tools, workers as well as the weight of the construction materials that are being installed safely. The third group is the heavy duty scaffold that are used when the scaffold must sustain the stored materials weight, tools, and workers.

The scaffolds can be apportioned into two groups, that is the users and erectors. The erectors also known as the dismantlers, are the workers who have the main responsibility of disassembling and assembling the scaffold. It usually takes place before the start of other works, during or as soon as the completion of the work. On the other hand, scaffold users are the ones whose work needs them to be scaffolding supported entirely or at times. Training has to be provided to the employees for them to know the dangers that are linked to the form of scaffold underuse. There is also the need to comprehend the procedures that are necessary for minimizing or controlling the hazards.

Components for a successful scaffold safety program

Safety culture is needed for a great SSP. Looking at the point of view of the employer, the corporate culture of the company is an area that requires management.

Accountability is among the most critical areas of a successful SSP. When a person is held accountable, their performance is compared to a particular criteria, after-which consequences are appropriately administered to the level of performance. Employers have the duty of providing each and every thing that is needed by the workers for the performance of the job safely. The employers also need to ensure that there is adequate physical resources such as machinery and tools, adequate time to perform their tasks, training, and that supervision has been done before administering any discipline due to non-compliance while they are working on the scaffold.

Strong leadership is needed. The employers need to understand that giving safety leadership that can be termed as tough on the maintenance of safety standards when operating scaffolds has enormous benefits.

Just like any other form of success, commitment is something that is needed for the prosper of SSP. The willingness of the top management in the demonstration of a long term commitment protects the employees from illness as well as injuries while they are working. The managers need to invest time and money into effective safety management through the development of safety procedures, programs, policies, and plans.

The Elements of an Effective SSP

A safe scaffold use and erection need to start through the development of an SSP that has work rules, hazard controls and identification, work rules, and policy statements. It is necessary to come up with a plan that is well written and clearly gives rules, responsibilities, and policies. It reduces the chances of confusion, formalizes processes, and helps in the training of scaffold safety.

The work rules and policies need to focus on fall protection, inspections, instruction and training, sound design, storage and maintenance, the rules for the right erection, rules for use, assigning personnel, selection of the right scaffold for the task as well as the rules for dismanting and alteration.

The scaffold needs to be able to support its weight plus a minimum of four times the maximum load intended to be transmitted or applied to the components and scaffold. The suspension ropes need to be able to support six times the maximum load intended. The guardrails, on the other hand, need to support a minimum of 200 pounds of the force of the topmost rail as well as 100 pounds on the mid-rail. However, when there are complex systems, an engineer needs to find out the various loads at various points.

For a successful SSP it is necessary to get the right scaffold for the job. It is a bad idea to outsource the duty of the selection of the scaffold to use. In case contracting for scaffolding happens, it is good to pick a scaffold supplier or rental agency that is quite knowledgeable on teh equipment at hand as well as its safe use. Another thing to look out for is getting the manual of the owner that has been provided by the manufacturer of the scaffold. If selecting your scaffold is what is opted, it started by the revision of the written requirements for determining where they will be used and the type needed. Ensuring that the scaffolds have all the requirements of the government is essential.

The main method of protecting workers is the control of exposures to the hazards at the work-site. The control measures that have been discussed by ANSI/AIHA Z10-2005 include; Engineering controls where there is the redesign of the scaffold for the provision of more protection

Elimination that includes working at the ground level to eliminate any hazard caused by falling from an elevation

Personal protective equipment where workers put them on for better protection

Substitution which includes the replacement of an old scaffold and getting anew one

Administrative controls where there are safety rules and practices for safer behavior.

Statistics

Approximately 2.3 million construction workers, which amounts to 65 percent of the total construction industry, work on the scaffold. The provision of protection of the workers from accidents that are scaffold related might help in preventing part of the injury incidents that amount to 4500 or even more than the 60 deaths that occur annually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The preventions help in saving the American employers 90 million dollars in the workdays not lost.

Based on reports by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72 percent of the injured workers in scaffold accidents stated the cause to either being support giving way or the employees being struck by a falling object or slipping. The accidents can be regulated by the standards of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were complied. According to OSHA, the shocking statistics on scaffolding accidents is that on a yearly basis, 10,000 construction workers are injured in scaffolding accidents.

The accidents that are associated with scaffolding are usually as a result of negligence by third parties. It is so because the people responsible for putting the structure together, the maintenance of the safety of the scaffolding and the scaffolding manufacturer fail to do what they need to hence causing injuries or even worse deaths to the workers.

Training

Training needs to be a condition to be given to workers as it will offer the best way of protection. Training should be undertaken before erecting or using a scaffold. The people who can provide training include the equipment vendor, equipment manufacturer. Undertaking and completing the EHS training, or a safety consultant whose specialty is scaffold training. For a person to be considered a person who is competent, Hands-On Scaffold Erector Training and User Training have to be completed. For the employees who work on the scaffolds and do not erect have to complete the User Training that consists of awareness of the protocol in regard to inspection of scaffold, the right usage of scaffold as well as material handling, the nature of electrical hazards, hazards of falling objects during work and the procedures that need to be followed when using electrical hazards. The employees who disassemble or erect scaffold need to complete Hands-On Scaffold Erector training. Refresher training needs to take place when either an employee is seen using the scaffold in a manner that is unsafe, changes that present dangers in the work-site that the worker has not been trained on before, if a near-miss incident or accident happens or when there are alterations in the types of scaffold, falling object protection, equipment or fall protection that the worker has not been trained on.

Conclusion

SSP is essential in the construction industry. Employers need to embrace the safety measure in order to provide the utmost protection to the employees. The employees, on the other hand, need to ensure that they are trained before undertaking any task that involves a scaffold. Through the use of a Scaffold Safety Program, there is the provision of a safe working environment whereby the safety and health of employees are maintained.