Under arrest

Fall protection prevents workers -- and your company -- from going splat.

by Paul Markgraff

Whether you are installing insulation in an airplane wing, welding inside the belly of a tanker truck trailer or lubricating a two-story stamping machine, you will require fall protection. Says who? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that’s who.

In fact, OSHA fall protection standard 1926.501 tells workers and employers where fall protection is required, which fall protection systems are appropriate for given situations, the proper construction and installation of safety systems and the proper supervision of employees to prevent falls.

It’s designed to protect employees working at heights greater than six feet. The permit-required confined space standard (1910.146) protects workers in confined spaces more than five feet deep. Both standards are strict yet valuable, for good reasons.

In 2003, the number of nonfatal lost-worktime occupational injuries and illnesses due to falls to a lower level reached 8,550, or about 24 falls per day, OSHA says. More than one-third of those victims were out of work for more than 31 days.

OSHA also issued 5,680 violations of the fall protection standard in 2004, the third-most of any type of violation.

Falls also accounted for 12 percent of all fatal occupational injuries in 2003. Some 691 workers died from fall-related injuries that year. Ten percent of those workers died from falling on the same level.

But falls don’t just produce injury and death. They produce enormous regulatory fines, skyrocketing insurance costs and declining productivity. By focusing on fall protection and ensuring its use whenever necessary, manufacturers can prevent problems from tripping them up.

Hierarchy of protection
There are three basic types of fall protection: elimination, passive and active. In the ideal situation, employers will eliminate the need for someone to climb on a ladder or a scaffold to get at height. Changing a light bulb is a good example.

“Instead of setting up a ladder to get at a light in an industrial manufacturing facility, you would use a pole from the ground to change the bulb,” says Craig Firl, product manager for DBI/SALA & Protecta, a maker of fall protection equipment headquartered in Red Wing, Minn. “There is no risk.”

If you can’t eliminate the risk, look at passive systems like guard rails. The worker doesn’t have to do anything special, wear anything special and doesn’t need training. Passive systems are just there and provide protection. But when passive systems aren’t enough, active systems are called for.

“If a passive system is not achievable for various reasons, you get into active fall protection systems,” says Firl. “This is where a person is wearing a harness. They have some type of attachment from the harness to an anchor point.”

Active systems generally include a full-body harness, which has evolved over the years and become the standard body component. Energy-absorbing lanyards, self-retracting reels or anything that keeps workers securely attached to anchor-points are also required.

Once an employer decides on an active system, he must choose between restrained and fall arrest systems. A worker is considered restrained when he wears a harness with a short lanyard that prevents him from reaching an edge where he might fall.

“If a person working on a flat roof is wearing a harness with an anchor point and lanyard that allows him to get to the edge but not over it, he is working under a restrained system,” says Firl. “It’s better than if he could physically fall over the edge.”

The most dangerous game
In certain circumstances, workers require a freedom of movement that puts them at risk for free fall, such as cleaning the side of a building or working atop an airplane fuselage. Some workers must also climb into confined spaces where they may be overcome by fumes or slip and fall. In all of these situations, fall-arrest systems must be researched, planned and executed with great care.

It’s extremely important to know what kind of equipment you are working with, according to Ed Bickrest, marketing communications manager for Miller Fall Protection, a Bacou-Dalloz company. Employers need to take into account how far a worker might fall, the height of the worker, the type of lanyard, the length of webbing, the anchor point and any rescue equipment.

Be careful not to overlook the length added to a lanyard by its shock-absorbing capability. Workers get hurt because they hit the ground before the lanyard had time to stop stretching.

“When you look at this stuff, you think a harness is a harness,” says Bickrest. “You need this and that, a lanyard, a tie-off, an anchor, but there are a variety of tools you can use. It’s really something the workers need to be trained on, to know what they are doing and which type of equipment is best for that application.”

In automotive manufacturing, when workers must enter a sub-floor confined space to perform maintenance duties, different harness configurations can produce different results.

Typically for this type of application, workers use a basic harness with a back-and-chest D-ring. That way, workers can hook the hoist to the front D-ring of the harness for raising and lowering and hook another emergency retrieval device to the back D-ring for rescue if something goes wrong, notes Bob Apel, product line manager for MSA.

“Shoulder D-rings are also available,” he says. “You can use them in conjunction with a spreader bar and enter a very narrow hole in standing position.”

The lap of luxury
Fall protection is serious business: If you fall, you can die. Even so, the fact that most people don’t fall is little consolation to workers who spend eight hours a day with straps wrapped tightly around their thighs, waist and shoulders.

But compromising safety for comfort leads to problems.

“People don’t want to wear this stuff,” says Bickrest. “It can be a nuisance and it inhibits their movement and how they do their job. So, people keep the leg straps loose. We find this a lot in falls.”

Injuries due to load concentration and suspension trauma are common among such workers. When a worker falls and the harness arrests the fall, the victim’s weight is distributed throughout the harness. If straps are worn improperly, weight is distributed poorly, resulting in injury, bruises, broken bones, even suffocation.

After the fall, veinous pooling can occur if a worker is not prepared. The pressure on the victim’s legs restricts blood flow through the body, causing it to pool near the pressure point. The harness acts as a tourniquet and medical complications can result. Many safety product companies now sell devices a fall victim can use to relieve the pressure on the legs by standing in the harness.

“Comfort plays a large role in whether a worker will accept a product,” says Apel. “Ease of use plays a large part in acceptance at the worker level.”

Closely following the fundamentals of fall protection can protect workers, prevent disaster and save lives. But it can also boost productivity, limit insurance premiums, sustain uptime and protect the bottom line. The severity of injuries that result from falls hurts employers and employees alike.

“Fall protection is a little different from hearing protection or eyewear,” says Bickrest. “There is going to be some injury involved if you fall off a building or a big piece of equipment. When you fall, you’re going to be on the six o’clock news.”

Paul Markgraff is associate editor of MRO Today magazine. He can be reached at . 

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