Mike, I've probably cut myself using a tape measure before... but I've never come close to taking any eye out or anything! Wear are the warnings about wearing gloves???

I had an employer two-years-ago who was verbally and needlessly overly aggresive towards  me. Even when he sacked me, he only used the term "let me go" so he didn't have to pay me off... Damn, I knew I should have sued that c***!!

Hi,

one of the biggest problems nowadays is that youngsters are not brought up able to use any common sense.  They have to be told that something might hurt them by the likes of the HSE rather than being able to look at a situation and decide for themselves "Well it looks like it might hurt so therefore it probably will.".  If kids were taught to think for themselves there would be no need for the HSE to create all of these ridiculous rules which only serve to irritate and annoy those of us who have a couple of brain cells to rub together!!

Cheers

AJ

 I recently changed broadband supplier when I spoke to the operator and said the cable would have to come through  the roof space she said somethimg about the engineer could not go up a ladder , luckily I live in a bungalow, There was an accident at the factory where I worked , a fork lift driver was killed , the factory was a very tall building  and it had large double sliding doors that  did not slide every easily when you had to open them  these doors must have been about 18ft tall  they took a fair bit of effort to open so it was not a very quick operation, what happend was the driver arrived at these doors and on the forks he had three stillages, these where large square metal bins used by the car manufactures to hold component parts, these bins where empty and he was taking them into the yard , he got of the forktruck and went to open the doors, he had left the fork trucks engine running  this truck had automatic transmission, some how , they could not discover how the hand brake released and the truck crept forward and crushed him to death, they tried all sorts of test but could not discover how or why the brake came off, it was very strange it was on the night shift and I was working in the welding bays not far away welding up army bumpers  so I was making enough noise,  and I never heard a thing , and knew nothing about it till the night shift foreman came and asked me questions. 

George 

George

That sounds like one of those unfortunate accidents which are not down toany one in particular who caused it. The forklift driver could have been in a fatality on the way to work or on the way home. It would then have been an RTA number not an H&S one.

Over the years the workplace has become a much safer place because of good practices not H&S. I dont believe that accidents have reduced much since the introduction of H&S. I think they were already reducing , in part by good training and Union intervention.

One site I visited regularly required me, the architect, to not only wear safety boots and hard-hat (fair enough), but also gloves and goggles. These had to be the ones they provided, so that they could be sure they complied with some standard or another.....I couldn't provide my own.

Mike

In that you are not alone. I've recently done some installation on a site where gloves are mandatory, as is headwear. To date I've snagged and destroyed two pairs of gloves where screws have snagged on the glove material (and damned painful it is, too), and almost every other wood trades person on site has had two or three (or more) similar incidents. This is all so we won't get dermatitis. BTW, the job was to install kitchens in otherwise finished apartments, so nobody working above, or even with, us. 

Scrit

I think I would tell them what I thought and if they wanted me to do the work then I do it on my terms. Allbe it safely. These stupid rules and jobsworths p**s me off. Its a good job I am almost 65 and out of the job market.

Roger

My friend a decorator, is currently working on a very fancy listed building as part of a refurb.

H&S are swarming over the place, everything has to be scaffolded with handrails etc, only there are 2 places that due to there positioning can only be reached by ladders, which are banned.

The answer...... he has had to go in this weekend to decorate these places whilst H&S aren`t in, even though they know all about it.   Pathetic.

Surely it would be better having H&S monitoring the safe use of ladders than turning a blind eye to the use of something they deem as unsafe.

Baz.

I repeat my previous post

Roger

Baz

I had the same on Saturday. It was necessary to install some joinery supports beheath the roof so that the HVAC guys can cut a girt great hole through it. Unfortunately they's hung air regulator boxes right beneath where the joinery frames need to go, so installing of same needed to be done on saturday out of the watchhful eyes of the H&S Officer

Scrit

If they had had some health and safety rules in place in 1954 I would not have been subject to a fall from 5 floors up when I put somthing on a platform hoist and the twit at the bottom pulled the start rope at the same time, I followed, to land flat on my back at ground level, thus killing the growth of disc material in discs 1to5, not good!

A subby J.C.B. Driver I had beckoned a mixer truck in, slipped over in the mud and the truck ran over him, Dead. 

Derek.

p.s. fortunately I was never subject to the stringent stupidity of today, it was bad enough twenty years ago.

Hey Scrit , if common sense was about in that warehouse we would not have the pleasure of the over the top but funny film. ( for non german speakers, it was a very tongue in cheek story of the hapless, newly qualified forklift driver, who obviously had not been taught some very basic rules!)

Several years ago my best mate was refurbishing a hotel after a fire, 1st day on site the HSE rep pitched up to look around. Wanted to know what was in an area several floors up and was told not to go there. His attitude of I'm HSE and will go where I want ultimately lead to a 3 storey fall and a ride in a big white box with blue lights. Steel toe capped boots and a hard hat were no softener to that rapid descent and the clipboard was a poor parachute. 

I`ve been to fetch some steel today, a huge 40'high gantry was being dissasembled. I asked where my steel was & was shown, i was then told i`d have to wear a hard hat.

Now bearing in mind the crane was removing the top most 32' x 16" x 6" rsj`s i asked H&S guy if he could tell me exactly what good the hard hat would do if the rsj dropped from 40'.

He still hadn`t got an answer by the time i left, fully loaded. Its still making me smile 6 hours later.

Baz

It's obvious to me that you're completely unaware that hard hats are made from the worlds strongest material, even the carbon fibre monocoques taht F1 racing teams can't hold a candle to it. Were the Empire State building were to fall on the hard hat it would survive. Amazing, but true. Unfortunately you'd still be flattened...........

Scrit

Johnstone's Safety is near here, and when we built their new ware house some years ago, I became quite familiar with the management, and witnessed some of the stringent tests on the safety helmets they wre moulding, hard to believe what they did to them and they still stood up.

Derek.