Fall are the most leading cause of hazards and major injuries at work places. Every Year, more than 200,000 people are injured and more than 11,000 people die by falls. This all happens due to lack of training and equipment among workers. As workers need to study fall protection guide and learn utilizing a fall harness for easily control work-site falls.
What is Fall Protection?
Fall Protection comes under the various equipment and safety procedures followed by a person to prevent fall hazards. More specifically, it includes the different methods prearranged for a construction site employee who could loose his/ her balance on heights, in order to eliminate hazard.
A Fall protection procedure is a step by step approach towards fall protection that covers all important guidelines needed to be considered that might help avoid such hazards.
Following are some important steps:
- Determine Safety Level of Fall Hazard Surfaces
- Elimination of Fall Hazards
- Prevention of falls by improving the workplace installing guardrails etc.
- Cross check or pre-inspection of fall harness
- Appropriate use of Fall Protection systems or equipment.
Types of Fall Protection System:
A fall protection system is an arrangement pre-designed to prevent injuries from falls. Previously, people used ropes and various knots to safely work against the gravity forces. But today, There have designed a variety of systems providing fall protection that are dispensed into two parts:
- Passive Fall Protection
- Active Fall Protection
Passive Fall Protection:
Passive Fall protection system is a non-dynamic/ stationary arrangement that does not move, adapt, or change when in or out of use. While using, there remains no need of active fall protection systems or equipment. These include:
Guard Rails | Nets | Covers | Aerial lifts | handrails | rooftop railing | temporary flooring etc.
Active Fall Protection:
Unlike passive fall protection, these systems are dynamic in nature and require the use of harness, equipment as well as worker's participation. These systems are basically designed to arrest while fall is in progress not to prevent falls.
These are very important when there is absence of passive fall protection system (guard rails, covers etc) and there's a need to prevent slam contact of worker and the lower levels of work-site. The Active fall protection equipment include:
Anchor Points | Full Body Harness | Lifelines | Safety Belts | Static Lines | Swing Falls etc.
OSSA Fall Protection Training and Certification:
In North America, Fall protection safety training and certification is compulsory to get a job in any work-site thus to reduce accidents, costs and prevent injuries from falls as by CSA(Canadian Standards Association) in Canada.
This results reduction of hazards rate that also raises productivity of Canadian work places.
According to OSSA regulations, the eight hours fall protection training must deliver the following stuff:
- Review of Legislation Compliant with OSSA Standards
- Creation of Virtue Fall Protection Plan
- Fall Hazard Identification
- Fall elimination, Prevention and Control
- Identifying the types of Anchor points and their Proper Set-Up
- Select and Proper use of Fall Harness
- Cross check and pre-inspections of Equipment
- Fall Protection Monitoring
For further information about fall protection training or equipment, Devin Jollimore is HSE manager and training coordinator at Mission Safety Services in Red Deer, Edmonton. He can be contacted at 1.780.449.2700 or djollimore@missionsafety.com.
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