Scaffolding safety is key to plant and contractor success – BIC Magazine

The Greater Baton Rouge Industry Alliance’s (GBRIA) members leverage their ability to collaborate and develop best practices.

For example, this year, the American Chemistry Council is recognizing the GBRIA/HBR’s (Houston Business Roundtable) Contractor Safety and Health Systems Audit Program as an excellent industry best practice for contractor safety management, which is a huge honor. In past years, GBRIA has earned awards from the Construction Users Roundtable (CURT) for improvements in safety and workforce development best practices. Another critical area of best practice that GBRIA members focused on is scaffold building.

GBRIA’s Scaffolding Safety Fundamentals were developed by a joint committee of plant- and scaffold-building contractors, and provided basic minimum requirements that plants should implement and require contractors to perform in order to build scaffolding in their sites safely. The guidelines were developed to reduce incidents, standardize plant and contractor requirements and improve communications between plants and contractors. The guidelines also help raise the awareness of hazards and ways to mitigate those hazards among plant and scaffolding company personnel.

Plants and owners should consider updating their gate entry requirements in-house or with their local safety council and provide training for gate entry, purchasing, contracts administration, safety, maintenance, operations or other personnel involved with scaffolding on these guidelines. In addition, plants and owners should develop internal audit processes to ensure compliance and reserve the right to audit their scaffold companies’ policies and training programs for plant entry compliance with safety standards. The following provides an abbreviated discussion of the guidelines; contact GBRIA for the full version.

Scaffolding companies must have documented safety and training programs that include important items such as energy isolation of equipment, confined space entry, erection and dismantling practices and more. How the company manages its short-service worker program must be included as well.

A pre-job check list, or Job Safety Analysis (JSA), must be used, initiated and reviewed with the crew any time there is a change in job scope, an unsafe condition arises, additional personnel are added to the job or at every personnel shift change. Any change to work plans should be approved by both plant and contractor management.

All required PPE must be worn on the job per scaffolding company and plant requirements. This may seem like an obvious point to put in a guideline, however, the feedback from owners is that simple things such as hearing protection are found in non-compliance repeatedly.

During use, or when building or dismantling of a scaffold, a tag system will be in place that provides the user information on completeness of a scaffold and any hazards specific to it that the user may be warned about. Netting or another method of mitigation should be used to prevent falling objects and debris. Additionally, specific guidelines may be dictated by the plant or owner. Deviations or variances from plant or scaffolding company policy are acceptable only after all other measures have been exhausted, and require both the contractor’s upper management and the plant owner’s or representative’s approval.

Scaffolding is a hugely important part of industrial construction and maintenance that contributes to the overall success of every site. The safety of every employee working in this craft is extremely important. It is GBRIA’s desire to improve and keep these guidelines updated. GBRIA invites input from any owner, contractor or concerned reader.

For more information, visit gbria.org or call (225) 769-0596.