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...And don't let it happen again
By Wendy Huber-Wichelt
A course in fall-prevention at the OSHA Training Institute in Des Plaines, Ill., provides students the chance to don a fall-arrest harness hanging from a drop-tower and then be lifted and dropped just a few inches off the ground.
"I think that goes a long way in demonstrating that the pressure on your body is
unbelievable. It's painful," said Manny Ypsilantes, construction-branch chief at the institute. "You see the commercial where the scaffold collapses and the guy's being suspended from an independent lifeline and he's calling on his cellular phone to order some hamburgers up. It's not like that."
Separating students from their misconceptions about construction-site safety is part of the Outreach Training Program offered by OSHA. To be exact, the program provides a one-week course for people who can then teach 10-hour or 30-hour courses in general industry or construction safety and health standards.
Would-be trainers learn about 18 construction hazards including those associated with stairways and ladders, scaffolding, excavations and materials handling.
After studying the falls, the crushes, the electrical dangers and the caught in-betweens that constitute major construction hazards, trainers as well as their students receive OSHA course-completion cards.
From October 1998 through September 1999 alone, the institute issued around 175,800 cards for training in Des Plaines and at 12 schools around the country that have partnered with OSHA to offer the courses, said Ron Mouw, chief of division of training and educational programs. And about 75 percent of those cards were issued to those in construction training, he said.
"That OSHA card is of some importance. Companies want to see it," Mouw said. "More and more larger companies are beginning to see that employees who have some safety and health training are more valuable to them."
According to Mouw, course attendance has climbed about 20 percent in the last five years. More than ever, contractors need to assure the companies hiring them that they know the nuts and bolts of safety issues, Ypsilantes said.
"A Mobil Oil or a USX use contractors to do turnaround and maintenance work all the time," he said. "They're putting a lot of pressure on the contractor to have their people trained and to be competitive from a safety and health standpoint, so they don't have to worry about the liability they present when they come into their facility."
At a job site, where a contractor does work that might intersect with that of numerous other contractors, an accident will result in intertwining liability. "If someone gets hurt, they typically sue everybody on the site," Ypsilantes said. "The lawyer lists everybody who was there and lets the court shake it out later."
Apart from liability concerns, changes in OSHA rules and regulations underscore the need for training courses and re-certification courses every four years, institute officials said.
A broad mix of professionals attend the classes. One class might have a construction-firm safety official, an employee of the U.S. Department of Defense, an insurance company trainer and a union representative. There might also be an attorney working as a consultant to a trial lawyer who's come "to bone up on his skills for testifying and understanding the law," Ypsilantes said.
As the drop-tower demonstration shows, training takes the form of lectures and then some.
As Mouw put it, "Adults learn better by seeing and doing, not just hearing the theory as children do in a classroom."
So the course on cranes and derricks will send the class to a facility where students can see different types of cranes, talk to the operators, look into the cab, and study the controls and other components. The trenching course takes students into institute labs, where they learn to use an engineering rod to measure, use equipment to identify different types of soil and learn shoring methods appropriate for each soil type. The institute will draw on experts in particular fields. In the trenching course, for instance, the instructor is an Iowa State University professor, Mouw said.
The basics
Apart from learning about hazards associated with specific materials or equipment, there are general principles that run through the training, such as "don't assume someone has done something for you," Ypsilantes said. For instance, there may be four of five craftsmen using a scaffold, none of whom built it and all of whom may assume that it was designed properly, he said.
"You assume that because the scaffold is there and because you see other people working off it, you assume it's not going to fail," he said. "But you really have no clue about whether it's safe."
So the institute's scaffolding standard requires anyone who uses a scaffold to be trained in collapse issues and electrical hazards, know how to identify potential hazards and be aware that scaffolds should have some form of fall protection, such as a guardrail, he said.
Younger students in the courses tend to be more accepting of OSHA rules and regulations and see workplace-safety standards as rights, Ypsilantes said.
But the older, more seasoned construction veterans tend to have more "established attitudes and behavior about how they do work," he said. That might be so because they can from an era when safety wasn't stressed as much, he said. "Back 20, 30 years ago, if a guy just wore a hardhat at a construction site, that was a big step forward."
The construction industry sees a far higher rate of accidents than does general industry, institute officials said. Ypsilantes attributed the persistence of hazards to the fluid nature of the job site.
"The job changes every second," Ypsilantes said. "There was a guardrail there five minutes ago but someone took it down. There was a floor covering over a floor hole, and someone decided they needed piece of plywood so they removed it. You thought it was there, and all of sudden you back up, and now it's not there and you get to fall 30 feet."
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