I worked for this firm years ago I think !!

[Andy™]

Unfortunately, after a year or so, their motive becomes at least partly to justify their continued employment. To do this they have to find some new risk, and change something.  This, I believe, results in some of the OTT safety restrictions we so often see. 

see it all too often, trying to justfy their job and making up stuff thats no help to anyone

 

[kerching]

Two of us were up,an old style 4 x4 tower scaffold

over reached trying to fix a cable cleat to a wall

heard a clang

one of the two bottom sections had fallen out as we had tipped the tower by over reaching

my mate whipped his belt off and lashed it to a pipe

i held on as he shined down inside the tower

he held base section as I shifted my weight to lower the tower back onto its base....looked like something from the Italian job

this was just one in a series of many

 

[phil d]

The best laugh I had over health and safety was in the fire service, I was volunteering on their incident support team, one night I'd just gone on shift and was called to a major fire in the centre of Warrington, it was mayhem. We had to close one of the major roads, at rush hour and evacuate about a hundred homes, we had nearly every Cheshire appliance, plus some from Greater Manchester and Merseyside, it was so bad that at one point the CAA rang me and asked if we wanted a no fly zone, due to the fact we were under the flight path for Liverpool Airport and we had large gas cylinders exploding! We had ground monitors set up and 2 aerial ladder platforms with a firefighter at the top of each directing jets onto the burning building, I'd arrived just after 17.00 hrs and was relieved at 02.00 the following morning, we had 2 casualties that night, both minor. One firefighter got a spark in his eye and the other got slight burns to his foot, we were lucky.

The following day we received a memo to all stations, 'no fire brigade personnel are to engage in the fitting of smoke alarms in domestic dwellings unless working from a suitable platform, ladders are not permitted' .How stupid was that, you could go up a hundred foot in a hydraulic platform and spray water into a burning building while gas cylinders are exploding, but you must NEVER, climb 3 feet up a pair of stepladders to attach a smoke detector to a house ceiling!

 

[Tony S]

20+ years ago I worked for a Canadian company as a shift production manager. I had to assess all maintenance and production risk assessments for hygiene issues, I was well and truly p****d off with it. The shift engineering manager was equally p****d off, we came to an agreement. We each wrote our department’s full assessment and we would just sign the supposedly dual assessment at the end of the shift.

Another company that RoB knows about used the “DuPont” system, how any work got done is beyond me.

 

[rapparee]

In fairness we've all done this before.

I was actually doing both this week.

Done after hours when the H&S officer was away home.

 

[phil d]

I hate those narrow scissor lifts, we'd wired a warehouse for a local firm and after all the racking had gone in they realised they'd missed something, me and my cousin went back to sort it and because the original lift was too wide to fit in the aisles they'd hired a narrow one. It was 4 feet long and 2 feet wide, it was full stretch at about 40 feet and wobbly as hell, our Stu was up top swinging on a bolt and this thing was on 2 wheels, it was horrible, I don't mind heights, I just hate it when things move at height, it doesn't inspire confidence. 

 

[rapparee]

I hate those narrow scissor lifts, we'd wired a warehouse for a local firm and after all the racking had gone in they realised they'd missed something, me and my cousin went back to sort it and because the original lift was too wide to fit in the aisles they'd hired a narrow one. It was 4 feet long and 2 feet wide, it was full stretch at about 40 feet and wobbly as hell, our Stu was up top swinging on a bolt and this thing was on 2 wheels, it was horrible, I don't mind heights, I just hate it when things move at height, it doesn't inspire confidence. 

We have something similar. It is a genie 1932

I love to get the toolmaker into it, go full height and make it sway. He hasn't a head for heights.

 

[phil d]

We have something similar. It is a genie 1932

I love to get the toolmaker into it, go full height and make it sway. He hasn't a head for heights.

That's very much like it, but the max height on one of them is 25 feet, this was a bit taller, I think it was a JLG. My worst one was years ago, working in the smoke, it was the first time I'd been up a tower crane and it was in the lift shaft of a building that was under construction. I'd gone up about 75 feet and noticed that the plywood shuttering around the tower appeared to be moving in the wind, I went up to the top, about a hundred foot and decided to mention this to the crane operator, he just laughed, "first time up one of these is it?" he asked. "yeah that's right, how did you know?" I replied, "easy, it's not the shuttering, it's the tower that's moving, everyone makes that mistake on their first time up" he said, roaring with laughter.

 

[Blue Duck]

Lucky you lot don't work for this firm....