From the course: Occupational Safety and Health: Slips, Trips, and Falls

Special challenges in construction and maintenance

From the course: Occupational Safety and Health: Slips, Trips, and Falls

Special challenges in construction and maintenance

- Slip and trip fall hazards can be found everywhere, in any industry, at work and at home. This course is meant to be a general course that covers the hazards that are common to all of these situations. This means that your particular workplace could have its own unique hazards that require additional consideration, maybe additional training. I did want to take a minute, though, to call out the construction industry. Not just because that's my industry, but because it really does present a unique set of challenges that are worth acknowledging here before we move on. Construction sites are really different from fixed sites, because they're always changing. It's the nature of the work. We're building something that doesn't exist. The site can literally change every single day or even hour to hour. Now the industry deals with this by providing additional site-specific and task-specific training. And since the safety features that may eventually exist in a building when it's completed and open to the public will not exist until we build them, we also expect to use extensive PPE, or personal protective equipment in construction. Now I've discussed standards that can be adopted in the workplace to protect people from slipping, tripping, and falling. I think it's important here to recognize the fact that many times, these standards are not meant to apply to construction sites. Now there are often many good ideas in these standards that can and should be applied to construction sites, but there are also often many things that can't be reasonably applied to a site that's constantly changing as it's constructed. Many jurisdictions will deal with these differences by issuing a separate set of standards specifically for construction. For example, in the U.S., there's one set of workplace regulations for fall protection for the construction industry and another set for all other industries. A good example of something that might be unique to construction sites or maintenance operations is proper lighting. Now we may not have the facility's permanent lighting up and running during these operations and walking through a dark passageway is a good way to slip or trip. It's important to be able to see where you're going and where you're working, so these rules will include requirements for adding temporary lighting. Now as I'll probably say throughout this course, gravity doesn't care what you're doing when you fall and it doesn't care if you're at a construction site or stocking shelves in a store. A fall as a fall. It's going to hurt and it could result in significant injuries.

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