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Working Around Overhead Power Lines with Ladders Every year workers are killed by coming into contact with overhead lines they believed were far enough away. The distance looks generous from the ground, the line is higher than it looks, and once a long aluminum ladder starts moving in the wrong direction it is already too late. This is the hazard where a single moment of setup care matters more than everything else on the job. Minimum Approach Distances OSHA sets minimum approach distances for …

Guide to Inspecting Scaffold Planks and Walkboards The frames are the visible part of a scaffold and the planks are the part the crew actually stands on. Wood planks absorb the beating of every load, every set of boots, and every weather cycle on a Texas site, and a plank that has been in service for two years on a job in the sun looks fine from ten feet away and is not. Inspecting planks is a five-minute job that belongs on the same schedule as the frame inspection. What to Look For Start with …

Guide to Working at Height in Texas Heat A Texas summer adds a hazard to height work that most safety literature written for mild climates never addresses. A worker standing on a ladder or a scaffold platform in direct sun in August is doing physical work in conditions that raise heart rate, reduce grip strength and slow reaction time, and every one of those changes the margin on a piece of equipment that assumes a fully capable operator. Heat on a roof or a lift is not a wellness issue. It is …

Guide to Tool Lanyards and Tethering at Height Crews talk about fall protection constantly and almost never about what is in the worker's hands. A hammer off a third lift of scaffolding arrives at ground level fast enough to kill someone, and the person who dropped it usually never sees where it lands. Tethering is the least expensive safety work on a site and the most consistently skipped, because it costs a few seconds on every single task. The Drop Problem Anything dropped from height accele …

Guide to Scaffold Base Plates, Sills and Footings A scaffold does not fail at the top, it fails at the bottom. Every leg transfers its share of the load plus the weight of the crew and material into whatever the ground is underneath, and the hardware at that point is doing more work than anything higher up the frame. Base plates and sills are the cheapest part of the system and the part crews skip most often. Here is what they actually do and how to decide what a given site needs. What Base Pla …