Michael Angelo discusses 3 steps for a rooftop fall protection overview for roof guard rail:
1. ACCESS
2. SERVICE
3. ALL
Our in-house roof safety expert, MichaelAngelo recorded a brief video summary of how we approach providing a Roof Fall Protection overview that identifies potential areas that should be part of your OSHA fall protection plan. The video link and the transcript are below. Let us help you walk getting that initial assessment started. Give us a call today at 866-503-7245 or use our Contact Form.
Transcript of our video blog post:
Transcript:
I'm Michael Angelo, and I'm with Dakota Safety. I am our field specialist for doing reviews for safety audits, safety assessments, whatever you want to call it for rooftop fall protection. In this particular case, I wanted to quickly go over how do I take us from an initial sky shot review, to an actual site visit, and then finally to budget numbers and reports, so that you can have a good handle on everything that you need to do for fall protection for your particular plant or your particular facility.
In this particular case, let's take a look at an example of a roof that we're, we're looking at here. So this is a complete food plant. And in this, what happens for me is I have 17 years of history of walking three to 400 roofs a year as a commercial inspector and estimator of commercial roofs. With that prior to showing up to Dakota Safety, that helps me a lot with being able to assess what's going on in roofs in knowing what to look for. And with our day and age with Google, Google right now allows me some great sky shots where I’m getting get some initial looks before even showing up that I just love about that. So let's, let's go through the process here.
So, first, sky shot review. Here's that same plant broken up into about four different images. Each image was me zooming in on an area so that I could take a closer look at it. All these red marks are areas where I'm identifying some initial what looks like fall protection need that I can see in this case from a sky shot. With that I make some notes, I'm able to send this along to either your safety director or your local plant engineer that would take care of things so that we can all start taking a look at what needs to be seen and looked on the project.
The next step, of course, is the actual site visit. So, as we get more serious and we get closer to really making things happen, I want to make sure that there's going to be a site visit involved because there's a couple of things that you just can't see. For example, up in this upper left-hand picture here, here's a wonderful stairwell that is 20 to 25 feet up. That is great for those that have to be in a hazmat suit to get to this level, but the walkway path that you see right here that's been in place forever is within six feet of an edge that's almost 20 to 25 feet in height with zero protection and a trip hazard going on. So, with that, I started looking at all the things that I could find. For example, here is some roof guardrail that's placed in five-gallon buckets with concrete. And I like to say like I did on this particular site, hey this is better than nothing. But we got other rickety ladders I got to deal with, I got a big large unit over here that has to be serviced, and over on this edge right here where they would walk around the corner is a 40 foot drop. It's just incredible-no protection, but we do have some of these concrete scenarios. Now I wanted to use this one large picture. For example, you know they say a picture's worth 1000 words and not to be too corny, but the truth of the matter is a site visit is worth a 1000 steps so that we can really review what really needs to be protected, what really is going on. For example, on a lot of food plants they have these ammonia lines that are just about 4 feet maybe five feet sometimes you could technically walk underneath these and be in the safe zone. But in this particular case, here's the walk path. We get right off the ladder right here. We come up. We got a walk path going on and with this walk path comes a danger zone that nobody's even, even addressing. Someone tried to address it here by putting a rail with five-gallon concrete pails into it. And this is, this is just eye candy. This really doesn't meet any OSHA’s compliance because if you, if you ran into this it’s not going to hit the 200 pounds of resistance that you need. It would actually just flop over. But the next best thing that I can't see on the sky shot is check this out. You have a wire running right across a path, literally a trip hazard. Fall, go down, 8-10 feet, you're done for.
The final part is after I've done a site visit, I draw up these nice little pictorial reports-lettering them, referencing them-so that we all have conversation point: whether that's a safety director to a plant engineer or plant engineer to safety director or to simply the plant manager, whatever you have to report to or whoever you have to report to. So everybody has something that they can see what's going on and see where there's the potential need. And from this, I developed a one-page overview, with budget numbers in quotes, so that you guys can put together quotes you need. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I love to set up the next steps for your plants and what you have going on whatever that is. Let's review: the sky shot review, or a site visit, and then finally, a budget report. Let's get you taken care of. Let's get you covered. And give me a call. I’d love to talk to you. Again, Michelangelo from Dakota Safety.
Dakota Safety.com 866-503-7245 info@dakotasafety.com
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Dakota Safety's non-penetrating guardrail handrail systems for temporary roof-edge fall protection. The SafetytRail2000 system is a ballasted guardrail handrail system that is nonpenetrating and meets OHSA requirements for a fall-protection guardrail system. Contact us today @ 866-503-7245 or info@dakotasafety.com for a quote or to request additional info.