Fall Protection

Parting Shots: NFC Photo Contest Drives Safety Awareness During Stand-Down

As falls continue to be the leading cause of death for construction workers, the Stand-Down helps to highlight the importance of fall protection and raise awareness about common fall hazards and fall prevention best practices.

Making a Good Thing Even Better

"Work safely. Go home Safely." An expanded version of NFC’s FrameSAFE Safety Manual template was rolled out  this spring and is taking hold in the marketplace.

Going Beyond Citations

Fall protection and safety standards are the bridge between completing a job and going home uninjured at the end of the day. 

Fine & Not So Dandy

Whether increasing fines can force a change in industry safety practices remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure—the cost of failing to comply with OSHA standards is about to rise.  

Focusing on Fall Protection Best Practices

  • When there’s no effective tie-off point for a building, framers have to use a job-specific best practices approach.
  • Both Hull and Shifflett agree it is in the best interest of component manufacturers to work with framers to create best practice approaches to fall protection.
  • The long-term goal is to host an online database that GCs and framing teams can visit to know who in their industry participates, trains and follows the same safety guidelines.

Engineering, Knowledge & Building Relationships

  • By approaching engineering and testing through the eyes of framers, NFC can make the framing process more reliable and cost effective.
  • SBCRI is fully capable of testing any type of full-scale assembly, which can provide framing contractors great insight into the performance of the products they use on a daily basis.
  • Testing raw materials, products and structural systems will ensure that framers understand real performance and derive maximum value from the product or engineered solution.

Parting Shots

A good headline and photo draw in the reader's interest, but in reality, this is a very scary photo. This news item on the home page of MSN.com caught the attention of Steven Spradlin, President of Capital Structures in Fort Smith, AR. Most notably, this is a great real-world jobsite example of framer engineering that doesn't comply with construction site safety requirements. To put it in Spradlin's words, “Holy crap, someone call OSHA!” (This is what he wrote, so it’s probably a paraphrase of what he actually said.)

Parting Shots

Congratulations to Truss Systems Hawaii, Inc. whose photo received the most votes in SBC’s Online Photo Contest. 

Fall Protection Made Easy(er)

It’s time to get out your winter coats. The bottom line for OSHA’s new residential fall protection rules is that framers are expected to make their approach to fall protection much like snowflakes: no two jobsites are exactly alike.

Parting Shots

As of June 16, OSHA intends to begin enforcing residential fall protection guidelines first put in place in 1994. The change comes from a 2010 decision to lift a set of interim guidelines OSHA imposed in December 1995.