The importance of roof fall protection
Any project must have roof fall protection, or the safeguards and tools used to avoid falls from height at a roofing jobsite. Fall protection should be the focal point of your safety programme, regardless of whether you’re a roofing business owner dispatching personnel to tasks or an individual contract roofer with your own clientele.
This is why.
Construction workers still sustain injuries and even lose their lives while working at heights every year, despite the existence of strong fall protection legislation and inspection programmes. Sadly, falls from heights, particularly roofs, still rank among the leading causes.
In the United States, falls claimed the lives of 364 construction workers in 2016 alone, or about one a day.
The good news is that many of these mishaps can be avoided by using the right roof fall safety gear and methods. In fact, the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) recently concluded that deploying fall safeguards would have likely been able to stop almost all of the deaths caused by falls!
Continue reading to learn how you can ensure that your company complies with all applicable laws and regulations while also assisting in ensuring that you and your employees arrive home safely each day.
What is roof fall protection?
Federal regulations require roofers to use particular fall protection equipment and/or systems to safeguard employees against roof falls while working at height (this should focus on fall from heights as one can also fall down or trip when working at heights and not suffer severely). (In Canada, these regulations are outlined in the Canada Labour Code as part of the Canada’s Occupational Health and Safety Regulations).
To ensure that everyone on the team has the knowledge necessary to protect themselves and their coworkers, these regulations also require employers to provide training on this equipment as well as specific first aid and rescue skills.
These fall safety systems typically consist of three fundamental parts:
safeguarding devices
security nets
Individual fall prevention (PFA) system
Working on low-slope roofs, you could potentially combine the following methods:systems for warning lines
systems for monitoring safety
Regardless of the type of job being done, anyone working at a height of six feet (1.8 metres) or higher must apply at least one of these safety precautions. What form do these safeguards take? more about Fall Protection and Roof Safety Equipment.
