Health & safety bulletin
Safety harnesses
23rd October 2007
Safety Harnesses form part of the required Personal Protective Equipment supplied to every engineer working at height and as such are recorded on the company’s PPE register.
Fatal accidents can occur if a harness, or indeed any equipment, is used incorrectly or absent mindedly on site.
Xmo Strata has been informed of instances where engineers from other companies have disconnected their lanyards in order to move to another position and lost their footing. In one instance, where a man died on a filling station, the scaffolder’s co-workers had seen him using an inappropriate method of securing his lanyard, and then disconnecting it. If one of them had stepped forward and stopped him in line with IIF (Incident and Injury Free) procedures, they could have saved his life.
Harnesses are of no use unless they are secured to a suitable anchor position – always ensure when you require a harness that it is secured using an appropriate length of lanyard to a purpose made anchor position.
We always encourage all employees and subcontractors to address unsafe practices at source to avoid injury and damage – remember you could be saving somebody’s life by telling them that they could be working safer!