Roofing Safety

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When they say, “You can’t fight city hall,” they aren’t talking about Mother Nature. And she’s been fighting Milwaukee City Hall for a long time.

There are many ingenious methodologies designed for motivating safe work practices among your employees. One of the most popular methods of controlling the way in which workers make decisions concerning jobsite safety is to offer them incentives.

The Experience Modification Rate (X-Mod) is a percentage-based multiplier (pricing mechanism) established by each state’s Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB). It’s used to calculate an employer’s workers’ compensation premium based on a number of empirically confusing statistical factors.

Now more than ever, it’s important to dot the i’s and cross the t’s when it comes to reporting your employees’ workplace injuries and illnesses. Recently, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began sending inspectors to company offices and worksites to assess the accuracy of their injury and illness records.

Most state civil judiciary legally consider roofing within the “inherently dangerous” occupation category. When you consider the steep pitches, heights to grade, surface traction conditions, material handling tasks, bulk material weights, environmental factors of wind and weather and the perpetual force gravity on the worker’s center of mass, it is no wonder that falls from or through roofs cause numerous injuries and deaths every year.

In 2001, backed by the National Academy of Sciences research report, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Assistant Secretary Charles Jeffress stated to Congress that implementation of the recently passed Ergonomics Standard would prevent over 460,000 serious workplace injures and save the nation’s employers $9 billion each year.

Roof hatches are frequently used to provide safe and convenient access to and from rooftop areas in commercial buildings. These products allow service personnel to gain access to the roof for maintenance and facilitate the installation or removal of large pieces of equipment into or out of a building.

Every year in the United States, chemical and thermal burns account for an estimated 700,000 emergency room visits, with more than 45,000 patients requiring extended hospitalizations for treatment such as skin grafts.

Last month we reviewed three ladder innovations (see “A Brand-New Batch of Ladder Innovations - Part 1”). In this article, we’ll review three more.

With the advent of the first add-on item for the ladder, the door was open for many more innovations, and they are still being developed today.