WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN DEVELOPING A FALL RESCUE PLAN
A fall protection plan in South Africa must include a “rescue plan” detailing the necessary procedure, personnel and suitable equipment equipment required to affect a rescue of a person in the event of a fall incident to ensure that the rescue procedure is implemented immediately following the incident.
Highlighted here is the fact that the rescue plan must include a step-by-step instruction how the rescues will be performed, the rescue personnel that will be involved in such rescues, the rescue equipment that will be utilized during such rescues and the fact that such recue procedures must be implementable immediately after fall incidents has occurred.
A fallen worker that is trapped in a safety harness, may suffer from internal injuries, may be exposed to other hazards and will most likely sustain suspension trauma if left unattended for too long. It is therefore crucial that the rescue plan is implemented immediately following the fall incident. A slow rescue, in this case, can kill.
General Safety Regulation 2(5) stipulates that “An employer shall instruct his employees in the proper use, maintenance and limitations of the safety equipment and facilities provided”. All fall protection equipment, including rescue equipment, has limitations. These limitations range from safe working loads that must not be exceeded to the physical limitations of what the equipment can or cannot do
Developing the fall rescue plan can be a daunting task for an inexperienced Fall Protection Planner to get right if he/she is not careful. In their eagerness to boost their sales, most training providers’ and equipment suppliers neglect to inform their customers of the “limitations” of their training programs and/or rescue equipment. As a result, their customers often end-up with skills and rescue equipment that are of no value to them.
If you think about it, multiple access methods are used to perform multiple tasks at height in various industries. MEWPS, telecommunication towers, overhead cranes, tower cranes, scaffolds, fixed ladders, portable ladders, roofs, gantries, mobile work platforms, suspended work platforms, manholes and excavations are but a few of the structures/situations were fall risk exist. Due to this, Fall Protection Planners must understand the risk first before they can make recommendations to their employers about the training and equipment that may be needed to affect the rescues of their fallen workers. They must be very wary of the limitations of training courses, machinery and rescue equipment that may have to be procured.
Pre-assembled rescue equipment is very popular in South Africa today. Many employers send their employees for fall arrest rescue training on pre-assembled rescue systems which they then end-up buying too due to bad advice from the training providers. Such employers are often convinced that their Fall Arrest Rescue Technicians will be able to do multiple types of rescues with a single skillset and a single pre-assembled rescue system. In my opinion, there is not a single pre-assembled rescue system available on the market today that can do “everything”. All these systems have limitations and Fall Protection Planners should take note of them.
Further to the above, many Fall Protection Planners recommend the use of lifting machines to conduct fall arrest rescues with, without taking the operator’s competency and the lifting machine’s limitations into account. Lifting machines are by their very nature not designed to “rescue” people with and their operators are not trained to use such machines for rescue purposes either. Such rescues should only be considered if standard operating procedures were developed for them and if the operators have been properly trained on these procedures.
In conclusion, should multiple fall scenarios be possible on site, the services of Rope Access Rescue Technicians may be required. These technicians are highly skilled individuals who can rig various rope systems to raise casualties to higher levels or who can lower casualties vertically or even diagonally depending on the circumstances. Unlike Fall Arrest Rescue Technicians, their skills are not limited using pre-assembled rescue systems.
