23.07.2011

Two survive shock

Two men were trapped in a trailer lift for half an hour last week after it came into contact with overhead power lines and caught fire.

The men, Ivan Ramirez, 42 and an unnamed colleague, had raised the platform into the guardrails while repairing a security camera on the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Miami Gardens.
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The rescue

The tyres of the Hidro (Hydro) Grubert lift caught fire but seem to have helped ground the machine limiting the shock received by the two men. In spite of this they were shocked and received burns which required treatment at the Ryder Trauma Center.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue brought in a small truck mounted lift with insulated basket to rescue the two men, who were trapped around 10 metres up, after cutting the power off.
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The two men were trapped for 30 minutes one man used his mobile phone to call for help

Vertikal Comment

These two men were incredibly lucky, but one has to wonder what sort of training they had, as the lift was set up directly under the power lines and the accident occurred as they lifted the platform up directly into the cables. One has to wonder what they were thinking.

The USA is by far and away the most developed powered access market in the world, and yet there exists - in some areas of the market - a lax attitude towards the proper training of individuals to use equipment such as this. It used to exist in the crane business with contractors treating Rough Terrain cranes as though they wer small forklifts or dumpers and allowing anyone to operate them.

Those days are largely long gone although it has taken the compulsory certification of crane operators on a federal level to really bring this to the attention of some smaller contractors.

In the past two weeks Notre Dame University has settled with OSHA over the accident in which a young man was killed after the 40ft scissor lift he was using blew over in extreme wind conditions. The college's own report on the accident said that the proper training of those using and responsible for the lifts would not have changed anything, demonstrating a total lack of understanding by those supposed experts who drafted this report- but more on that another time…

A one day IPAF operators course may not be perfect, but one thing that is certain – even the stupidest person will come away from it knowing that a) You don’t go up in an aerial lift close to overhead power lines and b) You don’t go up - especially to full height - in strong winds. The message needs to spread that a quick familiarisation of a machines controls does not constitute training.