26.09.2010

Slovakian Death Wish

A regular reader travelling in Slovakia last week spotted four men working on a roof in the small town Horná Štubňa.

While part of the European Union and subject to the Work At Height and other directives, the four were using the most basic of equipment.
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Hardly the safest or most suitable form of access

The scaffold frames appear to be well erected but the platforms are a total joke, made up of scraps of wood and an old pallet – highly dangerous, while there is no proper access method such as a ladder. And there seems hardly any point mentioning toe boards.

Vertikal Comment

What this shows yet again is that the market for aerial lifts in Europe is far from ‘saturated’ as some would have you to believe.

The day that nothing like this occurs, or ladders and scaffold are not used for jobs where they are ill suited, or people stop using forklifts and pallets – or standing in loader buckets to reach work at height, is perhaps the day that the market is finally mature, or possibly even saturated. Until that time there is still work to do and still plenty of growth potential remaining.

Lest anyone suggest that this sort of access equipment is restricted to “less developed” eastern Europe – think again - a picture similar to this could easily have been taken in Manchester, Lille, Eindhoven, Dortmund or Seville and we have examples within our Death Wish series to prove it.

Perhaps if rental companies stopped cutting rates and started the hard slog of converting a few people like this to more efficient methods of access, the access rental business would be coping with the recession a little better?