17.01.2011

CICA launches accident reporting scheme

The Crane Industry Council of Australia (CICA) has launched a new voluntary accident reporting scheme.

The move follows a survey of its members last year regarding the need for better and more readily available industry statistics on crane accidents. This resulted in the CICA board agreeing to the development, of a simple one-page, Crane Accident Report to launch the scheme.
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The accident reporting form is a simple single page document

CICA says that the aim of the Scheme is to:

- Be another industry initiative to promote crane safety awareness over time, by producing national industry crane accident statistics

- Encourage national industry understanding and commitment to reporting basic crane accident details

- Invite and promote ‘standard’ Accident Reports - on a voluntary basis

- Strengthen the industry’s self-regulation and voluntary compliance by taking responsibility for developing an industry data base of accident statistics

- Identify common and uncommon accident causes, to better educate the industry and improve the industry’s safety record

- Supplement the CraneSafe Program and data base, ideally building on the strong support and respect for CraneSafe

The accident report form will be available for download on the CICA website shortly.

In order to encourage ‘buy in’ for the project, CICA says that it will not collect any controversial information or data and will not release any material publicly, which may impact a member company’s safety record and legal liability or carry any insurance implications. All report forms will be treated as anonymous and with total confidentiality.

The aim is to collect the information in order to issue an annual crane accident report which highlights the most common cause of accidents and highlights the true overall cost of accidents.

Jeff Brundell, CICA board member and CraneSafe national director said: “The crane industry has shown that it can self-regulate with it’s hugely
successful CraneSafe program, so the same data-base and its software will be utilised to provide meaningful data that will assist all in the crane industry in understanding just how big an impact accidents can have in this high risk industry,”

Vertikal Comment

This is an excellent move by CICA and the Australian crane rental industry and one that will hopefully take off.

If anyone can make such a voluntary scheme work is the Australian crane association. Its CraneSafe programme has grown at an incredible pace and is a model that the rest of the world should look at.

The Australian crane rental industry is without question one of the most professional in the world, but like everywhere else it still has its fair share of accidents, many of which could be avoided with better training and more awareness.

Reporting schemes like this, possibly followed by a scheme for reporting ‘near misses’ can only help raise the industry’s game still further.