10.11.2004

200 attend American IPAF safety conference

Over 200 delegates attended the first Aerial Platform Safety Conference last week at the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas Texas organized by Aerial Work Platform Training inc the American affiliate of IPAF.

Tim Whiteman, Managing director of IPAF and President of AWPT Inc, told the conference that,”with thousands of new platforms being added to the market every year. hundreds of thousands of new and inexperienced users are operating aerial lifts every year.. “

“Add to this fact that the easier a platform seems to be to use, and the more platforms there are in use and the more likely that unskilled personnel, who have no ideas of the potential dangers of working at height, get into the basket of an aerial lift.

They are tempted to use a platform because it looks so easy. These are the people who “borrow” a platform for two hours in the afternoon to reach a defective light or to fix a piece of piping that got knocked earlier in the day.

These are the same people who do all the wrong things that can result in tragic accidents. If these people are working on a busy site and are not stopped, they are a danger to themselves and to the other people on site” He said

“Results of untrained operators using platforms on site can be tragic and expensive. Study after study says that the major cause of accidents in this business is operator error. operator error generally means an operator has been inadequately trained” He continued.

He also told delegates that IPAF and AWPT have launched a project to collate accident reports and statistics. The results of which will be used to identify high risk errors so that they can be tackled.

In some cases the cause of accidents is “machine failure”, but IPAF research suggests that this is rare. It also suggests that in some cases the description of machine failure may be misleading. IPAF performed a detailed analysis of accidents recorded by the UK’s HSE, This revealed that accident summaries could be inaccurate or confusing. An example of this was a case in which a platform was reported to have collapsed – closer investigation revealed that the ground gave way beneath an outrigger. Is this machine Failure?

Whiteman then called on manufacturers to continue to simplify and improve control systems with the specific aim of making it even more difficult to have an accident.

He quoted two areas in which he believed there could be room for development.

The first is that Joystick control directions should all be to a common standard to avoid errors when an operator moves from one unit to another. The other is that emergency down controls/procedures are all made as similar as possible, even qualified trainers can be caught out in this area if they do not know the specific machine.

Further details on this safety conference will be posted over the next week to ten days.