22.01.2016

Three's a crowd

A photo sent in by a regular reader has the title “Three Burks” and shows three painters clearly with some safety awareness, but .... then again....

The photo shows two men working from the top rungs of step ladders, while a third is use the base section of an aluminium scaffold tower to reach the higher levels.

The three have some sense, as they have fully cordoned off the area, and at least are not standing on boxes or other make-do forms of access. However the equipment is not ideally suited the height being worked at, but nothing too wrong with that. The scaffold looks properly erected for the height, Except… for the lack of a guardrail – and no point mentioning toe boards. While you could argue that the fall from the scaffold is only a couple of metres, the fact is there are four pointed spigots to fall onto, and the painter being a little too high for some areas is having to lean backwards to work, he could easily step back and either off the end of the platform or end up puncturing his head with a spigot.
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Three main and a paint job

Having said that statistics show that most serious or fatal injuries are from heights of between two and three metres – any higher and people start to think twice about dodgy equipment.

Against all this of course is that given the time the three would take to do this job the equipment is cheap and convenient. You could argue that one man with a small self-propelled scissor/mast lift, or even a push around scissor, would be faster and hell of a lot safer. Not the worst example by any stretch of the imagination and the term “Burk” is perhaps a little harsh – although looking at the photo you can imagine why our correspondent used it - but still one for our Death Wish series.

Have a safe weekend