With sites initially closed during the first UK-wide lockdown, constructors had to convince the government that the industry was safe to continue working during the pandemic. No area was arguably more difficult to safeguard against the spread of coronavirus than work done at height, whether it involved workers traversing narrow scaffolds or moving in confined lifts.
Sites soon reopened, however, and the past 12 months has seen firms adapting to the new health and safety environment as the COVID-19 crisis has progressed. Working at height is classed as work in any place where, if precautions are not taken, a person could fall a distance liable to cause personal injury. Often this is considered anything higher than 1.8m above the ground or floor.
Sanjay Nairi, director of London-based SME construction firm Refurb It All, says that COVID restrictions have demanded a rethink of everything, from access to sites to the number of workers needed for certain tasks. “Even the practicalities of, say, taking out a bath from a first-floor or a kitchen from a flat are [now] different,” he says. “A bath is 1.7m long and takes two, maybe three people to move it. One guy has to face one way [when moving a bath], another has to face the other so they don’t look at each other. Then from a health and safety point of view you need a third person directing people where to go. It’s the same when you are stripping a kitchen. One man can’t lift a granite slab – it’s a two-person job.”
While COVID risks can be mitigated when moving heavy items in general, working at height often means accessing narrow or awkward areas such as roofs, or using scaffolds. On high-rise schemes, getting to the work floor alone comes with inherent problems.
Unified response
According to Alasdair Reisner, chief executive of the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, early on in the pandemic it was important to act fast to ensure sites remained safe. He says: “The creation of the site operation procedures (SOPs) was the single most important thing the industry was able to do during the early days of COVID, as it helped ensure that anyone who was thinking of how to manage risk was informed by thinking that applied across the industry.”
Trade bodies acted quickly to set up a construction industry taskforce aimed at coordinating the pandemic response, says Graham Watts, chief executive of the Construction Industry Council. “The 11 other trade associations have now met over 145 times in the last nine months. We started off meeting every day; now it’s twice a week,” he says. “There is an enormous amount of joined-up working that lies behind the significant impacts that have happened over the last nine months. It was touch and go last lockdown in March whether Westminster would follow the lead of Scotland and ban construction work. The fact the CLC [Construction Leadership Council] pulled all these organisations together and launched the site operating procedures gave the government confidence to keep construction sites working.”
The SOPs are now on their seventh version, the latest of which was released on 7 January. The guidelines cover aspects such as when to go to work, site access and egress points, hand-washing, canteens and rest areas, as well as changing facilities, showers and drying rooms. The majority of the procedures, however, remain little changed since they were first published last year.
When it comes to working at height, the guidelines state that stairs should be preferred to lifts or hoists, and that one-way systems should be considered. If lifts or hoists are needed, the capacity should be lowered to reduce congestion and contact at all times. Tasks should be rearranged to enable them to be done by one person, or in a way that minimises social distancing requirements. Teams should also be isolated with no interchange of workers between teams, while numbers are maintained as low as possible and workers are kept away from others.
Safety focus already existed
To a certain extent, existing regulations, such as the Working at Height Regulations 2005, the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR) and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, have nurtured a safety-first culture on sites that was capable of adapting to the problems associated with COVID.
Andrew Brown, group health, safety and wellbeing director at Mace, says: “The new safety procedures on site in response to the pandemic have shown us that we can work more productively and safer on our sites. The challenge is to take the productivity lessons we learnt during implementation of these procedures forward and maintain the same high standards of health and safety practice, as lockdown rules start to ease. As we move from construction to production, we have a huge opportunity to promote ways of working on sites that are much safer by design, protecting our workforce and the communities we build in. If, together with the way we deliver, we can standardise these safe working practices across the industry, it will completely transform the way we create buildings and infrastructure.”
Darren Bourke, EHS manager for Mac Group, says the pandemic has led to a change in adoption of technology on its sites, which has been useful in adapting to working at height. “We have technology to allow virtual inspection of our sites,” he says. “Many of our blue-chip clients expect us to be able to do that now that the pandemic has prevented site visits. We’ve used GoPros and mobile phones to inspect sites at height. We are looking at whether we can use a pair of safety glasses that will reflect the image of the site for a client. I have held a phone and walked around a medical facility in the Republic of Ireland while we led an inspection. If they inspectors needed to focus on something, I would stop, they would zoom in and out. They had conversations with construction workers as easily as if they were there in person.”
Equally as important as mitigation measures are the day-to-day actions of workers themselves. The SOP guidelines state that “the measures necessary to minimise the risk of spread of infection rely on everyone in the industry taking responsibility for their actions and behaviours”. However, such measures can be harder to implement in practice.
‘Attitudes have hardened’
According to Nairi, responses to the pandemic have been taken more seriously as the crisis has progressed. He says: “Attitudes have hardened, without a doubt; personally knowing people who have been in hospital and on ventilators is why I am more cautious. Measures include telling clients they are not allowed on the sites for inspections, doing a lot more meetings via Zoom, and the guys on site being separated and away from each other. Timings on arrival and leaving site have also changed. Employees have to wear a mask. When on a job and you need to meet a deadline, you can’t throw a load of people at, say, a roof project, whereas before you could throw multiple people at it. Now the attitude is ‘hold on, you can’t have too many people up there’. You are always thinking of the two-metre rule.”
Guidance for scaffolders
Trade body the National Access & Scaffolding Confederation (NASC) has provided its own guidance for COVID-safe operations on site. The detailed 12-page document addresses many different aspects of working safely at height. In a section on working arrangements, it advises a range of measures to maintain social distancing:
- Scaffolding teams should be as small as possible, such as gangs of two where one erects whilst the other transfers materials;
- For large or tall structures, several gangs of three should work on separately defined sections, each with an operative at ground level transferring materials via a gin wheel;
- Work areas should be segregated with high visibility tape or hard barricades, and signposted to keep third parties out;
- All work must be adequately supervised.
The NASC guidance also sets out measures for working on a scaffold, suggesting for example that “segregation bays” should be observed – ensuring that a two-metre section of the scaffold remains empty between adjacent individuals at work. It also notes that people should avoid working “directly above or below each other, as this arrangement does not afford the same protection as when positioned two metres apart horizontally”. This advice is a result of the way droplets from a sneeze, for example, would be likely to descend from higher levels.
Source: ConstructionNews
Published: 8th April 2021