JLG Accident (Collapsed Grating)

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Details: Parent Category: Safety Info Posts; Category: Safety Alerts; Published: 23 July 2013

A very sobering and reinforcing JLG event, indeed. What you read below (and see in the attached pictures) relate to an event at an Air Force Base on June 10th. The man working 40 feet in the air in the JLG lived through the event. A very lucky man? No. He made his own luck. He had the discipline to wear a safety harness; to don it correctly; and, to tie off properly. The blood splatter in the pictures? OK, so he broke his nose but, he lived to tell about it. The investigation is incomplete but I have a few additional facts:

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Comments

#5 Rau 2013-12-11 05:53

You are not required to wear a harness in a scissor lift, only if the site requires it.

#4 Tim Bridson 2013-07-26 01:52

I agree with tying off in nearly all cases, following a risk assessment we decided that we would need to disconnect the lanyard when working over the dry dock that was still full of water, to be stuck underwater in a cage was deemed to be of a higher risk than the fall to the water

#3 Rex 2013-07-24 18:24

Thanks, Safety Bob. That certainly makes sense now. I didn't scroll through all of the photos carefully enough.

I don't typically work with JLGs, but my understanding is that they are designed for maneuvering with the boom extended. The key is having a flat, level surface. And the point of tying off is in case there is a bump or something that could cause the basket to shift and shoot the person out.

#2 Safety Bob 2013-07-24 18:01

The employee was 40 feet in the air, the basket went nearly verticle and he was unable to keep himself in the basket during the incident.

He would have been dumped 40 feet w/o fall protection. I doubt his injuries would have been limited to a broken nose if he survived that fall.

Fall protection may not help if the tip over involves the basket hitting the ground, but in this case the basket remained nearly 40 feet in the air.

As a side note, I do question the practice of moving an aerial lift with the boom extended.

-1 #1 Rex 2013-07-24 14:42

Just curious. In this example, how is it that being tied off in the basket helped him? It makes sense in these units to be tied off when traveling over uneven surfaces, but in a tipover, I'm not easily convinced that a person wouldn't be better served with a mean of jumping free from the basket. I've seen a man escape serious injury from a scissors lift that overturned several years back by jumping clear of it as it fell.

I'm not saying that he shouldn't be tied off, as obviously that is required and the safe thing, but I don't see that he was necessarily made safer by this specific case.

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