This footage would be great to use in a management setting to discuss failures in our safety process. My plant managers (all four of them) would immediately make the snarky comment about not having a “bullseye” painted on the bucket. It was simply a matter of time!!!
I/m betting this “practice” was “routine” (Reason’s HF model) and done in the name of “reducing congestion”. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone could justify this setup. It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall when management discussed this event… as, did they end it before the sun set that day, or make excuses for the need to continue in the name of “efficiency”? Not knowing the actual failures that led to this near-death event, I would hope the business, AND ALL THE OTHER businesses in this line of work, would take a moment and re-examine how this work is done within. Want to have a safety talk with impact? Send this video to every company phone, iPad, and computer, and then discuss the failures (regardless of whether they are management failures or personal failures) that led to such an event. Anytime a piece of PPE saves a life, we should celebrate this, but we also better damn well ask “WHY DID THE EVENT GOES SO FAR that our last line and lowest control play such a critical role”? Let’s not fool ourselves. Wearing a harness in a bucket truck is NOT protecting the worker from this event! The truck could have simply ripped the entire boom down, and the PFAS would have done zero for the worker. So yes, the PFAS saved a life that day, but there was a ton of luck involved. LEARN FROM IT!