“Sometimes the working surface isn’t large enough,” said
Taube. “You might not have a working platform in the laydown
area or access roads to the site. And then within the site, the
working platform may be laid out only to encompass the
installation point locations, not considering that some of
the equipment may need to traverse out beyond the actual
perimeter of the installation area.”
And in some cases, there is no working platform to speak of.
“Another issue is that a platform isn’t provided at all,” said
Taube. “Either contractually it’s not required or it’s an oversight.
There are still contractors that will go out and work without
a working platform.”
“We’re almost taking the moral high ground to get platforms
in, and there will be other people who come and say, ‘I can do
it for cheaper,’” said Finbow. “We’ve let jobs go where we’ve
been uncompetitive through the platform. But we’re a lot
bigger and we can take that stance.”
Aside from the legislation in Ontario, there are no official
guidelines in Canada or the U.S. for the design and construction
of safe working platforms, and so there is very limited
procedure to mitigate the potentially catastrophic risks.
As employers are legally obligated to provide their employees
with a workplace absent of serious hazards in addition
to having a moral obligation to keep workers safe, says
Finbow, it’s of critical importance that the industry
works to collectively resolve the concerns surrounding
working platforms.
“We always think about equipment, but keep in mind the
safety of workers just walking across the site,” said Taube.
“You can have issues from very slippery surfaces – whether
from ice, mud or very slick clay surfaces – but they pose a
hazard to labourers and other personnel walking across the
site, especially as they carry tools, materials or equipment.”
As Finbow wrote in 2014, “Equipment is expensive, and
our people are priceless. We do not want to damage either.”
Obviously, the consequences that can result from an inadequate
working platform are immense, and the risks are high.
“The greatest risk is toppling or overturning equipment,
and that’s a catastrophic event,” said Taube. “It’s going to certainly
lead to extensive equipment damage, and quite likely lead to
injury or loss of life.”
While injury or loss of life, along with equipment damage,
are the most critical consequences, there are also secondary
effects such as project delays, removal from the project and
incurring a negative safety record, which can affect a specialty
contractor’s ability to bid on future projects.
“People may not be aware of potential quality issues
associated with inadequate working platforms,” said Taube.
“This is the subgrade or subbase of a structure that’s going
to be built on our work. We are, in some cases, turning it to
muck, and that’s typically not good for what we’re supporting.”
Learning from protocol in the U.K.
“If we go back to the early 2000s, it was recognized that the
incidents of piling rigs falling over because of poor platforms
was too high,” said Derek Egan, B.Eng., Ph.D., C.Eng., FICE,
with Remedy Geotechnics Ltd. in the U.K., in a webinar
called, “UK Working Platform Initiative and Calculation of
Rig Bearing Pressure” presented live from DFI’s SuperPile
’18 Conference. “That’s why FPS launched their working
platform initiative.”
“I was a piling contractor in Ireland and the U.K. for
many years; I owned my own piling company,” said Gildea.
“I was involved in the early initiatives back in the U.K. when
we started discussing working platforms. What we did in
the U.K. was a lot easier than it will be in North America
because we probably only had 15 to 20 piling companies at
that stage. We had a lot of accidents and quite a few fatalities.
The FPS got together and said, ‘What can we do about it?’
And that’s how it started.”
FEATURE
A problematic working platform poses myriad safety hazards on a project site
CONTINUED ON PAGE 40
38 Q3 2019 www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
