Welcome

Forthcoming Event

The next Branch meeting will be on Friday 03 February at Ravenwood Hall Hotel, Rougham, Bury St Edmunds IP30 9JA.

The speakers will be Tudor Smith and Lee Spalding, on the topic of Contractors, the 5 Cs.

Recent Event: 09 December 2011

In December we met at Stradishall for a presentation by Martin Banasik of Allianz and Tim Watson a Crane Specialist Consultant.

Martin gave us a brief summary of the law and overlap between PUWER and LOLER. The legislation replaced much of the historical prescriptive and sectoral based legislation. The philosophy is the avoidance of risk to persons in the workplace. Some pragmatism can be exercised - the higher the level of risk the higher the level of activity to avoid it.

PUWER advocates removal or physical barriers in response to risk; safe systems of work are prone to error. PUWER requires that work equipment is suitable, people are trained to use it, maintenance, safe systems of work and many hardware requirements.

Inspection is required; a periodic scrutiny on the basis of the hazards the equipment presents. this must be done by a competent person. The default period is 12 months.

LOLER concerns itself with the planning and execution of safe lifting operations. It requires that the equipment is thoroughtly examined by a competent person, to assess the integrity of the safety critical aspects of the equipment. The inspector needs to be independent and impartial, but can nevertheless be drawn from within the organisation provided they have the necessary independence to report.

Priodicities of inspections are 12 months for items lifting persons and lifting accessories, and 12 months for lifting equipment. It is possible to vary these periodicities under an examination scheme.

Defects that can cause imminent danger are reported to the enforcement authority.

He also took us through a very brief overview of PSSR.

Tim Watson took us through the management of lifting with mobile cranes. He described the roles of the key players - the appointed person, the crane coordinator, lifting teams. He described the key contents of a method statement for a lift, and the basic categories of lift:

• Basic lift
• Intermediate lift
• Complex lift

He discussed some of the problems with stability, wind and ground conditions.

He discussed the pitfalls of deciding whether to enter into a crane hire agreement or a contract lift. In the latter the crane supplier takes most of the responsibility, once the work to be carried out has been specified.

He went on to describe some notable accidents.

As this was the December meeting, a raffle was held, with many prizes for people to take home.