Less Training Results In More Accidents

Why have there been so many construction accidents in the past few years? A recent article on Equipment World’s site by Wayne Grayson takes a look at the problem. OSHA official: Further increase in construction deaths likely; triggered by uptick in activity, less-experienced workers is a sobering assessment of safety on the jobsite.

“We recently investigated deaths at job sites in Kansas City, Missouri; Framingham, Massachusetts; Brookhaven, Georgia; Bellevue, Washington and Albuquerque, New Mexico,” said Dean McKenzie, the deputy director of OSHA’s directorate for construction. “And that was just one week.”

While this is appalling, the answer is pretty obvious to OSHA. The agency tries to make sure that employers and employees know the safety regulations and follow them so that accidents don’t happen as regularly. But those employers and employees have to be trained, and they have to respect their training. For example, the company doing the demolition of a three-and-a-half-story building in Connecticut had to be stopped before workers were injured:

“It was a brick building built in the early 1900s that they were trying to rehabilitate. The contractor had taken all the interior floor joists that tie the building together so all he had was a brick box,” McKenzie said. “Compliance officers called our engineering office to get our support on how weak this structure would really be and we shut it down until the job could be done safely.”

Imagine the operator of heavy equipment on that job, hoping that the building wouldn’t collapse on top of the work crew. Maybe he even was the guy who called in OSHA when the contractor wouldn’t listen, who knows? What we do know is that the better trained the operators of heavy equipment are, the safer everybody is. There’s a lot of dangerous stuff that happens in construction, and good training keeps it happening safely.

ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Training School works hard to make sure that our graduates are fully aware of the safety regulations and know how to operate their machine to do the job without any injuries. We want you to have a long, profitable career as a heavy equipment operator known for your expertise and safe practices.