SAFETY AND TRAINING Ӏ ESTA INTERVIEW
Does the guide also address different types of lifts? Yes, we have classified lifts into three sections because you could be lifting a tool-box from a truck onto the ground with a knuckle boom, or you could be lifting a thousand-tonne vessel using three giant cranes. So there are standard lifts,
complex lifts and critical lifts. There is also a section on double- hook single crane lifting operations which are allowed in some countries but not in others. The guide also has a section on engineered lifts. For example, if you have a plan for your engineered lift, what should be in that plan? What should you be able to see on the drawing? And what are the minimum requirements for such a drawing? Some people make beautiful full ones, some draw a couple of lines on a piece of paper and say ‘that’s it’.
How does the guide address unexpected situations on-site? There is on-site preparation for a lift. You do what you can to plan but what do you do when there are exceptional circumstances, when real events do not follow that plan? So we have paid quite a lot of attention to contingency planning. If you execute a lift, and your load is off the ground and you want to put it down in another place, what do you do if that place is suddenly unavailable for one reason or another? There might not be a second place to put it; you might not be able to put it back in its original location. Operating companies do not always think about such things.
Have you ever personally encountered any of these kinds of situations? I personally have come into contact with this some 30 years ago when the first superlift cranes came
42 CRANES TODAY
LAUNCH OF NEW GUIDANCE FOR HFRS IN CONSTRUCTION
In the UK the Construction Industry Plant Safety Group, a pan-sector group managed by the Construction Plant-hire Association (CPA) and set up through the Health & Safety Executive (HSE), has launched a new publication entitled ‘Good Practice Guidance for the Use of Machine-Mounted Human Form Recognition Systems’. The new publication is to inform owners, users, operators, managers. OEMs and third-party
suppliers on the considerations for the fitment, use and management of Human Form recognition systems (HFRS) installed on plant to detect and warn of human presence in defined danger zones. The guidance covers topics such as: HFRS types, function and fitment; management of systems on- site; data collection, monitoring; responsibilities to fitment and use; education and behaviours.
The new guidance document can be downloaded free of charge from the CPA website at:
https://cpa.uk.net/plant-safety-group/
in. On a superlift you have the counterbalance weight suspended from the crane; and if you put the load down you also have to put the counterweight down, or else your crane might fall over backwards. I have seen a situation where a
transformer was being offloaded from a barge, the crane rotated 180 degrees to set it down – only for the operator to realise that the counterweight would not fit onto the barge so he could put down neither the counterweight nor the load. It is not the only time that someone couldn’t put the load down because he couldn’t get rid of its fellow.
Where can readers access the LORM guide? The guide is free to download from the ESTA website: go to the ‘Public Library’ page, then click under ‘Cranes’.’ (Alternatively, https://bit. ly/4nIPcFj gets you straight there.) It is available in English and in Italian and we are working on French, Spanish and German translations. We are hoping that it will be useful in pointing operators, manufacturers and clients – towards best practices in what they do. The result can only be an improvement in safety; in other words, fewer accidents and fewer people harmed.
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