Spotters For Lifts

J

jmellc

Senior Member
Location
Durham, NC
Occupation
Facility Maintenance Tech. Licensed Electrician
Many of you have already seen this, I'm sure. Be ready when you bid any job at a plant. Our plant has been pushing us harder lately about spotting for each other on lifts, also if we spot for contractors. No longer can 2 on a lift be spotter and driver. Still have to have a ground spotter. No longer can ground spotter run to rest room while lift is in place and you are working. Spotter must be there at ALL times. Work has to stop if he has to step away. Prepare to include a spotter in your bid or ask customer to provide spotter. Ask the question ahead; don't let it be sprung on you when you arrive to start work.
 
This accident happened several years ago.

Employee killed after scissor lift hit by forklift | Safety News Alert

An electrical contract worker was killed and another employee was critically injured after they fell 30 feet from a scissor lift. Michael Leroy, an employee of Faith Technologies, was working at Hattiesburg Paper Co. in Howard, WI. He was killed after falling from the scissor lift that had been...
www.safetynewsalert.com www.safetynewsalert.com
 
infinity said:
Their money let them waste it. I hope any contractor working for them has hours of daily down time in their bid. :rolleyes:
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I have an hour of non-productive time for every guy each day just for the safe work permit process in an industrial plant.
 
Best one I had like that was we were installing new boiler in a few schools in a town near Boston. We had a substantial amount of cutting (torcH) and welding steel pipe. We had to hire the towns fire dept to do fire watch we could not provide our own fire watch they would not allow it. They used off duty fire fighters for this and we had to pay them OT. These were concrete and brick boiler room you couldn't start a fire if you wanted too.

I caught one of them outside in his truck reading a porno mag.

And you had to give them a couple of days notice when you were going to cut and weld. Some days you cut and weld all day and some days only a little but you had to pay them 8 hours.

After that we took some chances we would cut and prep without a fire watch and then have them when we were welding all day. Royal PITA and expensive.
 
Most of the big box stores require a spotter if the store is open, some even when the store is closed, but employees are working stocking. Not that unusual. You don’t see it that much in new construction because everybody is supposed to be trained to work around construction equipment.
 
BillyMac59 said:
The cost of having a spotter at ground level is insignificant compared to the cost of a workplace injury/fatality. Nowadays, it's all about liability.
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Yes there liability but anyone working on a lift should be trained to do so in a safe manner using the proper PPE. I'm not sure how a spotter on the ground looking at his cell phone is going to improve the safety of the worker on the lift. As hillbilly mentioned if the spotter is there for the protection of people on the ground then there is some merit to requiring one but that's generally not applicable on a construction site.
 
In stores you have kids crawling through the scissors due to inattentive parents, so it’s hard for the operator to see them. Barricades are not all that effective, because people ignore them because they have to get that one item!
 
infinity said:
Yes there liability but anyone working on a lift should be trained to do so in a safe manner using the proper PPE. I'm not sure how a spotter on the ground looking at his cell phone is going to improve the safety of the worker on the lift. As hillbilly mentioned if the spotter is there for the protection of people on the ground then there is some merit to requiring one but that's generally not applicable on a construction site.
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Having a spotter on the ground looking at his cell phone is a completely different issue.
 
hillbilly1 said:
Most of the big box stores require a spotter if the store is open, some even when the store is closed,
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And if you watch what they call a "forklift operator" work, you quickly realize that you do not want to be anywhere near them. 😖

Proper forklift etiquette is that you stop and stand back a safe distance while a pallet or load is being picked or placed. You can't expect the brain dead DIYers that frequent those big box stores to know that.

-Hal
 
infinity said:
Yes there liability but anyone working on a lift should be trained to do so in a safe manner using the proper PPE. I'm not sure how a spotter on the ground looking at his cell phone is going to improve the safety of the worker on the lift. As hillbilly mentioned if the spotter is there for the protection of people on the ground then there is some merit to requiring one but that's generally not applicable on a construction site.
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That's just it, the new guy and lowest paid guy on site is likely to be the one that does this majority of the time. What are they going to do when they get bored? Look at their phone or most anything you can think of that takes their attention away from the task they are there for.

Seems the story that is behind this of a forklift running into the man lift and killing/injuring those on the lift maybe needs to address the forklift operator more so than the operation of the man lift. Maybe they needed barriers at the very least to keep the forklift away from the man lift? If these guys had been working on a non moveable scaffold there should be no need for a spotter, yet the forklift could easily take it down as well.
 
don_resqcapt19 said:
I have an hour of non-productive time for every guy each day just for the safe work permit process in an industrial plant.
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I did a big overhead crane project at Boeing once, we hadn't factored in the 1 hour per day, every morning, for a safety meeting. EVERY morning.

That was in 1995 or 96 I think, even back then we had to have a ground spotter on the JLGs who had a radio tied to the entire worksite crew. Before we started there, someone had been in a fully extended JLG working near the crane rails when a bridge crane, being driven by a contractor technician, hit their basket and knocked the entire JLG over. There was a spotter in the basket with the electrician, who apparently was yelling at the bridge crane driver to stop, but he still hit them and they both went to the ground in the basket, nearly killing them. For one of them, it apparently ended his career...
 
At least here, forklift operators are supposed to be certified by taking an OSHA approved course. Some courses are better than others, there is the minimum $49 online course and those better courses that provide hands on training. That will get anybody in the driver's seat however. You can tell just by looking that the HD forklift operator had little training and is a risk vs the skilled warehouse operator that can skillfully place stacked pallets on racks 40 feet up.

-Hal
 
jim dungar said:
On whose part?
My link was to an early news article, since then a full investigation was conducted.
As I recall, this was a maintenance activity the forktruck was not aware of.
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Reminds me of the insurance company accident report by the driver involved: "It was late at night and I accidentally turned into the wrong driveway and hit a tree I do not have."
 
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