OSHA! We all love to hate them! They burden us down with all kinds of regulations and requirements for safety education. Why? Doesn’t the government understand that we construction workers are professionals?
“I almost killed him!” This thought rushed through my mind 30 years ago when I was a foreman of an erection crew building a 30′ tall steel building in Sarasota, Florida. Those were some pretty wild times as far as safety was concerned. We didn’t wear hard hats until one of the guys dropped a screw gun from 20′ up on scaffolding and split a co-worker’s head open. And fall protection? Are you kidding? We were steel workers. The ball on the crane was our elevator to the roof!
I had welded up a t-bolt to hold a piece of steel in place. One of my guys was standing on the beam when the weld broke. It was only God that saved him as he fell forward to grab onto a beam 30 feet off the concrete below. No hardhat. No safety harness. Not tie-off. He was lucky to be alive and I was lucky to not be responsible for someone’s death.
OSHA’s rules and regulations exist to help keep us safe. There should be no excuses for most injuries on the construction site.
