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Whether travelling as a passenger in a car or switching from a motor-launch to a ship, abiding by the rules and taking a little extra care can often prevent a major accidentA marine surveyor who stumbled and fell six metres through a cut-out on a platform while inspecting the inside of a tanker was spared serious injury due to the hard hat he was wearing.
Although the surveyor received cuts and bruises, his hard hat protected both the sides and top of his head, helped reduce the severity of his injuries and ensured that he survived the fall.
A second incident involved an employee who was sitting in the rear passenger seat of a car when it was involved in a head-on collision with a truck travelling at speed on the wrong side of the road. Although the accident was serious, the man’s injuries were not as severe as they might have been had he not been wearing a seatbelt.
These are both examples of employees following Lloyd’s Register’s Golden Rules – in the first case wearing the appropriate personal protection equipment (PPE) while working; and in the second, always using a seatbelt when travelling in a motor vehicle.
These two incidents illustrate that we are providing better protection for our employees. However, our main aim is to reduce and eliminate injury incidents altogether. While our serious injury incident rate has fallen significantly over the last two years, we won’t be satisfied until people no longer get hurt!
We constantly strive to find ways to keep employees safe at all times. One important method is looking at injury incidents, near-misses and safety observations, so we can learn from mistakes or from best practice. When reviewing our data from the last few months, we can see that our increased safety requirements have indeed saved lives amongst our employees.
Working on water
One very high-risk activity for marine surveyors is when they switch from a transfer vessel to the ship or boat they are about to survey. Lloyd’s Register recently issued a short film entitled Safe Boat Transfers showing the risks and hazards involved in such transfers and guiding surveyors through each stage of the process.
The film was made in response to the growing number of safety incidents during vessel transfers and the lack of public guidance on the subject. Examples of recent incidents include surveyors falling into the water or onto transfer boats; being struck by moving objects or being exposed to hypothermia while in the water.
Safety problems
The film outlines the pre-boarding safety checks surveyors need to make; the correct equipment they should wear and the safety requirements that boats need to apply, as well as the defects that might affect safety equipment. Other safety problems include surveyors struggling with inappropriate transfer vessels; poorly maintained ladders and inadequately trained crews.
As a safety organisation, we frequently undertake these types of internal campaigns to keep our surveyors safe. Now we want to share this with the wider industry to support greater general safety. We have pioneered similar programmes, such as initiatives to promote shipyard safety, which we have later shared with the industry.
Cathy Booth
Head of Safety Systems, Lloyd’s Register Group
Above article has been initially published at Horizons (January 2013) and is reproduced here with author’s kind permission