What In The Wide Wide World Of Sports????

[nachoman]

A friend was telling me the other day about someone that was in the gutter cleaning business. His employee would climb a ladder to get to the gutters and he needed a safety harness and a place to attach it. Since he couldn't attach it to the ladder, OSHA decided he needed to get a "cherry picker" truck and hang the bucket over the ladder as a place to attach the harness. Most people couldn't stay in business conforming to all that nonsense. Fortunately, we never had OSHA come to our place of business, I'm afraid we'd shut down before we jumped through their hoops. Not that we were careless, we had our own rules, they just made common sense, something most OSHA inspectors fail to recognize.

Ironically, I sat through a 2-day Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) class last week. Think of it as the OSHA that is specific to mining activities. The interesting part is when they went over ever mine related fatality in the USA so far this year (I think it was 80 something thus far). Several gruesome fatalities occurred because people neglected to lock out a piece of machinery they were working in, and another worker came by and switched it on. These machines were usually the type that grind rock up . But the stupidest one was perhaps the guy who climbed up a ladder to fix a piece of pipe on a roof without a harness, slipped, and fell 50 feet to his death. This accident occurred about one hour after the company had a mandatory safety meeting about - wearing a safety harness when working in high places. As the miners in the class told me - conforming to the safety measures is cheaper than the insurance increase, the million dollar haul truck you have to replace because it rolled on an unstable roadway, or the 2 days downtime while you pick human body parts out of your conveyor.