Safety is not just an issue for those who operate cranes. The manufacturers themselves – for various reasons, and not only product liability fears – are just as concerned.
And, in the USA at least, they have taken great steps to find out from their customers what they can do to help reduce the risk of accidents involving their equipment. Some of the suggestions that are made are really remarkably simple.
“Safety is the key concern of construction equipment manufacturers,” states Ed Roskowski, technical director of the US Construction Industry Manufacturers Association.
At the back end of last year CIMA held a seminar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to brief manufacturers’ risk managers, design engineers and product safety managers on product safety and liability issues.
One of the simplest measures that the seminar focused on was the improvement of warning labels and decals (stickers).
“It used to be that safety labels were designed in-house and were therefore different and unique to each manufacturer,” Geoffrey Peckham, president of Hazard Communication Systems, told the seminar.
“But industry-wide standardisation of pictorials and use of current formatting standards offers a better means of informing users about the hazards associated with equipment.” The USA’s ANSI standards state that a safety label needs to communicate four items: the nature of the hazard; the degree of seriousness; the potential consequence; and how to avoid it.
There are also standard signal-word colours: red for danger, orange for warning, and yellow for caution.
Peckham, who was involved in the production of the ISO international standard on safety signs, said that signs incorporating pictorials convey information quickly and easily, and conquer language barriers and illiteracy.
However, he advised manufacturers not to rely only on pictures, even if the message being conveyed seemed obvious. Peckham’s view was that it was better to reinforce the message of the picture with words. To avoid lengthy word messages, a safety label could also refer the user to the safety manual, he suggested.
At the CIMA seminar equipment customers representing dealers, contractors and rental companies discussed their top 10 recommendations for manufacturer product safety programmes with the audience of manufacturers. These are listed on the facing page.
From the panel discussion it was evident that the crane-buying public wants construction machinery manufacturers to provide more training and operational/maintenance information, as well as better designed machines.
Additional training from manufacturers, especially video based instruction (and CD-ROM and Internet) on how to safely use a particular machine, proved to be very much in demand.
The customers also want controls to be positioned more uniformly across product lines, where practical, and would also welcome suggestions from the manufacturers on how to properly secure equipment for transporting.
