Today I spent most the day on a manlift in a warehouse installing conduit in the rafters. The guy working with me was pretty uncomfortable with the height and swaying while I was unfazed from years of working on such platforms. While I was standing on the railing of the platform, he asked what would happen if I fell. My responce was ‘well I’d probly die’. He asked ‘really?’ I said ‘I’m not really sure but if I lived I’d probly be wishing I died.’
So my question comes down to percentagewise what are the chances? Given the manlift is 16 feet up to the platform and another 4 feet to get over the railing (I never stand on the top rails btw only the mid ones). It would be a 20 foot free fall onto concreate. No protective gear of any sort just random clothed person plumting. Should my money be on death? Massive bodily injury? Bouncing and walking away?
We have done variations on this one before. The height to probable death is fairly low given an accidental fall on concrete. I am not sure exactly what we found for percentages by height the last time but the probability at 20 feet should be well over 50% for death. Serious injury would make up most of the rest.
As you and you cohort should be aware, both of you ought to be wearing fall arresting body harnesses. An OSHA inspector could be an unpleasant surprise to you and your employer, the GC on the job, yadda yadda.
There’s no way to predict-it’s all based upon how you hit and what gets damaged. You could be anywhere from bruised and sore but extremely lucky to minor injury, sitting in a wheelchair doing a Christopher Reeve impression, or worm fodder.
Well technicaly he wouldn’t be required to wear one he was always on the platform which has a 4 foot enclosed railing. When I was stepping up on the lower rails I only had an effective 2 foot railing so yes I should have been wearing one.
I’m well educated in safety proceedures and certainly know better. When I worked for Home Depot I was in charge of lift equipment safety for my district and had people fired for doing stupid shit like that. I’m working for myself now so I generaly make my safety decisions based on my comfort level.
I’m in MA, the OSHA inspectors around here spend their time in and around the big dig so barely spend any time checking other jobsites.
I’m not sure about the OSHA requirements, but I used to design manlifts (Snorkelift, now defunct) and I know that according to our operator manuals, any use of the lift (or even operation of the vehicle from the basket) required the use of harness and lead. This was no doubt a CYA legalism in case somebody fell out of a basket at ground level (I had a manager that did exactly this…dips**t). Without question stepping up on the lower rails is outside of the operational guidelines of the manlift. Hey, we knew people did stuff like this (and the guys running telescopic MHTs do even more hazardous things) but it was clearly stated that feet stayed on the platform floor and nothing but arms were to extend beyond the footprint of the basket.
Can you provide context for the failure, i.e. was it operator error or mechanical failure? Modern manlifts have redundency in the telescopic function and hefty safety factors on lift, stability, and structural elements pertaining to elevation function.
With regard to the OP; I’m assuming (by the height, application, and the fact that there were two of you) that you were in a scissors-type lift (or that Upright lift with the articulating boom and a big platform); there’s a lot of entirely natural swaying motion, and it takes a surprising amount of force before they’ll tip. I’ve been up in 126 foot machines, however, where you’re right above the boom and can’t see what’s holding you up, and the sway (several feet) is disturbing. Then you look at the stability factor of safety–somewhere in the area of 1.25, assuming a wind load of such-and-such–and you start feeling nauseous and wondering if your affairs are in order. After that experience, 20 feet seems like a puddle jump. Would you die from a 20 foot drop? Probably not, especially if you don’t land on your head, but odds are that you’ll probably break something.
Mechanical or design failure, though I don’t know the details. Apparently the manufacturer did end up acknowledging that it was a problem on their end, and the guy was awarded enough money for him to retire on.
Interesting. I’m surprised they acknowledged any culpability rather than just settling out of court.
We had a request from marketing via legal at one point to develop a platform that wouldn’t require someone to wear a harness, i.e. a cage. It was absurd, both because it ended up being weight prohibitive (maximum standard weight capacity was 750 lbs, i.e. two guys and tools, this one ended up being 250 lbs max capacity) and almost totally useless for any practical purpose. In the end, we accepted that people would use these things in all sorts of ways that were not approved, or indeed, intelligent, and merely put disclaimers and warning stickers all over the console and the op manual to CYA.
I could tell a few tales of design punts that were, in my eyes, kind of scary, but for the most part we were very conservative with regard to stability and structural/hydraulic safety. The advantage to taking liberties with safety margins was far outweighed by the costs, and marginal design decisions rarely made it past the first couple of reviews. The vast majority of incidents are operator error and carelessness, pure and simple.
Yep clearly against the guidlines thus Osha would through a fit to if they saw it. It is very standard proceedure for many electricians and such. The sheet metal ceilings in the warehouses are 24 feet. The small lifts that fit down the isles tend to have a 16 foot lift. So the only way to get all the way up is to bring a step ladder or stand on the rails. I personaly prefer the rails. If the people buying or renting the equipment understood anything besides its platform that went up and down and got something with a 18+ lift it wouldn’t be so standard. You just try to work with what got and not kill yourself or don’t do the work.
In a warehouse situation, your chances of survival might be altered by whatever you hit on the way down; bounce off a stack of flattened cardboard somewhere, even if it’s just a grazing contact and you might just break a number of bones - catch your head on the corner of a piece of steel racking and you might be dead before you hit the floor.
Data point: In High School a friend fell off a 2nd story apartment balcony railing onto sidewalk concrete. She’d been sitting on the railing & went over backwards. ~12 feet from railing to surface.
She landed in about a 45-degree head down/feet up attitude. Her head hit basically on the corner where the face joins the left side of her head.
Result: 6 months in hospital/rehab, drop of ~40 IQ points, personality went from vivacious to coach potato. Despite major use of modern (well, 1970s) medicine/surgery, her face was obviously crooked & her left eye didn’t track right but still saw OK. She had no paralysis, but did have some awkward movements, like after a minor stroke.
Another couple of feet or a more vertical impact would probably have broken her neck in addition to the above.
Imagine a shuffling, not-quite-right checkstand operator at a cow-county KMart & you’ve got the idea. Before the fall she was in athletics, the band, got good grades & was popular, attractive, & seemed likely to do real well in college.
Damn, that was a shame. I hadn’t thought about the accident for probably 10 years. We weren’t real close, she was mostly just another girl in my graduating class. I wonder how she ended up?
At a place where I used to work, a man who was working on top of the manlift drove it into a pit cut into the concrete floor, tipping it over. He had a safety harness, but it didn’t help him much as it sort of trebuchet’d him over the railing as the lift swung towards the floor, 20 feet or so down, so he ended up hitting the concrete. He died, and even though this is the SDMB I’ll spare the details of the horror.
I always felt bad because I had specified the cut in the concrete that he drove into. I don’t feel responsible for a variety of reasons (such as, the actual cut was made without my knowledge, at the wrong time, and the people doing it deviated from the standard safety procedure I had specified of putting a steel plate bolted to the floor to cover the hole - and the manlift operator was never supposed to be driving the thing while it was extended upwards), but I still feel bad.
Most self-propelled manlifts (except for the really tall ones that have to deploy their outriggers before elevating) are designed to move, albeit at a reduced rate, while elevated. Construction sites are obviously quite hazardous and the danger is exacerbated when hazards aren’t clearly indicated or people are in to much of a hurry to take a minute to do something right (cover up a hole, for instance, or put on a safety harness).
I know they are designed to do so, but our factory was so crowded and busy and potentially hazardous that it was the official company safety policy that the manlift not be moved while extended. Of course, everyone ignored it, just like the other official policies (forktruck operators had to wear their seat harness, construction personnel were not to smoke joints on the job, etc.)