ROOF SAFETY; DOES NOBODY CARE??

First of all, the foremost obvious risk related to roof cleansing is that the potential for a life-ending or life-altering fall. Many people wrongly presume that only two-story roofs are unsafe,but there are numberless people who are paralyzed or die by falling from single story.

Here are some basic roofer safety tips if you want to go up on your own roof. Please recall twice before getting on a roof and strongly consider using a professional instead. The guidance given here is not a complete guide to roof fall protection, but to some extent this is useful.

https://youtu.be/FRaV93zBplE

I'm always safe! I took this one today to prove I do use my ladder.

Dorothy Parker was a phenomenal wit. Here's a bit from one of my favorites of hers:

"Oh, I should like to ride the seas, A roaring buccaneer; A cutlass banging at my knees, A dirk behind my ear. And when my captives' chains would clank I'd howl with glee and drink, And then fling out the quivering plank And watch the beggars sink.

I'd like to straddle gory decks, And dig in laden sands, And know the feel of throbbing necks Between my knotted hands. Oh, I should like to strut and curse Among my blackguard crew.... But I am writing little verse, As little ladies do.

Yes, some kinds of planks were designed to get people from the ship to somewhere else, and out at sea, well, the somewhere else was... how shall we say.... making someone walk the plank under those conditions was designed to kill them. But it's not the plank's fault.

Woody made the right rule. Yeah, if you're doing a repair job, why not prepare a place at the base of the work, sanely drop the trash there, and then take it to the truck. What would be the sanity of erecting a scaffold or setting up a plank for something like that? But you build bridges for the bigger stuff; that's what they're for.

It's all about determining where to stop a cascade of events from leading to something harmful, without utterly destroying your quality of life and freedom in the process.

So here's how the intellectual, arm-chair genius mind works: (the kind of stuff we get from over-paid, self-aggrandizing, bureaucrats and judges and actuaries and such) You've got a car accident. Guy was driving without his lights on after dark, goes over a hundred foot embankment (missed the bridge) and dies. You've got another car accident. Guy drops his cigarette between his legs, fishes around for it and plows into a cement and steel column (didn't miss the bridge) and is dead on impact. The next incident on the stat sheet is related. Man gets into his car, gets out on the freeway at high speed, starts pondering on how absurd life is and how many restrictions to happiness there are, puts a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket over his head and plays chicken til he goes off the shoulder (no bridges involved) slams into an oak tree, and dies three days later in the hospital. Or worse, causes a head-on collision killing a dozen other people while he is at it. How do we find and fix the source of this preventable stuff? Outlaw cars. That's it. No more driving cars and no more deaths involving or not involving bridges when there are cars around the scene. You can own them but you can't drive them. You need to hire a licensed, insured, seat-belt certified, non-drinking, bonded driver to take you to the supermarket. A chauffeur, so to speak. But wait! It was all because you couldn't see. There was no vision.

In this case, there wasn't even a car. I don't like using my 28 foot plank much because it's too damned heavy to move around easily, and when you are out in the middle you get the sympathetic vibration bridge syndrome going. But roof to truck with a six-foot drop below? I'm using the plank. Every time.

Walking the plank was designed to kill people! Sometimes you just gotta throw the crap on the ground and double work it. :unsure:

One thing WSHA here in Washington used to do was send all employers the results of their investigation of every workplace fatality and advisories on how to prevent them. It was very educational, even though it rarely involved roofing.

I adopted several practices from those reports, like putting fisheye mirrors at the back of my delivery trucks. On the only roofer death that I remember, during a tearoff, a guy was carrying an armload of wood shingles as high as his head, while crossing a plank from roof to truck. He fell less than 6' but hit his head on a retaining wall. After reading that, I made a rule to never carry armloads higher than your shoulders.

dubya has hit on the obvious: OSHA is very very very vague about mitigating factors and how these accidents happen

They don't even separate, to my knowledge, professional roofers vs. homeowners, or neighborhood kids.....or people drugged up and drunk

We've been snookered. Of course. In the end, the quality of roofs will go down and many homeowners, their neighbors and their children will end up hurt and DEAD, doing the jobs themselves because they won't be able to afford anybody doing it "by the book".

In my opinion you do a stellar job, John, and I would feel extremely safe working on any of your projects, but as I've mentioned before, I still don't think you are in compliance, even though the OSHA man on the last tile project you posted gave you the ok. Those guys setting tile at the top of those ladders would have a lot of velocity by the time they hit the scaffold deck. Way more than a six-foot fall. Don't get me wrong, I'm not finding any fault with how you set things up. Just saying.

We scaffold our jobs so we have a catch platform beneath us. No ropes, no debris on the ground, and no hassles. I am too damn old to be bouncing off the ground. Harnesses when working in the lifts and such, but very few ropes.

I think this business would do fine without ropes on every job. That's after experiencing several bad accidents in the 90's. No serious ones since.

Drugs were at play. I'm not talking about MJ, talkin bout the hard stuff. Guys will work hard, and my Dad had no idea these guys were doing this because most of the crew was guilty and covering for each other. Two of the guys came back after a bad fall and are still with me today, without their habits. I now know how to spot a problem. It was an epidemic around here, very sad.

Another guy fell, broke his back. Came back after a year or so clean. Fell again, off a stepladder, a few years later. Came back after a couple of years clean again. Then walked out in traffic at night and got seriously hurt. His old lady is going to take him to the scrap yard when his time's up. :lol:

I'd imagine the ropes are making the substance abusers feel the safest, while annoying the rest of us most of the time.

At least the world is better than it used to be, when men were worth less than mules!

Looking back over the last 30 years I can remember 7 accidents where someone fell from the roof that occured on a job site that I had a personal involvement with. Most of which I was just working on a crew for someone else.

Of the 7 falls only one man was seriously injured. One guy suffered a sprained ankle and another a bloody nose.The other 4 were uninjured.

ALL of the incidents involved the young and inexperienced doing things that were unsafe and just outright ridiculous.

There was one serious injury in 30 years and it was discovered that the young man that fell was drunk and high on marijuana.

Sheesh! Or should I say: sheeple.

Estorey, some of us believe government over-regulation is the root of problems, not the solution. We abide by safety rules because we have to in order to prevent fines, but we haven't fooled ourselves into thinking we can't be safe without them. They are a nuisance part of our business. Your holier-than-thou attitude is a bit of a nuisance as well.

Why not go spend your time helping old ladies across the street and stop the thinly-veiled threats.

OSHA has very little to do/impact on practical safety.

Would be interesting to know if OSHA regs may increase accident odds in some cases, &/or overall. i.e., anytime a worker is climbing/working at heights, there is a risk. What about the increased time OSHA regs put on particualr tasks. INOW's; A particualr task may take 30 minutes and can be completed in a safe manner, whereas complying w/OSHA, may expose the worker to twice the time at risk, so-to-speak. Not to mention the added task of safety equipment handling/set-up/tear-down.

You take a co w/100 roofers, that's got to be a calculated ADDED risk factor.

wywoody.....Thanks for tellin-like-it-is.....

This is about as close as I can come to "hugging it out".

Estorey, I'm sorry for all the words that came after vindictive in my previous post. But I stand by that word. But, I also understand where you are coming from because the main thing I have observed about having a crew fully in compliance and hooked up is the amount of additional workplace hostility it generates.

My reason for doubting whether you are real is that unless you live in a coal mining town in China, work-related deaths are rare enough that they are reported in the news. I would assume that anybody safety-obsessed would take note of a roofer death or check online for the story.

Egg, you are wrong about why I may seem to be annoyed, the amount of money I get has been whatever I asked to get since about 1978. I would ride a motorcycle across the desert for free, I have been known to even pay to do it, they don't let you ride in hare-and-hounds for free.

egg, its funny you should say that, I was thinking the same thing.