Does your organization have safe work procedures in place for pedestrians working around mobile equipment?
What if we tweak that COR Audit question a bit?
Does your organization have safe work procedures (SWP) in place for mobile equipment working around pedestrians?
More specifically;
Has your company trained or instructed their drivers in safe work procedures for driving in proximity to roadside workers?
When your trucks are out on the road, and they pass by or through a construction site, they’re carrying out their work while transiting through another employers’ workplace.
To be sure, the employers running these roadside worksites have their training, SWP, controls, and PPE in place. And it is their responsibility to keep their workers safe. But, there is still considerable uncontrollable risk posed by the public and professional drivers passing by or through that worksite.
Now no doubt, the majority of drivers on the road are the public, and awareness is being raised – For Drivers – Drive with Care in the Cone Zone. There are also resources available for companies doing the roadside work – Keeping Your Workers Safe.
There is no doubt that employers with road-going drivers can develop SWP and driver instruction/training to help protect other employers’ workers. I suspect some companies are already doing this. It would not take much time or effort to add a Driving around roadside workers SWP to an already robust safety program. Having this SWP in place also enhances your company’s due diligence in the case that one of your drivers is involved in an accident or incident with a worker at a roadside worksite. Additionally, the optics are much better if there was news coverage of such an event and it is clear that your company had SWP and had trained/instructed your drivers.
Reprinted from May 2015
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