As you climb up and down a scaffold on a construction site, you may notice various safety hazards.
There are many ways that scaffolds pose a threat to workers, and knowing more about how you can get catastrophically injured on them is important.
Total collapse of the structure
According to the United States Department of Labor, every construction workplace should have a competent person on the site that checks to make sure that the scaffold is not in danger of collapsing. If the workers do not properly construct it or the competent person does not check before work begins, then the scaffold and beams could fall apart when someone stands on it.
Even one person’s body weight is enough to break an unsafe scaffold. Falling down and landing on your back or any other position can leave you with catastrophic injuries as well as serious head trauma.
Loose tools
When a worker is up on a scaffold, they may forget to properly place their tools in a safe spot so that another worker can walk around without stepping on them. If you step and trip on a misplaced item that someone left on a platform, you can suffer from a variety of physical injuries.
You can also struggle with severe head trauma if a heavy tool or other item drops from above onto your head. Workers who are rushing to finish a task may lose their grip on their tools and drop them to the platform below. Learning more about how catastrophic injuries can happen on scaffolds is one way to prepare for work on a construction site.
