Any device, equipment, or system preventing an employee from falling on an elevation or mitigating the effect of a fall through fall protection.
Basics types of fall safety or protection
Falls are essential causes of serious injuries. You can prevent yourself from falling and getting injured or worse killed. For your safety, you should know the basic types of fall protection and which works best for every situation. There are basic types of fall safety or protection:
- Guardrails
- Travel-restraint
- Fall-restriction
- Fall-arrest
- Control zones
Guardrails
The guardrails are ideal methods of fall safety or protection. It removes the risk of falling by placing a barrier between the edge and the worker. The guardrail is the first and foremost safety barrier intended to protect a motorist who left the roadway. In a most common scenario, if the car is staggering off the road, it would be for that vehicle to come to rest unstopped. In most places and cases, that is not possible.
Travel-restraint system
The travel-restraint system will keep you from getting too close to the unprotected edge. It can restrain travel to keep the employee from falling. When getting to the open edge of the roof or floor, the system will hold you at the back. The travel-restraint system is an assembly of components designed to keep an employee from reaching an unguarded edge.
The system consists of a lanyard, a safety harness, a lifeline, or a belt. The lifeline and lanyard are adjusted to let you go only so far. The belt attaches or safety harness to the lifeline directly or through a grab or rope.
Fall-restriction system
A fall-restricting system has a combination of these:
- work positioning system (swing stage, bosun’s chair, a work positioning belt, etc.)
- fall-restricting equipment (fall arresters, rope grabs, lineman pole climbing belts)
Fall-arresting system
A fall-arresting system will keep you from making contact after the fall incident. It will arrest the fall incident. You should use the fall-arresting system if working from the following:
- Unguarded work area for more than three meters above a nearest safe level
- Unguarded work area above anything or surface that causes injury to an employee
- Unguarded work area above any open top rank, vat, or pit
- The work platform is 3 meters above a permanent, which is a safe level
- Work area where a safety and health officer determined necessary
Control zone
The control zone used where impracticable to use a fall safety or protection system, yet not allowed on a sloped surface over three in twelve and even on a scaffold. The warning line as part of the control zone should be set up 2 meters, from the unguarded edge and employees that worked in the control zone should use another form of fall safety and protection.