ROOF SAFETY; DOES NOBODY CARE??

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.

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.

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.

Well, it may be time for a trip down linguistic lane. Per diem is related to carpe diem by the day. Woody might just be annoyed because nobody payed him what they should have to drive that motorcycle through the desert way back in the early diems. The benefits were just uplifting panoramas and self-reliance while building independence and a first-rate mind, day after day. A person can get carpal tunnel syndrome grabbing at small amounts of money on a repetitive basis. Could even happen to you while nailing on shingles though even a four cents a nail, it didn't happen to me. Minimum wage on the other hand, just gives you plain old tunnel syndrome although you could also get carpal tunnel syndrome while you were at it if you happened to be continuously clutching at the walls. Sometimes it seems like we are walled in by the tunnel of days. But one diem does not equal another diem really and hopefully never will. Each day is a unique gift. Carping per diem is not latin-based, per se or even per say. Our rugged old English has accumulated a lot of variety and that one is Scandinavian from karpa (to dispute.) There is benefit from disputation, even sometimes the carping variety. How this shakes out for anyone in particular is not for me to say, only that it is all somehow related and I get a per diem allowance for such things.

Mama is happy again because Estory said he was sorry. Now Estory and WyWoody have got off on the wrong foot. Estory is not vindictive and Wywoody is not a jerk. We've got a lot of passion for our opinions. Now hug it out!

Hi,

I consider myself to be one of the safest roofers out here.I may not wear a harness but I take ALL other precautions. As in the best safety being to not have a fall to begin with whether your tied to a rope or not. I don't want to fall half way to the ground and have my vertebrae snapped in half from the rope catching either.

I always tie my ladder off in a way that will not allow it to slide horizontally or allow the bottom to kick out. Even though I take full advantage of the grip that an old couch cushion provides, I still will not go up a steep sloped roof on a cushion without a secure walk board underneath me just in case.

I have a very good feel for the roof and ultimate respect for it. Which is something I can not say holds true concerning many of the governments rules and regulations.

I am self employed with no employees. OSHA does not posses the ability to give me a citation for anything as long as I am working alone.

If I feel a job would be unsafe for me to do, then I will pass on the invitation to bid altogether. I carry a 24 ft. ladder. If that don't reach with room to spare then it's "Sorry I couldn't help you".

If I hired employees to work for me then all of this would be another story. I could not and would not expect others to be safe on their own free will. Especially younger people. Only other advanced experience roofers can be expected to posses these same qualities and only some of them.

I am a roof repair specialist and could care less about re-roofing a house. If you see me up on the roof doing a repair with no harness on and you decide to call OSHA, tell them to hurry because most likely by the time they get there I will be working on the next one across town.

With all that said I agree 100% that if you are going to put other people in harms way ( which occurs simply by putting them on a roof ) then you need to follow all safety rules and regulations. And also implement many of your own!

Peace! ;)

Estore, your response answers the question whether you are a vindictive, know-it-all, snitching little-minded man.

Nobody answering this thread has advocated not having hired help in compliance. Working owners are exempt, which means we still retain the right to determine safety measures for ourselves even if the state dictates what we have our employees do. Quit your smug pretense of assuming anyone that doesn't agree with you is irresponsible. It won't fly here.

Mike H,

There's always going to be those unavoidable instances. When it comes to customer negligence, however, do not agree to and make sure your contracts do not read that your company holds the owner's and their representatives harmless for injuries resulting from their incompetence and or negligence.

I saw a situation years ago where the owner did not disclose the proper information about his property and a man got injured to the point of never being able to work again and the owner was clearly negligent, HOWEVER, because the contract read that way (from the General Contractor), This poor guy wasn't able to go after anyone.

I care, and we take great strides to be safe. We've actually won some awards and received some recognitions for our efforts.

But we've had two serious accidents in the last year.

Accident 1: Man appears to have simply blacked out upon stepping on the top rung of the ladder, pitched off backward and fortunately landed on a co-worker, saving his life. He's still pretty messed up, and may never roof again, but he is alive.

Accident 2: A steam line that was supposed to be disabled had a release as a man walked past it. Badly burning him with 2nd degree burns over most of his back, arms and butt crack. He's in amazing spirits, but it will be a good while before he can stand the heat of the sun again. Maybe a year.

No amount of osha, on our part, could have stopped these. However, the customer's part in the steam release could have been very simply avoided.