A safety awareness leaflet has been issued to warn users of mobile elevating work platforms (MEWPs) about the catapult effect, which can cause occupants to be ejected from the platform, leading to serious injury and death, especially if occupants in boom-type machines are not wearing the correct personal fall protection equipment (PFPE).
CEO & MD at IPAF
The leaflet, entitled MEWP Catapult Effect, has been created by IPAF’s Safety & Technical team as part of the federation’s ongoing Don’t Fall For It! global safety campaign, which is targeted at reducing falls from the platform. It’s free to download via IPAF’s website at www.ipaf.org/resources.
Brian Parker, IPAF’s Head of Safety & Technical, comments: “It’s been a challenge to condense the key information describing the catapult effect, what the main underlying causes are, and how to mitigate these. We’re confident that the new leaflet will be very helpful in raising awareness around this potentially dangerous situation that can arise when using MEWPs, and we are happy to offer this free of charge to end users.”
IPAF launches enhanced accident reporting dashboard
Members and non-members who log data in the IPAF accident reporting portal (www.ipafaccidentreporting.org) are now able to access improved dashboard functions that allow them to track their own safety statistics against the wider industry, following extensive work behind the scenes to enhance and update the portal’s user interface.
Brian Parker, IPAF Head of Safety & Technical, comments: “Until now, IPAF offered a limited interface for viewing reports via the portal, with logged-in users only able to view charts ranking the incidents reported by company as a proportion of the total, which allowed rough benchmarking against overall industry trends.
“However, after extensive development work, we are pleased to announce that those using the incident reporting dashboards can now apply multiple filters that will give a snapshot of member company incidents entered against all database entries, which are completely anonymised so no company or individual can be identified.”
Peter Douglas, CEO & Managing Director of IPAF, says: “We need to challenge ourselves as an industry. Is there more we could do to reduce these numbers? We need more data from across all sectors of industry, from as many countries as possible; especially via easy on-the-spot incident reporting through the ePAL app. We hope this empowers people to report accidents and near-misses, which too often go under-reported.”
IPAF is a not-for-profit members’ organisation that promotes the safe and effective use of powered access equipment. Members include manufacturers, rental companies, contractors and users.
IPAF
015395 66700
Comments are closed.