Inclement weather practices
Something that has always tripped me up is how to manage workers and contractors during inclement weather conditions. OSHA offers very loose guidelines on how to manage during such conditions.
For example: if there is a major storm system moving through the area would you cancel all work (scheduled to take place during the storm), or proceed with the job until weather conditions get bad enough you feel the need to start pulling teams off the job. If that's the case, what would you consider "bad enough" - would that just be a judgement call left up to the safety professional?
Does anyone keep a written policy on hand for this type of stuff? I bring this up now as hurricane season starts ramping up (plus I've seen some recent OSHA citations on this subject).
Comments (3)
I've always wondered this myself. Luckily for me, I work in a region where serious storms aren't necessarily apart of our normal climate. However some of my sites are located in particularly arid regions where it gets in the 100s by late May/June. We have protocols for working to prevent heat stress, but there are no rules that prevent us from working in extreme heat. What is "extreme heat", and where do we draw the line?
If anyone haws insight on any of these issues, that would be great!
Most of the work we do is at the customer's location. Typically our customers have a lightning policy, which gives distances for lightning strikes and a wait period after the last known strike (typically 30 minutes after last known). I've also worked on locations that were in areas known for tornadoes. Those sites had built concrete bunkers for shelter in case of bad storms. We've built a question set within our site safety plan that covers inclement weather mitigation planning, but do not have a formal full blown procedure. We use the Weatherbug app for a lot of our weather data needs on a daily basis.
This link is for an OSHA Fact Sheet for lightning when working outdoors, which has some good info as well. https://www.weather.gov/media/owlie/OSHA_FS-3863_Lightning_Safety_05-2016.pdf