On Monday, a worker saved his mate’s life by hitting him with a wooden plank in a desperate attempt to get him to release his grip on an electrified lamppost, according to local press reports in the Basingstoke Gazette and the Southern Daily Echo.
A sub-contracted operator had a close brush with electrocution when the raised arms of his 20-tonne excavator hit an 11kV power line as he drove up a slope at Scottish Water Bathgate in West Lothian, Livingston Sheriff Court was told yesterday.
A council has been fined by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) for serious safety failings after workers struck and ruptured an underground gas pipe, releasing almost four tonnes of gas in June 2010.
Two North East companies have been fined by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after workers were exposed to danger of electrocution when a digger struck an underground cable.
Even in a large, open-air area such as a quarry, the dangers of confined spaces still exist. Despite the fact that you’d think there was unlikely to be confined spaces in these environments, confined spaces are often located within equipment, below ground and in other applications with a quarry.
A confined space, an area that’s hard to enter, potentially dangerous and generally unsafe for human habitation, should always be approached with care, the correct knowledge and the correct equipment for entry. This makes sure at all times that the safety of those entering the space is not jeopardised and the risk of potentially fatal incidents is exponentially reduced.
It’s shocking to think, but the vast majority of incidents that occur within confined spaces never go reported. Even when they do, fatalities that occur as a result of an accident within an enclosed environment are rarely reported, leading to a lack of awareness of the dangers these environments pose.
Carbon dioxide, a common by-product of breathing, is lethal to humans in larger doses. The standard level of CO2 that a human can live under comfortable is around <600ppm but in many cases higher levels of CO2 are exposed to humans and can cause problems ranging from headaches to death depending on the concentration of the gas.
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