Male Anchor: A tragic accident today for a construction crew while on the job at a Miami
site. On Miami Beach, a worker taking a nasty fall and essentially dying from his injuries.
Female Anchor: This man was impaled on rebar. He was up on the third floor
there working on the third floor. He fell to the second, 12 feet or so,
but he landed on those metal rods that are there to shore up concrete.
Jeff: I'll get your attention right here. People don't do it, they're going to do a curtain wall,
right, they got four-foot rebar stubbed out; they didn't add it in. You can go
on the internet and look at it. It goes in right about the thigh and comes out right
about the armpit. You know how they get you to the hospital? They cut the rebar.
Dustin: When we talk about fall clearance and how to calculate our fall clearance,
being able to calculate that clearance properly is really, really important. Let's start with our
lanyards. When we calculate fall clearance for our lanyards, we're always calculating from our
anchor point. We're not calculating that from our walking surface. So, the first thing we have to do
when we calculate our fall clearances, we have to know what is the first thing that we could come in
contact with. Is that a lower level? Is it the ground? Is it something that may be stacked on
the ground that could be the first thing that we come in contact with? We also have to know
what the length of the lanyard is that we're using and what the deceleration distance is on
that. When we calculate fall clearance using a lanyard, we start at our anchor point. We start
with what our maximum freefall would be, which is six feet, the length of the lanyard. We go
in to the deceleration distance on that device, which would be 42 inches, three and a half feet
by OSHA standards. Then we have the distance from the workers back d-ring to their feet,
which on average is probably about five feet. Our body's going to conform into the harness,
that back d-ring is going to stretch up about a foot, and then about two feet of safety clearance,
just in case things weren't quite where they needed to be or we have workers of different
weight, brings us to a total of seventeen and a half feet. So, using a standard six foot lanyard,
we could need a total of seventeen and a half feet from our anchor point to that next level.
That's six feet of lanyard, three and a half feet of deceleration, six feet of worker and
harness stretch, and our safety clearance at the end, for a total of seventeen and a half feet.
Jeff: What happens when you fall? The first thing that happens is you're going to engage. Okay?
You're going to fall; depends on how long your lanyard or whatever is, your freefall distance
is going to be anywhere if you're on a six foot lanyard, it's six foot. But people don't think
about it because what happens is everything else comes into effect. We have the shock pack comes
into effect. The height of the person. If you think about it, you know, the stretch of the
harness, the safety factor. So, I mean, it can be anywhere from about 12 feet if you're on a
retractable; we could get you down to about 12 feet. But if you're on a six foot lanyard, it's
going to be close to 18 feet. They don't do the calculations, and they don't add that 18 in. Or
they add it wrong and they hit something. My buddy over here just parked the forklift underneath me.
Okay? I didn't add that in. They’re going do a curtain wall. Right? They got four-foot rebar
stubbed out; they didn't add it in. You can go on the internet and look at it, it goes in right
about the thigh and comes out right about the armpit. You know how they get you to the hospital?
They cut the rebar. Or, how about this, you're on a tilt wall and you do that same thing. Right? You
know what you do? You touch that wall and what do you think the first thing is? You start spinning
because you're out of control. You have this much control. The only problem is, on a fresh tilt wall
you got form spikes, rebar, two-by-fours. Yeah. How about windows? Go through a window at 40,
they'll bury both halves of you, I promise. But they don't keep that in mind. Or, there's a rebar
filled concrete column at B; you just hit it at 40. Do you think that column will be there in the
morning? Oh yeah. Do you think you will be? Oh no. And it'll have a decorative red spot on the side
of it because you can't take the forces; it will kill you faster than you knew. You just can't take
the forces. So, that's the problem; they don't do the calculations, they don't do the math.
And I always say fall protection is two things: a set of numbers and a set of mistakes. And if
we can take the mistakes out of the equation, every mistake we take out, we're better off.