Friday, March 14, 2014

Firefighters do not wear safety harnesses on roofs but construction Workers must . Why is Fire Service not following this safety Practice ?

Like I always say " The Fire Service is its own Worst Enemy"
We have again another double standard where firefighters conduct operations on roofs and are not required to have on safety harness to prevent them falling off or thru the roof . Yet this same firefighter if he also works as a roofer must wear one . Do you see a problem with this ? I do.
How many firefighters lives could be saved and injury prevented if they wore a harness which was easily enough detached if they had to yet make a run for it yet  fire resistant enough to allow them to use it in daily work.
You can see in a link below where a firefighter slides off a metal roof clearly this situation called for harnesses



But instead a firefighter gets hurt and it is seen as a danger of the job. 

If this was a construction site OSHA would be all over them and a $25,000 +penalty would be accessed. 


Above  shows a typical harness made by  MSA  you must wear on roofs  a firefighters harness he uses to carry a air tank could be easily adapted to work just like this. Yet no one has done it. 
A firefighter needs to get away fast from scene etc etc. bull shit same thing if your working on a roof so I ask why have harnesses  not become mandatory on roofs for firefighters ? especially when there doing rescues and other tasks where fire is not involved.  I have done both jobs Firefighter and Construction and have tied off while doing firefighter stuff on roofs etc. and got criticized for it. Myself and many other firefighters who have worked in construction know for a fact a lot less firefighters would be getting hurt and dying on the job if the followed and knew the way buildings are constructed and took the safety precautions we do when putting up tearing down or modifying a building .
Instead of making up there own rules which gets them hurt because they are out of there league and do not know what goes on around them. That's why there are specialized private Industrial Fire Forces 
 for gas wells and hazmat situations and the fire service would do well to start realizing they are not equipped and trained to handle every situation and know when to back out and let professionals handle it. 

What do you think. 

No comments:

Post a Comment