A friend of mine Jim, called me recently to ask if he and his wife needed to have all their electrical equipment Portable Appliance Tested (PAT tested) for their business which they run from home.
They had received a telephone call from a local company to ask when the last time that their electrical equipment had been tested was. When Jim said he was not sure it ever had been, the caller (salesperson) told him to look at the plug Continue reading
Isn’t it surprising that the vast majority of people are happy to ridicule ‘Elf n Safety’ yet more often than not it is those same people who notice unsafe activity?
The shopping cart
I was recently at a networking breakfast where one of the other guests threw a mini shopping cart over his shoulder. Continue reading
Over the weekend an 11 year old girl was tragically killed when she came off a banana boat ride towed by a speed boat
As with a lot of incidents and accidents there is a plenty of speculation surrounding what happened, you only have to
search the subject on the internet to be presented with a plethora of newspaper articles all putting their own particular slant on the ‘story’ and trying to make it as newsworthy as possible. Continue reading
I expect you have heard of the death of Mike Edwards from the Electric Light Orchestra
who was tragically and unexpectedly killed on Friday when the van he was driving was hit by a runaway straw bale weighing 600kg. Just to put that into perspective that is as much as a fiat 126 http://bit.ly/ao1FfN or an old style Mini http://bit.ly/cCPUSI the difference is that a bale of compacted straw is a lot more robust than a small car. Continue reading
Last week I did something that I am very uncomfortable doing! Now it might surprise you to know that I do not like telling people that they are doing something wrong but as a qualified professional it would have been remiss of me to let this pass.
As I mentioned in my post Window-cleaning-at-height the owner of the property has a duty of care to make sure that people or companies contracted to work for them do it safely. Continue reading
Today I went on our weekly grocery shopping trip with my wife.
On our way there we passed a building site with the first block of houses nearing completion.
The property developer has just erected their sales office, which has clearly been reused from another development. Now this is very laudable but for me the condition of the office is a huge marketing faux pas since it is covered in green algae and does not reflect well on a company who are hoping to sell homes to new owners.
I am no marketer but even I can see that by simply cleaning the sectional office building before it is erected will present a professional image that surely the property developer would want to convey. Better still clean it before it is delivered to site and slap a coat of undercoat on it, then paint it properly once it is erected.
As it is it raises questions not only for me that if they are prepared to present themselves in a sub-standard way, how well are the houses built and what sort of maintenance support can the new owners of the homes expect in the future.
Today I met some friends at a local hotel.
At the time the windows were being cleaned, which is nothing unusual in itself. However when the window cleaners had finished the ground floor external windows, one of them put up a ladder to clean the first floor windows. This caught my attention because the window cleaner (who just happened to be a woman) proceeded to climb the ladder to the height of the first floor and as you are expecting cleaned the windows. Continue reading
For anyone who does not know me personally in my spare time I am a runner. I enjoy the freedom of pulling on a pair of running shoes, running kit and heading off to wherever I decide to run. For years I have trained to compete in races from 5 miles up to the 26 miles 385 yards of the full marathon. I now run simply for pleasure, time and distance are immaterial. At the moment anyway.
This week I was enjoying running one of my regular routes that takes me from the seafront past Whitstable Golf course, over the railway line and up an alley out onto a road with a footpath. On this occasion there was a man from a utility services contractor digging a hole right in the middle of the path where it merges with the alley and on the footpath, there was no avoiding it. He did stop to let me past, which I did and carried on my merry way. Continue reading
Photograph from Safety & Health Practitioner 15 July 2010
There was an article in last week’s Safety & Health Practitioner magazine http://ow.ly/2gy1x about the owner of a derelict building who had contracted the work of removing the roof to a third party, who had in turn sub-contracted the work to someone else. One of this sub-contractors staff was seriously injured because there was no provision for safe access to the roof.
Yesterday I went to the start of the Whitstable Oyster Festival and saw the parade of the oysters through the harbour accompanied by a drum band.