The Importance of Stop-Work Meetings for Industrial Chimney Contractors

Safety First

All industrial chimney contractors should implement stop-work meetigs regularly in order to minimize risks. You may be wondering why this construction worker is not tied in, or why this demolition job went wrong as it did seemingly unplanned. There is a secret to doing these kinds of jobs correctly that most workers and companies know nothing about. During any demolition job like this there needs to be specialized safety meetings every so often in the project. This is where workers sit down and discuss how the job can go wrong, and how to prevent it. These kinds of meetings do not happen by themselves; they have to be a habit. And usually there is no reason for them with regular jobs that already have regular tool-box safety meeting talks.

People can only think of one thing at a time, and in this case the construction worker is focused on the job to just keep going in the face of risks. There is no concrete plan in place on where to stop or when to stop. Someone may suppose that this may not have been the case. However as can be plainly seen in the video the worker was not even tied in. The accident obviously happened due to poor planning.

But in addition to regular planning, safety and standard protocols, there should have been plans to stop every hour or after every cut and make assessments ————-this obviously did not take place because that cut was made at the wrong time and the worker was not tied in. There was no stop work meetings, to assess how the structure was behaving during the demolition process, nor what it could do and when.

Stop Work Protocols have not been written up yet by OSHA or other such organizations. There are no industrial standards for stop-work protocols during demolition on time and for unforeseen reasons based on guess work. When I say guess work, this has to do with supposing the present plan, whatever that present plan is, maybe wrong. This protocol has to do with the idea that accidents can happen to anyone for unforeseen reasons.

Additionally, when these plans are in place there has to be more respect for the plan than for the job. Often what can happen is workers want to simply plow ahead without having to deal with questions or interference or discussion. People like to work independently, sometimes people do not get along well. This is a common problem because this protocol can be annoying. People do not like their plans to be called into question and have to go over them repeatedly. It may also be necessary in these meetings to discuss backing up and putting things back the way they were or starting over. People do not like this idea either, they have envisioned an outcome for the job, and it is easy for the ego to get involved, but this outcome may not be either logical nor practical as will the results of the job show.

On the bright side, the nice thing about accidents as can be seen in this unfortunate case here, is that they remain a testimony that people can make plans, even plan for months and spend millions of dollars on these plans and the plan has been clearly wrong all along. People then try to deny that they made any mistakes, but there is no denying it as the results prove it. You may ask, how is that a nice thing? In the world we live in other kinds of mistakes humans make can go on for centuries and no one knows why they are wrong because they have never done any kind of serious fact checking and evaluations. But sometimes after a long time it can happen that someone can point out the obvious and the truth becomes apparent and people want to change. But in an accident, there is a serious opportunity for people to understand that there was a mistake. In this case people can understand that enjoying doing things the wrong way even though it may have been practical and efficient was a mistake. The good thing about accidents is that they provide us with an opportunity to learn about human nature and how we need to be able to communicate properly with the people we work with and with the job itself. Unfortunately, even though all these things are true, even in an accident sometimes we fail to learn and these same kinds of accidents as well as wrong thinking keep happening again and again.

There are more industrial chimney accidents to analyze, such as the south denmark silo demolition that went wrong. Learning from these and having regular stop-work meetings may prevent further accidents such as these.

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