Safety and training go hand in hand. A properly trained operator is likely to be a safe one. An untrained operator will almost certainly be dangerous. In, for example, a heavy industrial setting, the consequences of any failure in an overhead crane operation could bring about a major disaster, quite possibly with many deaths.
Regulations about training, therefore, exist. In the UK PUWER, or the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, it states that, “All people using equipment at work must be adequately trained to ensure health and safety in its use, supervision or management”. It goes on to say that, “Some work activities require detailed formal training but, for most everyday activities involving work equipment, adequate training can be delivered in-house using the manufacturer’s instructions and the background knowledge/skills of more experienced workers and managers.”
That second sentence does not apply to heavy industrial hoists. “Turning up at a new job and being given an hour’s briefing by your predecessor is certainly not adequate for that,” says John Robbins. He is technical trainer at Konecranes’ UK training centre. The centre offers courses for crane operators, and for lifting and slinging, from their training centre in Banbury in Oxfordshire. “We can run the courses from there, or we can train at the client’s job-site,” he says. “That way, the delegate gets to learn on the very same crane, in the very same surroundings that he will be using in his career. It also means that we can integrate his company’s system of work into the training, to make sure that it is specific to what they want and at the same time adheres to the regulations.
“We train around two to three hundred people a year and we also have 220 technicians based all around the country who come to us for training. We do novice training and refresher courses. I would say there is about a 50:50 split between them. Once you have trained as an operator, then three years later you need to have refresher training, so that is a regular thing. That is a legal requirement in the PUWER Regulations. Operators, of course, get daily experience of their job, but they can forget one or two things, or technology progresses, and they need to keep up to date.
“What we do is provide delegates with an official training course and at the end of it, with the certificate that says they are competent to operate the machine. We cover the LOLER requirements, the PUWER requirements, and BS 7121.”
LOLER is the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, which is more specifically oriented towards lifting operations than PUWER; both of them apply. BS 7121 is the Code of Practice for the Safe Use of Cranes. “We have also recently become IPAF accredited. IPAF is the International Powered Access Federation, which is all about using scissor lifts and cherry pickers. We train people in the operation of those as well,” Robbins says.
“For all of those on all of our courses, we try to make sure that we are not just satisfying the standard but are actually above it. We train people for every different type of crane,” adds Robbins. “The novice course lasts two days; the first day will be in the classroom, the second will be practical, working the cranes. The refresher course is one day. For that refresher, every student is different, because sometimes the delegates are operators who have been using their crane every single day, but then I have also had people who have never used the crane at all since they did their novice training three years back.
“There are skills that you pick up when you are using a crane, such as taking the swing out of the load, moving the crane at the right time to correct for that. Not all of our customers’ cranes have anti-sway technology. Indeed, some of them are using cranes that are 50 years old. But sometimes refresher training is simply about getting familiar with the controls on a new or different crane.”
And rigging is every bit as important as operating the crane. “If you are going to be using a crane there is a good chance you are going to be using eyebolts, shackles, slings, that kind of thing. So we cover that in our course. And we will also cover just rigging on its own as a separate course if that is what the customer wants.”
“It is all about giving confidence and familiarity and the ability to work things out for themselves,” says Robbins’ colleague, James Wall, business development manager for customer training, UK and Ireland. On-the-job practicalities matter as well: “We call it ‘Point of Work’ training. We talk about things such as: ‘What do you do with the crane when you have finished moving the load, or have finished your shift?’ Of course, you must not leave it in an unsafe condition, but there can be more to it than that. There is the production level as well: we will talk about real things that they are surprised that no instructor has ever taught them.
“For example, if you have two gantrycranes sharing a single runway, and on each gantry there are two hoists, we’ll ask them the importance of a home location. Suppose at the end of the day you leave the hoist roughly in the middle and one gantry in the middle, and you come back in the morning and find that the hoist has broken down. It is bang in the way of the other gantry, so you have just lost 60% of your factory production that day. Why not park one of the gantries right at one end of the building and the other gantry right at the other end? Then if one hoist goes down you can still cover the full length of the building, so production can still go ahead.
“On one of the sites we train at, the crane is not allowed to be down for more than seven minutes. More than that and the whole plant shuts down. So those things are important.
“It means that the benefits of training are not only safety. That is obviously huge, but there is also making sure that the factory’s productivity is not impacted by a small breakdown. It is much more than just ticking boxes – it is about the real-life application of training: how do we keep the factory moving? How do we keep people employed? How do we keep faith with the end user, with the customer?”
Is there one frequent error that new or refresher operators make or need reminding of? There is, says Wall, and it is a simple one: “I think knowing the weight of the load is an important one that can get overlooked. It is important because you need to select the right lifting tackle, and there may be multiple different items that combine together to make up the lifting tackle.”
“Another one is the rate factor and derating,” says Robbins. “I think that is the most common thing I come across. A lot of novices don’t understand that if you have a one-tonne sling, it might not actually be able to lift one tonne. Depending on how you are rigging it up and how you are using it, it might only be able to lift much less. You have got to take the sling angle into account.
“With any accessory, the SWL could be considerably less than what is marked on it. These are things that people get wrong and that novices are surprised about when they get the training,” explains Robbins.
Modern technology – anti-sway, anticollision, automatic programming and the like – has made things safer. But that technology has to be used, and has to be understood. “All of these are helps, and are brilliant; but at the end of the day, people still need the training to know about the crane that they’re working on, no matter how many bells and whistles it has. They need to know the features of that crane, and how they work and what to do if they stop working. If you have an anti-sway system, you have to know which buttons turn it on and off. We have cranes now with machine user interfaces on them. You sit in a chair behind the television screen and you operate it from there. It is very different from the old days of a cab with levers, set on the bridge of the crane up near the roof. Instead, you have CCTV cameras, often half a dozen of them or more, and you know the computer will talk to you. It will tell you how much load there is in the grab, it will tell you where the grab is, it will give you all the information, the angles, the heights. It will tell you everything. It will tell you if certain sections of the warehouse need loads to be fed to them. And unless you understand what information it is telling you, you are not capable of doing that job. It is not very different to driving a fancy car. The warning lights may come on but you as the driver have to know how to react to them. You do actually have to know what you are doing.”
The LEEA (Lifting Equipment Engineers Association) has its own training academy based in Huntingdon. Training can also be delivered at client’s workplaces or online. Courses range from a six-hour online elementary ‘Introduction to Lifting’ course via a three day online or instructor-led foundation course to diplomas for professionals overseeing the testing, inspection and maintenance of lifting equipment. Diplomas are available for manual lifting machines, powered lifting machines, bridge and gantry cranes and several other categories as well.
LEEA also have an Accredited Training Scheme (ATS) in which LEEA member companies who offer training are audited on their course materials, trainers and facilities. There are dozens of companies, spread worldwide, with hundreds of courses covered between them: appointed persons, advanced rigging, counterbalanced floor crane, management of lifting and slinging – to name just a few. Training is generally to international standards. North American member companies offer training to North American standards – crane assembly/disassembly director and master rigger courses are just two examples.
Carl Stahl Evita, headquartered in Rotherham, is one such LEEA member company. They supply lifting equipment and custom-engineered architecture and also offer training programmes. Isaac Robinson is their head of marketing. What three things does he most emphasise to trainees to ensure safety? “Obviously you have always got to do your pre-checks,” he says. “You have got to make sure that your equipment is always in working condition and is always maintained. The number one, the biggest cause of accidents in my view, is just lack of concentration – which can in turn translate to a lack of knowledge. People tend to be overconfident in themselves, and that sort of overconfidence can make them a little too ambitious in what they are trying to achieve. But both of those come down to lack of training.
“I think when you are not properly trained on something it is very hard to understand the due diligence that you have to maintain. If you do not have that knowledge behind you, then you cannot know how to operate something professionally and accurately. So those would be my three key points: carry out pre-checks; concentrate at all times; and make sure you have the training to know what you are doing.”
Does the recent advance in digital tech help here? Things like sway control and anti-collision systems are becoming standard. “These things absolutely help, but they are not a silver bullet. They do not take away from the need to pay attention and to concentrate and to know what you are doing. Because, often, it is very heavy equipment that we’re working with, and even in the most safe-looking environments any incident can be costly and can be deadly,” explains Robinson.
Which is not to say that light engineering cannot be dangerous also. “Consider a mechanic lifting an engine-block with a small gantry hoist in an auto-repair shop. Compare that with, say, big steel girders weighing perhaps 20t being lifted with an overhead bridge crane in a heavy industrial plant. The engine-block lift doesn’t seem so dangerous – but you can be just as much hurt if it falls on you.” (In June this year, a Liverpool company was heavily fined after a car fell from a two-post car lift and very seriously injured a worker who was on his break.)
“On paper, that 20t beam lift seems more dangerous than just lifting an engine. Realistically, though, it is somewhat easier to work with steel beams. You can easily find the centre of gravity – it will be half-way along – so you know it will be balanced. It is a uniform shape, there will be obvious rigging points. And if you are working in a large steel plant or similar everyone around you will be constantly aware of safety and of all the regulations and so on. It will be part of the cultural environment.
“But an engine block is not necessarily uniform. The shape is awkward. Actually figuring out how to mount it and how to make sure that you are not lifting at an angle – these things are far from obvious. That’s where we come in: with the training to give people the ability and the knowledge to be able to look at those sorts of tasks and to be able to undertake them professionally and correctly, and with knowledge about what they are doing.
“Some of our courses are ‘Lifting and Slinging Safely’, ‘Lifting Gear Examiners’, ‘Lifting Operations Instructor’, ‘Management of Lifting Operations’, ‘Safe Operation of an Overhead Travelling Crane’ and there are several others. They cover the skills field pretty well. At the moment, we are putting together a course entitled ‘Train the Trainer’, which will be essentially teaching people to give the training themselves. And, of course, maintenance is an essential part of safety. We cover that: one of our biggest areas there is on wire ropes. We have four courses on inspecting and examining wire ropes.” (For the consequences of a rope failure, see the case study in the ‘Safety’ feature elsewhere in this issue.)
Carl Stahl Evita, like Konecranes, go further than the standard in their training. “When we do our ‘Lifting Gear Examiners’ course, if we have 20 delegates on that, it might be that only eight of those actually become inspectors. A lot of companies that we work with, especially the larger ones, will send their actual lifting gear operators on these courses just so they have the ability to be able to identify issues with the machinery themselves. Big companies want to make sure that any problem can be spotted as early as possible.”
And in any situation there is always the possibility of the unforeseen. “You have always got to be aware of the unexpected. The accident that catches you is none of the ones you are expecting. So that is a big thing we teach people in training as well. Not everything can always be sorted out immediately. If something cannot be stopped it is always best just to get out of the way. If an out-of-control collision is going to occur, it is going to occur regardless and you know something? You really do not want to be in the middle of it.
“Of course, if things are starting to go wrong there is always going to be that conflict in your mind: ‘If I stop things now, the whole factory will grind to a halt. My foreman will complain, my boss is going to lose money and be cross’ and so on. There is the temptation to carry on regardless, to get the job done on time. But you have to put that out of your mind and say that safety has got to come first. And that is 100%, all the time, and every time. And we always try to put that into the mind of everyone that we deal with.
“Lifting is a dangerous sector to be in, heavy lifting especially so,” explains Robinson. A damaged product can be pushed back, repaired or replaced. For people, it only takes one small mistake for something irreversible to happen.
