Falls kill more than 300 construction workers every year and hurt thousands. Deadly falls on the job are from unprotected roof edges, roof and floor openings, scaffolds, ladders, structural steel, leading edges, open shafts, and more.  What you need to know:

Protect Yourself

• Whenever fall protection is needed, make sure you have the right fall-protection system, know how it works, get trained to use it – and use it.

• Where eliminating the hazard, guardrails, or safety nets won’t work, you need personal protective equipment (PPE) – fall-restraint systems, personal fall-arrest systems, or work positioning systems. Restraint systems keep you from falling. Fall-arrest systems stop falls. You will need a full-body harness if you use one of these systems.

• A full-body harness has straps worn around your trunk and thighs, with one or more D-rings in back to attach the harness to other parts of the system. If you fall, a properly fitted harness spreads the stopping force over your thighs, pelvis, chest, and shoulders.

Choosing a Harness

• Learn about the types of fall hazards on your job.

• Choose the right type of fall protection for each type of fall hazard. Never use a body belt, seat only harness, or chest-only harness for fall protection. Use a full-body harness instead.

• You can use a harness with an anchorage, a lanyard, a retractable lifeline, a vertical lifeline, a travel rail, a horizontal lifeline, a fall arrester, and/or a shock absorber. A fall-arrest system should let you fall no more than 6 feet. A work-positioning device should let you fall 2 feet or less.

• A registered professional engineer should design a fall protection system. A qualified person must supervise the setting up.

• Make sure the harness fits you and is comfortable, to prevent body strain. You can get shoulder and back pads to reduce harness pressure. Full-body cross-chest harnesses are more comfortable for women and can reduce bruising when falls are stopped.

When it comes to selecting a winch you can’t just choose the first one that you come across. Winches generate high force and careful consideration needs to be because if the wrong one is chosen it can be dangerous.  The paramount concern should be that of safety. Secondly you need to ask yourself a few questions as to why you need a winch – what environment will you be using the winch in and are you a beginner or an expert when it comes to hoisting in the load.

Another important factor when selecting a winch is whether the winch should have the freewheel feature.  Freewheels are usually found on ratchet winches. The purpose is to let you pull the cable freely from its drum and then attach it to the load you want to pull in.

It may be this type of winch does not suit your requirements, in which case a self locking winch, brake winch or worm gear winch is probably more appropriate for the task in hand.  Any job that requires the lifting of loads a ratchet pulling winch should not be used.

Look at the environment in which you will be using your winch. Environmental conditions such as harsh salt water, causes of potential damage and abuse all need to be considered. How often will the winch undergo maintenance checks? All of these need to be part of the decision making process. For these conditions then a larger winch should be used that has protective guards to prevent damage to the winch.

It is difficult to calculate the exact amount of load that is to be pulled with the winch as different loads have different weights.  If using one of the Dutton Lainson hand winches then the total capacity that these types of winches can handle ranges between 35 to 55 pounds.  To winch this weight range you should only need to use one hand. If you cannot reel in the load with one hand then the weight bearing is too much for the winch to handle.