When I was asked to lead a team to evaluate a customer's fall protection needs, I was somewhat hesitant. I felt I was fairly competent when it came to fall protection and I knew that the team would include two other very knowledgeable individuals who could make up for any of my shortcomings. But I was worried about this NASA customer. They have an entire staff of safety professionals along with several other contractor safety professionals whom oversee HSE concerns at the center. How could we assist them in the identification and elimination of fall hazards?
What I soon discovered was that this task was more about perspective and focus than about identifying fall hazards. The HSE team at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) had identified many of the fall hazards onsite. The issues they were faced with was how best to reduce or eliminate these hazards in a way that was conducive to completing their mission. They needed help making fall prevention and protection at NASA LaRC a systematic program.
Late one afternoon in 2005 my teammate, Robert Whitfield, received the phone call that every safety professional fears. An employee had fallen while descending a tower and had died at the scene. After the initial shock dissipated, he started the notification process and waited for additional information to filter in. While waiting he started playing 20 questions on what could have happened. Did the employee have on his fall protection equipment? Had he anchored off correctly? Had he followed our safety procedures? Was he familiar with the tower and its hazards? The answer to these and many others were all yes. Our Corporation had a good fall protection program that met current OSHA guidelines, so what went wrong? Over a year later OSHA agreed, our Fall Protection Program was compliant and not at fault.
As part of our Corporations recovery from this tragic event, an internal Six Sigma based "Green Belt" team consisting of experienced climbers, instructors, and management was formed. During that year while OSHA investigated, we took a hard look at not just our current fall protection program but also the tasks our employees were really being asked to perform. Our Corporation got into the climbing business gradually. First it was some roof top work, then some tasks on antennas, and finally tasks performed on towers. Since it was so gradual, few noticed that our tasks aloft had increased and changes in our program may have been needed. OSHA was at a loss for suggesting improvements but our mandate was clear. We needed to go beyond current OSHA requirements to protect our employees. The generic Fall Protection Program we had built years before no longer had enough detail and depth for the tasks we performed. In response, we adopted a Managed Fall Protection Program based on the new family of ANSI Z359-2007 standards. These standards are the bedrock that our Fall Protection Program is now built on.
