Even if you follow all the safety procedures for your work, situations can take a bad turn. In these moments, you need a rescue task force ready to go.
Some jobs come with more risk than others. Most of the time, steps are taken to mitigate that risk and keep workers protected.
Unfortunately, not everything goes to plan 100 percent of the time. Workers can fall, become trapped or find themselves unable to move to a safe location under their own power.
That’s where a rescue task force comes in.
A rescue task force is a team of specialists who excel at removing people from dangerous situations. The team always has a plan and is able to assess and execute with laser focus and precision.
Today we’re looking at the types of projects in which a rescue team is necessary to ensure the safety of your workers. If any of these sound like they might apply to the work you do, you should really have a trained rescue team on hand.
Confined Space Rescue
Not all projects take place in wide open spaces. At times, workers are asked to do their jobs in locations that aren’t all that easy to get into or aren’t designed to have humans inside them, such as caves, crevices and pipes.
A variety of steps are taken to ensure those who enter these confined spaces can safely exit. Should someone become trapped or injured, however, the process of getting that person out can become a lot more complex.
Having a rescue task force on site guarantees that a trained rescue team — one that specializes in retrieving people from confined spaces — is standing by and ready to act. Such a crew has the equipment necessary to navigate obstacles, safely secure an individual and extract them from the confined space.
If you work on a lot of projects where room to maneuver is limited, a rescue task force is a must. You hopefully won’t need them. But should a time come when you do, you’ll be thankful for their presence.
Fall Rescue
Whether it’s on a tall building, a towering tree or the side of a mountain, there’s no shortage of work that requires fall protection equipment. This equipment is meant to save workers from a fall and enable them to rescue themselves.
This isn’t always possible, though, should a worker suffer an injury or otherwise become incapacitated. In situations like this, long durations strapped into fall protection equipment can actually be detrimental to the worker’s health, which makes staging a rescue priority number one.
By keeping a rescue task force on standby, you don’t have to worry whether a rescuer has the knowledge and experience to successfully save that imperiled individual. Anyone qualified to serve on such a force has likely performed many similar rescues and has a plan for getting the worker out of harm’s way.
When the task at hand requires one or more people to work at substantial heights, you should have a rescue team on site. Fall protection equipment can save someone temporarily, but it’ll take an experienced and highly trained team to fully remove a worker from a fraught situation.
Fire Rescue
A number of industries work around combustible materials. In the oil and gas industry, especially, it’s tough to avoid situations where a crew of workers might be in close proximity to — or even working with — dangerous chemicals.
The potential for these combustible elements to turn into something far more threatening is not as minimal as you might think. All it takes is a machine operator error, a malfunction or even a lone spark to start a fire. That makes a rescue task force a critical piece of the safety puzzle on job sites where these materials are present.
If workers become trapped in a fire or are somehow injured in a blast, a rescue suddenly becomes a lot more complicated than simply finding them and carrying them to safety. There’s your own safety to think about. The structural integrity of your facility could be compromised by the fire. There’s also smoke inhalation to consider, as well as the possibility that you yourself could become trapped by the flames.
In such treacherous situations, the safest route to take — the only route to take — is to have a rescue task force ready. That team can employ its expertise to more safely stage a rescue.