"Man sustains head injuries in ...workplace incident..."

On our travels throughout the industry we see a variety of PPE requirements to enter an aluminium plant. Universally required is the use of wearing a hardhat while on an aluminium plant’s premises. Here is a recent incident emphasizing the need to always wear head protection.

A man has been transported to a local hospital after sustaining a head injury while working eight metres above the ground.

Firefighters were called to an aluminium plant in the Pacific one morning during the first week of May 2019.

Senior Station officer said they were called to assist a worker with head injuries.

"When we arrived we found one of the workers had injured himself while he was eight metres high, working on a mobile gantry," Senior Station officer said.

"He basically bumped his head and required our assistance to get him down safely." A government safety organization spokesperson said they had been alerted to an incident.

It took crews 50 minutes to get the worker down with an aerial appliance and high angle recuse equipment, before he was treated by paramedics and taken to hospital, Senior Station officer said.

An Ambulance spokesperson said the man had been transported to local hospital with moderate injuries.

A government safety organization spokesperson said they were aware of an incident and were making initial inquiries.

The aluminium company has been approached for comment.

We are glad that the worker realized his injury and requested help. We pray that he recovers fully from his injuries. For reasons unknown at this time it appears the worker was not wearing head protection. If he was the injury would have been lessened or not occurred.

On our travels we went to an aluminium plant that does not require the use of hard hats. We brought up the danger of not wearing a hard hat. In response one worker said that he was a recordable incident because he hit his head and required 5 staples to close the wound. We explained to the plant management that they should require all workers, contractors, vendors, visitors to wear hard hats. In response a manager told us that their outside contractors tell the aluminium company that they do not care what the aluminium plant requires, the contractor requires that all of their workers were hard hats. Hopefully that aluminium plant will finally realize that requiring the use of hard hats is needed.

The Aluminium Times Magazine had an article on this topic. It can be downloaded here.

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