Thank you for writing your article on construction safety. Without regulation the largess of contractors will not choose to be safe because it costs them money, time, and jobs. Contractors are often short-sighted and don’t know how to market themselves in a manner that makes developers happy to pay a 5% premium for a safe job. As such a levelling of the playing field and implementation of specific regulations is the only way to see effective change.
In the US the climate is changing and regulation nationwide is on its way, slowly. Great Britain is enforcing inspection requirements after many deaths in the last few years. The interesting part is every manufacturer of tower cranes (including the small self-erectors) require inspection every time they are erected. Many even require periodic inspections every three months if they are used heavily. If there is a regulation in your OSHA that requires maintaining equipment as the manufacturer specifies, no new laws are needed, just simple enforcement.
I am a third party inspector. I would argue that you need to have the inspectors be third party. If you don’t add the third party clause, the inspectors will be representatives of the crane owner and nothing will have changed. Ethics is not self-evident, nor self-regulating in construction. A new industry will serve Malta well.
Thank you for speaking out on this issue. I run a blog on tower crane accidents (www.towercraneaccidents.blogspot.com) because I grew weary of the claims that these accidents never happened.
Keep the pressure up on asking why you don’t enforce the rules that the manufacturers require and you’ll be on your way to a safer construction community.
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