Safety Tidbit 8.01 – Visitor Safety at a Dredging Site

Safety Tidbit 8.01 – Visitor Safety at a Dredging Site

 

Reference: Signal Mutual – Dredging Visitor Orientation by Weeks Marine

 

This Safety Tidbit is brought to you by my student, Mr. Tyler Kachmarchi– a Junior in the Safety, Health, and Environmental Applied Sciences Program at the Indiana University of PA, graduating in the Summer of 2023.

 

Often in the marine construction/maritime industry, scheduled visitors will come and see your site for audits, personal projects, or just because they are interested and willing to learn more about what happens on the job sites. These visitors can be anyone from stakeholders, office employees of your company, or employees of companies that work directly with your company. Ensuring these visitors' health and safety is essential to their visit's smoothness and productivity. While a student, I worked with a company in southern Louisiana over the summer; the safety professionals and I were subject to many visits to the dredge and the fill site on our project. For us, ensuring the safety of the visitors required many days of preparation. These tips and pointers will help you and your safety departmentensure incoming visitors' safety to your maritime site.

●      Prepare the correct amount of PPE for your visitors. Get the number of attendees to ensure the number of hard hats, gloves, life vests, etc., is more than what will be in attendance.

●      Ensure the visitors view your company's visitor orientation video and allow time for questions or concerns after the showing.

●      Be prepared to assist the visitors in any sort of way.

●      Assist visitors when they are: boarding, crossing gangways, entering high-hazard areas, etc.

●      Ensure the visitors always keep their protective equipment on.

●      Be ready for questions (many of them). Visitors are usually inexperienced in the field and have many questions, including "What is that?", "How does that work?", "What are they doing?"

●      Point out areas of high hazards, whether on the barge, crew boats, vessels, or dredge.

●      Make the visit enjoyable for them. Provide interesting facts and details about the performance of tasks and theultimate mission of the job site. Creating this environment will keep your audience engaged and provide a good image for your company and its mission.

 

I hope this was helpful, and thank you for reading my Safety Tidbits! Comments and questions are always welcome. ~ Bryan

 

P.S. Please let me know if you have a new safety or health question.