That inspection barge on the Ohio River near Paducah was a mess

I was out on a job last Tuesday checking a dredge setup near the Paducah lock and dam, and the safety gear on the inspection barge was just tossed in a heap. No one had even checked the fire extinguisher tags since April from the looks of it. How do you guys handle it when a site is that sloppy about basic stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai_bennett20d agoMost Upvoted

Man that's rough, you'd think on a lock and dam they'd have their act together with safety gear. Nothing worse than showing up to a site that's clearly been skipping the basics, makes the whole job feel like a gamble.

hannaht2920d ago

And honestly I wonder if part of the problem is that some of these older sites were designed before modern safety standards were even a thing, so retrofitting them just ends up being a patch job that never really works right. Like you've got a lock wall built in the 1930s with no thought given to fall protection, and now someone's tying a harness to a pipe that wasn't meant to hold a person's weight. It's not even that they're skipping the basics on purpose, it's that the whole setup was designed for a time when guys just walked the edge without a second thought and nobody complained. So you end up with this mix of ancient infrastructure and modern rules that don't always play nice together. Ever had to work a site where the original blueprints were literally hand drawn and nothing lines up with what's actually there?