Working Group Safety

The Safety Working Group’s aims are to promote safety awareness for the geotechnical and geoenvironmental industry.

Strategic Plan

The Safety Working Group aims to provide guidance and links to relevant documents via this web page.

We produce regular updates throughout the year and all guidance documents are downloadable to make them as accessible as possible.

We aim to provide generic guidance to inform practice – it should be noted that for every site a specific risk assessment must be made to assess the actual site hazards present and how they can be addressed to minimise risks to people and property.

AGS Safety WG – Terms of Reference

Publications

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Safety Guidance

Safety Guidance - Classification of Potentially Contaminated Sites for Intrusive Investigation Activities

Published March 2024. This version replaces ‘Comment on the approach for classifying sites into green, yellow or red’ published in 2022. This…

Safety Shares

Safety Share - Young Site Engineer killed by Excavator

Published February 2024 Safety share regarding Young Site Engineer killed by Excavator.

Safety Guidance

Safety Guidance - Asbestos in Soils

Published January 2024 Works which involve or encounter asbestos fall under the requirements of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 (CAR 2012).…

Safety Guidance

Safety Guidance - Mental Health (Work Related Stress)

Published January 2024. This version replaces Guidance on Occupational Stress (Published 2020) and Guidance on Health and Wellbeing at Work (Published 2021).…

Safety Guidance

Safety Guidance - Competence

Published January 2024. This version replaces Guidance on Training and Competence published in 2020. Competence is not solely training and is definitely…

Safety Guidance

Safety Guidance - Noise

Published January 2024 This version replaces ‘Guidance for Health Management with Noise’ published in 2015. In the geotechnical and geo-environmental sector noisy…

Articles

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Article -

AGS Welfare Guidance, a step in the right direction

Image provided by AECOM The industries expectations to all health, safety and wellbeing requirements have changed through the years, as we understand…

Article -

Early Career Professionals: Call for Posters

The AGS is holding a sustainability-themed poster competition at this year’s Annual Conference, and we’d like to see how Early Career Professionals…

Article -

Mitigating the risk of asbestos when using vacuum excavators in made ground

Vacuum excavation[1] is widely used in the ground investigation industry as a means of excavating inspection holes and trenches to check for…

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Guidance on the Opening of Core and Dynamic Sampler Liner

Introduction For engineering geologists in the UK ground investigation industry, the opening of core and dynamic sampler liners to enable the logging…

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Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Industry Accident Statistics 2022

Within the wider construction industry, the geotechnical & geoenvironmental industry has been criticised, sometimes for good reason, for a poor safety record.…

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The relationship between LOLER and drilling machines

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) requires industry bodies, such as the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists (AGS) and British Drilling…

Members

Adam Branson Card Geotechnics Limited
Adam Latimer Ian Farmer Associates
Alistair Cima CC Ground Investigations Ltd
Chris Dimelow Lankelma Ltd
Fiona White Geo-Integrity Ltd
AGS Safety WG Leader Jon Rayner AECOM Limited
Julian Lovell Equipe Training Limited
Liz Withington CC Ground Investigations Ltd
Madeleine Bardsley WSP
Margaret C.Y. Lo Soils Limited
Marian Markham Jacobs UK Ltd
Megan Coleman RSK Environment Ltd
Michael Smith Specialist member
Nick Brown Hydrock Consultants Ltd
Owen Seymour WSP
Paul Breslin
Rachael Parry Geotechnical Engineering Ltd
Roseanna Bloxham RSK Environment Ltd
Steve Everton Jacobs UK Ltd
Tom Collins Applied Geology Ltd
Will Capps Delta-Simons