Article Safety

AGS SWG Call for Safety Alerts

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Dear Member,

 

 

MESSAGE FROM THE SAFETY WORKING GROUP CHAIRMAN – CALL FOR SAFETY ALERTS

 

The Safety Working Group would like to encourage the sharing of lessons learnt from accidents, incidents and near misses on a more regular basis. This information is normally obtained from members of the group raising issues during the meetings which often have directly affected their organisations or through discussing Safety Alerts. However, we rarely receive Safety Alerts and so often the issues we can discuss are limited to the experiences of the members of this working group which can be argued does not necessarily reflect the industry or membership as a whole.

 

The wider construction industry seems to be much better at issuing Safety Alerts but many of these are not related to AGS member’s work and so often they are not relevant. It is the belief of the Safety Working Group that we are missing valuable ‘lessons learnt’ or an opportunity to raise awareness of current issues and we would like this to improve.

 

This is an appeal for the AGS membership to ‘up its game’ and to start being more pro-active in the generation of Safety Alerts. The issuing of Safety Alerts is a simple system which can be used to not only raise awareness of substandard products or poor practice but also to reiterate safety messages, provide lessons learnt and provide warnings. Some companies are reluctant to issue Safety Alerts as they believe that any accident, incident or near miss will look bad on them or clients may believe their organisation has unsafe practices. This is a very negative view of Safety Alerts whereas they should be looked at as a proactive approach to accidents, incidents and near misses and a desire to improve safety.

 

We would like to receive any Safety Alerts which have been issued to members but would also really like to receive Safety Alerts generated by our members. Please help.

 

 

 

Yours faithfully,

For the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists

 

 

JULIAN LOVELL

Chair of the Safety Working Group