But I simply can't wrap my head around it. I was driving down a shared street-City/State. The state probably wishes to get out of being responsible for it and shove it all to the city, but for now they have it. There is a scheduled re-construction of it for two years hence. So yesterday there was a four man DOT crew surveying with a GPS unit locating property corners. They all had the DOT yellow vests, and all had hardhats.
Yellow vests sure, but hardhats?
Hit by a car jumping the curb? (there are no corners in the pavement here they are all near back of walk).
My lifelong distain for hardhats must be coloring my thinking.?ÿ
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That's just bureaucracy in action and doesn't have anything to do with safety.
I started surveying for a shop that had written policy of wearing hard hats at any time we occupied mons in the street.
It was not followed by the majority of crews but I noticed it and followed it for the most part and came to believe that it is good overall policy.
The thing about a hard hat is that it has a psychological impact and?ÿ association with people, they see you wearing one and they treat you differently, it may be that they let you onto the roof of their high-rise building to set a prism, disregard your wanton trespassing, or that they give you a little pump of the brakes on the roadway.
I wear one in the woods for crashing through brush sometimes, which is a little extreme but whatever.
As to the DOT, rules are rules, somebody made the policy and now it will be followed, for better or for worse it is my casual understanding of government work that, that is the way it is.?ÿ?ÿ
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That is how I feel about "Survey Screw Ahead" signs sometimes, I put em out not because I always think that they will help, but for the blame game afterward if I get hit or cause an accident.
When working inside VDOT right of ways, you must have vests, hard hats, and safety glasses.?ÿ Our company's minimum is that plus steel-toe boots.?ÿ There was a 23 year old survey crew member of a local company killed while working on a local interstate improvement project that unfortunately no amount of PPE would have saved him.?ÿ?ÿ
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There are rules like this because the insurer is unwilling to rely on the discretion of the dopiest member of an organization. Note that OSHAs attitude is that having a safety rule and failing to rigidly enforce it is the same as having no rule at all.?ÿ
There is no better rain hat than a hard hat, and we work in the rain, so I wear a hard hat much of the time. I've got a carbon fiber one, which is lighter than the plastic ones. Try it, you might like it. Also excellent as a sun hat, does not get sweaty dirty as quickly, washes off easily when it does.?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ?ÿ
@norman-oklahoma I sometimes use an old fiberglass bump hat with chin strap. I can't imagine bending over to open a monument case and having my lid fall off and roll into traffic.
That is a problem, but if you remember to reach around behind and tighten up the ratchet an extra click before bending over, not so much of one.
Yeah, I agree with most of this actually. It's nice for crashing through brush for sure and I rarely wear any sort of hat anyway so sometimes I will put one on just to keep the middle of summer sun from cooking me alive.
I dunno if anyone else has heard this but one of my grandmothers said wearing a hat will make you go bald so if you were every in the house for breakfast/lunch/dinner you had to take your hat off.
It's the same thing working with TxDOT...everyone that gets out of the vehicle must have a hard hat, safety glasses, lace up boots and high visibility vests...gloves are suggested depending on the work being completed.
The hard hat rule..... a long agonizing fight- the tendency seems that the real safety wonks were marginally functional folks who generally didn??t handle out doors well so they bid jobs in the bowels of the beast and came forth as safety experts. They and other bureaucrats then have many many many many meetings ... in some of those meeting they actually get to try to answer questions, after a vehicle drives thru a mile of traffic control and hits something or someone, they are allowed to speak for 5 minutes..... finally after many more years of many more meetings - they are tasked on their PA to work on a policy..... and villa??s they get a gold star and everybody else is wearing a hard hat and wondering what happened-....
My devious plan is to retire and be able to say that 2015 was the last time I wore a hardhat.
I was some time ago informed that hardhats have an expiration date. I believe without looking that the one under my back seat I keep around just in case has an end date of 1992.
So I'm not sure I can claim that I'm wearing a hardhat if I put it on.
So I'm not sure I can claim that I'm wearing a hardhat if I put it on.
You are less likely to be asked the expiration date of the hard hat than to be dinged for not having one.
I can say no one ever looked at it, even when I was heavily using it.
One of the companies required its use outside the truck, of course I wasn't near anything construction related since I was doing section breakdowns for well locations and was long gone before anything happened. So on my 4-wheeler I had a hardhat on, not sure what that did for protection.?ÿ
A DOT motorcycle helmet might have been a better requirement. But that wasn't required so I wore the hardhat. On the 4-wheeler, lol.?ÿ
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Last hard hat worn was in 1982 and it was orange for survey crew inside a paper mill.
It was completely welcomed inside that environment because you never knew where the next flying object was coming from with all those conveyor belts running and workers overhead simply scooting mud and stuff from their boots and the enormous amount of crud in the air that just settled on you like being in a morning mist.
Wearing one around any highway construction site paid off many times with flying gravel and such and goggles were necessary to have because of the flying debris and dust storms that appeared out of nowhere.
Eye protection is something to be prepared for because the surface of your eyes can take a beating without you knowing about the damage done until it is way too late to fix.
Had a large styrofoam safari hat that I wore many summers out in the sun, at a distance it looked like a hard hat. It really blocked the sun's heat rays better than any straw hat I've ever worn, probably because it was not actually touching my head, only the band held it on.
I have several of what we always called a party chief's cap. The ones with the bill so large that there is no way you can wear it and look thru an instrument.
Am glad that I have never worked where it was required to wear steel toe boots and I've never owned a pair. They really interfere with metal detectors and I've actually seen people have to take them off to please the entry guard at courthouses.
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I was staking a railroad for a Corps project a few years ago. The contractor had hired a safety guy who turned out to be a real PITA. I was by myself setting slope stakes across an open wheat field a mile away from anything. There wasnt even any equipment running on the job yet. I had on one of those insulated orange hunting caps thats kind of puffy looking. I saw this guy come high stepping across the field to tell me to put on a hard hat. I told him the hat I had on was a soft-shell hardhat. He looked kind of puzzled, and headed back but didnt get far before it dawned on him. I told him I??d get my hardhat when I got back to the truck, which was when I was going to be done anyway. I never did get along with that guy, but hardly anybody else did either. He was the same guy that said I had to have a motorcycle helmet on when on the atv and switch to hardhat when not. He got overruled on that one.?ÿ
I've been twice stuck on the hard hat by stray objects while on construction sites. The first was a 25mm nut accidentally dropped by a worker from about 10m above. The second was a drop from even higher, about 30m, and that was someone else's hard hat that got knocked off when they clipped a handrail when getting to the top of an access ladder.
I noted some time ago that the common plastic HH's that everyone wears may not be fire-proof. Years ago I was doing some scrub cutting on a farm, and I lit a fire to burn things off. I had put the cutter down to refill it with petrol, and taken the HH off as well, then noticed the fire, ran around like the proverbial putting it out. When I got back to the cutter, I could see that the fire had gone through, but hadn't ignited anything, except that the HH was now a molten ball of snot - glad that wasn't on my head. The other odd thing was my cotton overalls - they didn't flame up, but there was a patch of smoulder at the leg cuffs, which I couldn't extinguish by mechanical means and eventually took them off an threw them in a pond.
I actually worked on a bridge several years ago where the general made it a point to check our hard hat expiration dates before the issued the safety sticker required to be on site. That was a first for me.
My racing helmets have about a 5 year life self life. Some events even have a limit on the age of my suite and seats. It can get expensive. Seats seam a little excessive for a car that only see daylight when being flogged on the course.
Many years ago had to wear full gear while working on a project similar to what eddycreek described.?ÿ Poop from a big bird on the fly would have been the only possible thing to come from above other than hail if we were stupid enough to stay out there during a hail storm.?ÿ But, we kept them on because we suspected their safety inspectors were attempting to spy on us just to give us a problem.?ÿ I was a subcontractor on that job so didn't want to cause problems up the line.
