Building a Better Fall Protection Program

Drew Batty | Electric Utility Contractor Account Manager | Buckingham Manufacturing

Melanie Russell | Vimocity

Hi, everyone, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Melanie with Vimocity and I'll be moderating our conversation.

Today we're talking about what it takes to make fall protection work the way it's supposed to in the field. Most utilities and contractors already have the policies, equipment, and training in place, but the real test is how those pieces come together when the work is actually happening.

Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that today's session is being recorded, so feel free to drop any questions in the chat.

If we don't get to your question, we will make sure to follow-up via email afterwards. Then stay tuned for some free resources at the end.

Before I introduce Drew, I'll give a little background on Vimocity for anyone who might not be familiar with us.

Vimocity works with utility and construction companies to help create more consistency between their safety expectations and what actually happens in the field. We help safety and operations leaders keep risks like heat, fatigue, and soft tissue injuries in front of crews through the channels they already use, whether it's a pre job brief, a safety meeting, or on-site communication.

We also help break down specific jobs visually so crews can see the setup, hazards, equipment, and techniques involved before the work starts. Really the goal is to make it safe, effective work easier to reinforce every day, not only during annual training.

With that, I'm really excited to turn it over to Drew Batty. Drew, can you tell us a little about your background as a lineman and the work you do with Buckingham Manufacturing today?

Yeah.

Hi, Melanie. So I've been with Buckingham since 2024. They brought me on to focus on equipment sales and training to contractors on the North half of the country.

Before that, I was a lineman. I got in the trade pretty late, I would say. I was 30 years old.

Had been working construct... Different construction jobs, operating different equipment for years at that point, and had always known about the line trade and decided to go for it.

Applied for an apprenticeship, got ranked pretty low at first. This was 2014, and asked what I needed to do to get in because I didn't get into that apprenticeship. And they said you either need to go work in the trade as a ground man for a while or go to a climbing school. So I did both. Went to a school out West.

It was called...

Forget what it was called now. Volta. It was called Volta out in Oregon.

Immediately following that school, started working as a ground man in the trade, applying to apprenticeships. I knew I wanted to, after that point, go the contractor route for various reasons and applied to a couple apprenticeships and got into the LBAD apprenticeship and moved to Indiana. That was 2015.

Topped out in 2018, worked for multiple different contractors all over the country.

2024 came around and had an opportunity to come work at Buckingham to sell to the contractors, and that's what I've been doing since.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the introduction.

Just to start us off, most organizations already have fall protection policies, equipment, and training in place, but when crews are actually doing the work, where do you tend to see the biggest gaps?

The trade overall has come a long way when it comes to fall protection.

Going back to when buckets were first introduced, I want to say back in the 50s and 60s, not many utilities had them and people weren't wearing harnesses going up in them. It's still practice today. I see there was just a tree crew out of my house couple weeks ago, and the guys weren't wearing harnesses up there.

But on the opposite side of the spectrum in the trade, whether it's the contractors or the utility guys I come into contact with, they've done a really good job about making it normal practice to wear a harness up in the bucket for fall protection.

Now when climbing steel towers or poles, that was a relatively recent development of having fall protection, especially on poles. It was always a practice to free climb the pole, meaning you were just climbing up the pole with your hands and your climbers on your feet, and sometimes maybe you had a strap around the pole. Most of the time you didn't, and companies were seeing a lot of, injuries and fatalities from falling off the pole. So 2015, the OSHA standard came into play where a person climbing a pole must be fall protected at all times.

That's a little bit of the history, Buckingham led that with the BuckSqueeze. Was actually developed first started getting developed in the late 90s by mainly a result of the utilities coming to the fall protection companies and asking, hey, we need to solve this problem.

Buckingham got a lot of flack for, the BuckSqueeze that they developed, which is almost like our flagship product, fall protection device when climbing wood poles.

When they started showing it around and coupling... Companies started implementing it, you know, the guys had been set in their ways of free climbing and and didn't wanna change, But it was really the utilities themselves that were pushing it and pushing us and the other vendors to come up with a solution to the problem.

I'd say today, the industry, it's pretty well embedded in the industry fall protection compared to what it used to be even recently, but there's still some gaps where fall protection might break down.

One that has been pretty recent is the issue of falling off buckets. So when a guy is climbing into one of the big buckets, a 55 footer or bigger. You know, they're pretty high up off the ground, and we've had... I've seen it. It was in storm in Florida, for a contractor, and a guy slipped coming out of the bucket, fell down, and hit his head on the outrigger, and it basically pretty much scalped him. He actually lived.

I ended up randomly a couple years later on another storm running into the guy and working with him, driving around in the bucket with him up in Michigan.

He ended up being okay, but it's an issue. Then booming up in the bucket, if you could imagine if you were to fall out of a bucket even 10 feet out of the air, if you're a six foot person and your lanyard is six foot long, it's connected to the bucket, you know, 10 foot up in the air, you're still gonna hit the ground. So there's a gap there, that hasn't really been solved that great.

Buckingham has developed a system, which is fall restriction out of the bucket, which means, like, you're basically restricted from even falling out of the bucket.

So what you do is you boom up, be connected to this fall restriction kit that we have. So if you were to even get flipped out of the bucket, you know, you're not gonna be even be able to pass the lip of the bucket to fall out. And then once you get up to a certain height, you use your regular lanyard, you can unclip out of the fall restriction device.

But it was cumbersome, took up room on the bucket, and just wasn't adopted. So there's some gaps in fall protection that still exist, but overall I'd say, the majority of of the big ones have been filled in.

Now another gap that I've seen is guys forgetting to clip into the bucket. So when you're getting in and out of a bucket multiple times a day, every day, for weeks and years and whatnot, sometimes that habit of clipping into the bucket with your harness, you just forget to do it. Sometimes maybe you don't do it, you know, out of, you know, not wanting to, but most of the time you're just forgetting to. And Buckingham actually came. There was a fatality at a contractor, and the contractor came to Buckingham for a solution for this where their guy forgot to clip in. He was flipped out of a bucket, a big bucket, and fell to his death.

Buckingham came up with something called the PeerCheck, and I have it right here.

It's like this device. It's basically like a seat belt. So when you go to clip into the bucket, this is at your anchor, this point, and this device is the one that you actually clip into.

So you can see when it's not connected, it makes that sound kinda like a seat belt reminding you to clip in. Now this would be going across the top of the bucket. So when you climb into the bucket, you're reminded to clip into this device.

Different bucket companies have come up with some solutions to a similar like sounding device to where if there's no metal on metal contact with the anchor point in your lanyard, the bucket won't even boom up. That requires a full new bucket purchase, which is expensive. Ours can be put on any bucket, but it's the same thing. There's a gap there because even... It took us maybe a year, a little longer to develop that for the contract, and by the time we developed it, it was kind of like out of sight, out of mind. The contractor wasn't interested anymore, and we haven't sold hardly any of those. We call them the peer check.

So there's some solution to these small gaps that we've developed, but they're still there just because for the different reasons of some of these devices not getting implemented.

Yeah. Other... Go ahead.

Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say, you know, and I think that brings us to the point around before anyone leaves the ground, there's a lot of important decisions that need to happen. So maybe some of those gaps are happening before you're even leaving the ground. What do you think crews should be talking or looking at before they get started?

We have something called a tail board, which everyone in construction, especially utility space, knows about the tail board.

Sometimes it can be just something to pencil whip.

Sometimes it is effective in developing a plan, for the job.

When it comes to fall protection, you know, before that before that job starts up, it's just really important for the crew to take the time to make sure your equipment is running right and to give the crew the time to inspect that equipment.

There's different ways and different equipment that we have and different ways that we train to inspect the equipment. The biggest thing that Buckingham does, in my view, is that we can show up to company safety days and do a full equipment inspection for the utility or the contractor. We do that quite a bit and it's been pretty successful in identifying mainly harnesses and wood pole fall restriction devices, body belts for climbing. We've seen equipment that is old and needs to be taken out of service.

So that's, I think, one of the main ways is those yearly safety stand downs to not only do your rescue training, which almost every company does, at least, pull top rescue, but also to inspect the equipment and and take it out of service. And it can be tough sometimes for guys because they get in the harness and they get it broken in or body belt or secondary or primary to let go of that because it's broken in.

But it needs to be done because if it needs to be red tagged, it does need to be taken out of service.

Yeah. And you're talking about the equipment itself and how important it is to inspect the gear before you use it. But if, you know, inspections become routine or you're not on-site to do that, what tends to get missed or what can easily be missed, on the equipment?

So when it comes to, like, harnesses, they get left up in the bucket a lot of times.

They get, you know, pretty routine damage from weather and the elements. So the biggest part is just even inspecting it at all, one, but specifically when it comes to the harnesses, UV damage from the sun, is a is a big one that we see, and then, rusty hardware.

Now Buckingham offers aluminum hardware, which would mitigate that instead of steel. We do offer steel hardware, and I'm talking like the quick connect buckles that the guys use on the harnesses.

One of the recent things that we found out we just came out with, and this goes for all harness companies because almost all harness companies use these same buckles when it comes to the dielectric buckles. The dielectric buckles are nine KV rated, hardware, the quick connect buckles on these harnesses and they're basically steel buckles with a nine k v polymer coating on them.

And the tolerances are really tight for these specific buckles. And we found that you can if you don't keep them clean and, free of debris and dust and and and all the weather that gets on them that it can look like that the buckles connect and clasp together But, actually, if you're up in the bucket working, like, I had a harness like this before and Buckham found out, you know, I'd be working up in the bucket, and I'd lean over and put some pressure on the leg straps, and the buckle would pop open. And, obviously, that's a not a good thing you want your harness to do if you were ever in a scenario where you needed it to work.

You need those buckles to stay class. So we found that the dielectric buckles in particular, they weren't malfunctioning. They worked great. It was just the tolerances are a lot tighter because of that nine KV polymer coating on them.

So we did another round of testing, made sure the buckles were okay, and came out, just with a more rigorous procedure to inspect the harnesses and keep those buckles clean. If you, you know, your heart...

You're supposed to be inspecting your equipment every time before you use it, but at least, like, do a deep dive into it once a year.

These buckles, you really need to keep clean almost monthly, spraying them out with WD-forty to keep them clean so that they are latching correctly.

So that was one example of something that we've seen recently.

Yeah, that's super helpful. And I love all the different checkpoints for deep dive, what you should be doing daily, etcetera. And so, yeah, you've kind of talked about the plan kind of before, making sure you're all prepped.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, even with a really good plan on paper, the job can look totally different once someone gets up there.

So what do you think a worker should do when then the original plan or equipment no longer fits what they're seeing once they're up in the bucket?

So that happens a lot.

You know, conditions changing. It can be it can be weather. It can be the piece of equipment you're working on. It can be the, you know, the site, the pole, the tower, the structure that you're working on. Things change all the time, and you're supposed to...

Every time a condition changes, do a new tailboard. Now that... In the field, that doesn't happen too much.

You know, guys aren't gonna come down and write a whole new tailboard, for something that changes, But you definitely want to run it by the... Through the whole crew, get a collection of mines on it, and, reevaluate your plan. I mean, some sometimes you could be climbing a tower, for example, and an anchor point that you might want to use might be rusty and loose and a piece of angle iron. So obviously, that might change change the plan of your rigging points.

There's been times where I've been up in the bucket where I just need an extra set of hands. You know, two hands isn't enough. So stopping that work and and getting another bucket on the pole or another person up the pole to help with the task at hand.

I think one of the biggest ones is is the weather, you know, and heat. We talk about heat. This isn't fall protection related, but one time when I was an apprentice working, we were hand digging a hole. It was summertime.

I felt fine. You know, I was an apprentice digging the hole. Didn't think anything of it. And my my foreman came over and actually stopped me from digging because he noticed I wasn't sweating anymore.

It was the middle of summer and told me to take a break.

You know? And that's just an experienced member of the crew looking out for his guys, looking out for his apprentice, and telling me to take a break. And, you know, luckily, I didn't have, you know, any heat related incident or anything, but, I did take the break.

And nothing ended up happening, but it's just something that always stuck out to me, him stopping the work and giving the... Giving me a break. You know? There has been times where we have had to do a whole new tailboard. There was a... I was working underground, doing some, loop fed, backbone work, and the company was having problems with, flashes and kind of confusion on the loop fed system.

Nothing. I didn't have any flashes personally, but they started making it a requirement to do a new tail board for each location on the loop fed system because they're having so many problems with it. So that was an example of the company taking ownership of, you know, conditions changing because underground is a lot different than overhead. Not a lot different, but sometimes it can get confusing because everything's not up in the air where you can see it.

So sometimes the company does need to take ownership and and make the guys do an extra tailboard or change their plan.

Yeah. And I think you're bringing up a really good topic that applies to everything around having a culture where you feel safe to speak up, have the time to do something safely. I think it's just so crucial no matter what you're doing, fall protection related or not.

So we've talked a lot about the plan, the rescue plan on paper, how to be prepared, but having to use that plan obviously in real life is very different. So what makes rescue practice useful and realistic?

So it is extremely important to train on your rescue equipment. And I found we just ran into it with doing a video shoot with you guys. Hadn't done we have a tower rescue high angle rescue kit and it probably been maybe a year maybe not close to a year since since I had demonstrated this, high angle tower rescue kit. And we had a couple guys, I don't think that had used it too much, and we ran into some issues with, rope binding up when lowering a guy down off a tower. And this was just, you know, we had all the time in the world. This was training, you know, just shooting a training video.

And so after reevaluating that, I was like, man, this just proves that going over your rescue equipment is extremely important.

So what a company can do is, one, make sure all the parts of a rescue kit, all the parts of a a guy's rescue equipment, whether it's pull top rescue, are there like with our tower rescue kit.

We have an older kit that was we sold a lot of and it's a good kit but what we found is what guys were taking components out of them taking an ox block out of it or taking carabiners out of it and using it for other things and then once you don't have the components then your rescue kit isn't there to use when you need it.

So we developed a new high angle rescue kit, that everything is stitched together and there's different things a company can do with the kit. I've seen like some of them will have zip ties that zip tie the top. And if that zip tie has been broken, that means someone got in there for a reason. And there's different color zip ties that the company can use to make sure no one's opened the kit. But we've added on the manufacturer side a way to make it harder for a guy just to grab a carabiner out of it because it's all stitched in to the kit. So training on the kit is good. Most companies are really good at training like pull top rescue.

At least when I was out there, almost every company, you know, would do pull top rescue every year. But on the transmission side of things, like, I had never done tower rescue, not even in my apprenticeship training or, no company offered tower rescue training while I was out there working on the job. And there's different reasons for that.

It's a lot more time consuming. You need a structure instead of just an easy you know, 40 foot wood pole or whatever you have in the yard. You need a tower.

There's different reasons for that, but we don't see too much training on on tower rescue. I mean, you hope that you can get a bucket to it or a crane to a guy that's working transmission and get them down that way.

But sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's a while till that next bucket or crane gets there to get a guy down off a tower.

So training with the equipment. Another, piece of equipment that we've had lately that has been selling pretty good is, bucket self rescue. And there's been a lot of videos going around the Internet lately, about bucket fires and guys jumping out of their bucket, because of a bucket fire or because of bucket malfunction, needing to get out of the bucket and get to the ground.

We've been doing a lot of training and going and showing off our, bucket self rescue system.

It's just a simple little bag that's, you know, an arc flash rated bag to keep it from burning up. And if you need to get out, you hook it up to your harness, and you can basically descend down using a descender on a on a, you know, pretty thin rope, which keeps the unit small and not cumbersome because guys just have so much stuff in the bucket. They don't need a ton of extra stuff up there. But this rope is really strong and they're able to get out of the bucket.

You know, after being at Buckingham for a little over two years now, selling this system, was like, be nice to hear some stories about it, you know, actually helping out. And I finally did hear a contractor had to use it, last winter, and they were telling me about it. It was nothing too crazy when it came to, a fire, but guy was up working, transmission, and his, crane broke down, and lower controls didn't work. Couldn't get down.

There wasn't another bucket or crane in the area. It was gonna be hours before another one could get there, and he was just stuck up there. It was middle wear time. It was freezing, and he ended up using our system to descend out of the out of the basket and get to the ground.

So it was a pretty nice success story to hear when, you know, online, you're hearing a lot about these kind of disasters and seeing the videos of of guys getting in trouble up in the bucket. So that's one of the biggest things I would push is training with your equipment, inspecting it, making sure all the components are there. You're coming to Woodpole, a guy climbing, I remember, again, was an apprentice and we had a guy climbing up the pole and the foreman came over and chewed us a new one because there wasn't an extra set of climbing equipment at the base of the pole in case that guy, you know, needed a rescue.

So I went to the truck and got my climbing equipment set at the base of the pole.

So it's just making sure the equipment's readily available and all pieced together.

Yeah. Super helpful tips. You've covered a ton of practical information today, but just wanted to know as we're wrapping up on time, from your perspective, if a leader wanted to take a fresh look at their fall protection program, where would you tell them to start?

So it kind of goes back to what I was saying previously is know the rules of fall protection.

Sometimes they change and talked about that OSHA wood pole fall protection rule that went into effect finally in 2015.

Almost everyone in the utility space knows about it. But there's, for example, there's a new rule about flight harnesses. So guys, they use helicopters quite a bit now in the utility space, mainly in transmission, to fly guys to different locations, different structures. Maybe sometimes they're working, doing skid work out of the helicopter.

Well, there's just a new rule released by the FAA where any harness used to fly a guy. So it's called HEC, human external cargo harness. So any guy...

Any harness that's used for flying, must be put out of service, five years from the manufacture date, and that's not issue date. So if a company has a brand new harness sitting on the shelf for a couple years when it goes into service, you might only get a couple years out of that harness because it must be retired from flying, five years from the manufacturer of the harness. So it's a a new rule. Know the rules.

Another thing they can do is inspect their equipment, make sure it's complete and up to date.

And I would say the last thing, like, I've touched on is is make sure the guys know their equipment. Sometimes you train on equipment, in your training, and the equipment you get out in the field is different. So make sure you're training on the right equipment that you're gonna be using, and, do it often because you can get rusty and it's easy to forget.

Well, Drew, this has been so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing your experience as alignment and what you're seeing through your work today with Buckingham.

We received a ton of valuable information, so thank you again. So we have some free resources. Right now on the screen, you'll see this high angle rescue kit. If you scan that code, it will take you to that kit. Drew also was kind enough to include his email address at the bottom, so if you have any questions, you can email him there. Second, if you want to scan this code, you'll get free access to a sample of fall protection videos and guides that we actually co collaborated with Buckingham on, so some great content there.

And then lastly, if you just want to stay up to date on future live events, we'll be hosting Scan This Code to stay in the know. So thank you so much again, Drew. Thank you all for joining us today. We hope you'll join us next time.