After documenting some rather creative approaches to boom-lift safety abroad, I thought it was only fair to bring the investigation home.
Welcome to Cork.
Two completely separate locations. Two different jobs. Two boom lifts.
And, apparently, one shared philosophy:
Protect the machine. The pedestrians have eyes.
On Shandon Street, a boom lift was operating beside a busy public footpath. There were cones, signs, high-vis clothing and all the reassuring visual ingredients of a professionally managed job.
Excellent.
Except pedestrians could still walk directly past—and potentially beneath the work area.
Then came Blackpool.
Surely a busy shopping centre would be different?
Absolutely.
There was even more tape.
The boom lift itself was beautifully surrounded. Cones positioned around it. Red-and-white tape carefully stretched across the parking area.
The machine looked extremely safe.
You could almost hear it whispering:
“Nobody is scratching me today.”
Meanwhile, the public could continue walking along the building immediately below the elevated platform.
Which raises an interesting question about the purpose of an exclusion zone.
Is it supposed to exclude people from the area where something could actually fall on them?
Or is it primarily there to give the boom lift some personal space?
Because judging by these two examples, we’ve developed a fascinating new hierarchy of controls:
1. Protect expensive machine.
2. Protect parking spaces.
3. Deploy cones so everything looks official.
4. Pedestrians? They’ll figure it out.
Perhaps I’m overthinking it. – After all, people aren’t stupid.
Surely nobody would walk underneath someone working at height.
Really?
People walk where the footpath takes them. They look at their phones. They talk to their children. They carry shopping. And most importantly, when a work area has been left accessible, they reasonably assume someone competent has decided it is safe to walk there.
They don’t generally stop, look fifteen metres upwards and conduct their own dynamic risk assessment before continuing to Boots.
And perhaps nothing will fall.
Probably nothing will fall.
Almost certainly nothing will fall.
But “probably nothing will fall on a member of the public” remains a surprisingly poor control measure.
The Blackpool setup particularly fascinated me because considerable effort had clearly gone into restricting access around the machine.
So the concept of exclusion was understood.
It simply appears to have stopped travelling upwards at approximately waist height.
Maybe falling-object physics works differently in Cork.
Perhaps spanners, fixings and tools falling from elevated platforms have been trained to respect red-and-white tape located twenty metres away.
I must have missed that toolbox talk.
And this is where our old friend “so far as is reasonably practicable” enters the conversation.
Closing or diverting a pedestrian route beneath overhead work?
Some additional barriers?
A properly positioned exclusion zone?
A banksman controlling pedestrian movement where necessary?
Apparently we shouldn’t exaggerate.
After all:
“Nobody has been hit yet.”
Ah yes.
The gold standard of reactive safety management.
So next time I encounter a boom lift overhead and an entirely open footpath underneath, I’ll know exactly what to do.
Walk confidently.
Don’t look up.
And if something does come falling out of the Cork sky, I shall simply be grateful that somewhere nearby… the machine was properly coned off.