Safety Harness Accessories

Safety Harness Accessories

Safety Harness

Once you have put the safety harness on, like a jacket, and adjusted the chest strap to so it is tight but comfortable, we need address the leg straps, buckles and sliders, there is more to it than just stepping into safety harness. Stepping into a commercial full body safety harness is considered to be extremely bad practice. Not only does it increase the risk of slips trips and falls; if the safety harness is placed on the ground it could pick up all kinds of dirt and contamination. There is also a risk of complacency setting in; where the user steps into the safety harness in a rush and fails to adjust it appropriately. In a fall a slack safety harness can lead to death or worse, extreme testicular trauma and severe rectal damage. The easiest way to gage the correct tension of the leg straps is to tighten it until you can just about get 2 fingers between the webbing and your leg. Two finger tension means placing the middle and index finger perpendicular to the webbing around the front area of the leg. The final thing and probably the most important thing is to lock your safety harness, every safety harness with a buckle used for adjustment should have at least one slider to lock it. If the safety harness is not locked and you are involved in a fall the movement of the webbing through the buckle can cause the bar tack to shock load against it. The bar tack is rolled over and lightly stitched it is only there to keep the sliders and buckles on the safety harness. The energy, in a fall, may exceed the strength of this stitching and it will rip apart allowing the bar tack to unroll and pass through the buckle. The end result is that you will fall through the bottom of the safety harness.

It doesn’t matter how good your safety harness is or how correctly you are wearing it unless it is inspected on a regular basis it will offer you no protection what so ever. The most important part of the safety harness is the webbing, so check the webbing for any signs of abrasion; look at the edges of the webbing, a 1mm cut in either edge of the webbing will cause the webbing to fail. From there it is a simple task of looking at and feeling all the component parts of the safety harness. If there is any sign of wear and tear or damage then do not use the safety harness. It should be quarantined and removed from service and passed to your line manager so it can be recorded and destroyed inline with the Equipment Inspection Policy. The article is not intended to be used as Primary Training; instead it is a reminder to those who have been trained to wear a safety harness.