“We’re almost taking the moral high ground to get platforms in, and there will be other people who come and say, ‘I can do it for cheaper,’” opined James Finbow, HSEQ, manager at Bauer Foundations Canada. There are no official guidelines in the U.S. for the design and construction of safe working platforms, and so there is no official procedure to mitigate these potentially catastrophic risks. Obviously, the consequences that can result from an inadequate platform are immense, and the risks are high. “The greatest risk is toppling or overturning equipment, and that’s a catastrophic event,” warned Taube. “It’s going to certainly lead to extensive equipment damage, and quite likely lead to injury or loss of life.” While injury or loss of life, along with equipment damage, are the most critical consequences, there are also problems such as project delays, being removed from the project and incurring a negative safety record, which can affect a specialty contractor’s ability to bid on future projects, and quality concerns. “I was a piling contractor in Ireland and the U.K. for many years; I owned my own piling company,” added Gildea. “I was involved in the early initiatives back in the U.K. when we started [discussing working platforms.]…[The industry] had a lot of accidents and quite a few fatalities. The FPS got together and challenged, ’What can we do about it?’ And that’s how it started.” To ensure proper working platforms on construction sites, members of the FPS created a simple form for general contractors to sign that indicates there is an adequate platform built to a proper design and specification and that it will be maintained by the general contractor throughout construction activities. “We call it the Working Platform Certificate,” articulated Egan during his 2018 webinar. “It summarizes what the project is, what part of the project [the specialty contractor] is working on [and] under what load the working platform is designed to operate. It names the designer, the designer’s organization and any testing required. And then the principal contractor At the same time, a group of specialists was assembled by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) at the direction of FPS to create a unified approach to working platform construction and design that defined the health and safety requirements for safe platforms. BRE published a document in 2004 titled “Working Platforms for Tracked Plant: Good Practice Guide to the Design, Installation, Main- tenance and Repair of Ground-supported Working Platforms,” also known by the title BR 470. Working Platforms Industry-Wide Working Group The Working Group was initially created in 2017 to start gathering information, such as the existing documents and guidance from the industry experience in the U.K., to provide to the deep foundation construc- tion industry. There are key takeaways from the protocol that the U.K. industry followed that the Working Group believes would be of benefit in the U.S. market. “The biggest Site control (e.g., access, drainage) may not be issues that can be addressed in advance Learning From Protocol in the U.K. “If we go back to the early 2000s, it was recognized that the incidents of piling rigs falling over because of poor platforms was too high,” recalled Derek Egan, B.Eng., Ph.D., C.Eng., FICE, with Remedy Geotechnics in the U.K., in a webinar called “U.K. Working Platform Initiative and Calculation of Rig Bearing Pressure,” presented live from DFI’s SuperPile ’18 Conference. “That’s why FPS launched its working platform initiative.” has to sign to confirm the platform has been correctly designed, correctly installed and will be correctly maintained before the piling contractor goes to the site.” Egan explained that an early version of the Working Platform Certificate was created in 2004, and that the initial reaction from principal contractors was less than positive. It was through FPS members collectively insisting on the form’s use and refusing to enter sites without one that it became standard practice for both FPS members and nonmembers alike. five or six piling companies [in the U.K. at that time] were the first ones to say, ’We want to take the lead on this,’” declared Gildea. “If you look at the $1.5-billion market in the U.S., if you take the top 10 contractors, they probably have about 70% of that market. And through ADSC, DFI and PDCA, all of them are represented. If you can get the bigger companies on board to start off, it starts to filter down.” DEEP FOUNDATIONS • SEPT/OCT 2019 • 97
