3 Safety Considerations for Land Surveyors Who Work Alone

Every morning, we get up and go about our day assuming we’ll come home safely tonight.  Thankfully, that is almost always true.  For land surveyors, there are 3 special safety concerns that you should pay close attention to when you work alone.

Traffic

Often you will find yourself parked on the side of a road or motorway.  You may follow safety guidelines that recommend placing warning signs or orange cones in your work area and wearing a high visibility vest. This helps, but drivers are often thinking about other things.  Sometimes despite these precautions, they don’t see you. The speed awareness programme in the UK claims if you have a break down next to the motor way and you stay in your car, your life expectancy is 12 minutes. Even if this number is wildly inaccurate, it highlights the need to stay alert when you’re working near traffic.

Unstable terrain

What looks like a perfectly safe plot of land, may have hidden dangers underneath.  There are an increasing number of sink holes randomly appearing in both urban and rural settings.  Land on the edge of water or river banks is also prone to unexpected shifts. Before starting work in an area, survey the situation and go through an appropriate hazard assessment process.

Building site hazards

Each building site is unique and my have it’s own set of safety procedures.  Always check in with the foreman or site manager and determine which safety gear is appropriate for the conditions. This would include everything from wearing steel toe boots, hard hats, high visibility vests or protective eye-wear.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes things still go wrong. If you find yourself working alone or in isolation, having a reliable check-in system in place is very important.  This is especially true if you find yourself going into high risk situations like the ones above. Ok Alone allows you to check-in as little or as much as you need. It also has a special “high risk” check-in feature, giving workers the option to check-in in as little as 10 minutes.  Or you can quickly tell people you’re safe and send them a message using an sms to check-in. By having a work alone monitoring system in place, you’ll have the comfort of knowing help is available should you ever need it.

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