Saying stone is heavy is stating the obvious, but it is amazing how many injuries – and even some deaths – are suffered by those who seem to forget it.

Since the previous issue of Natural Stone Specialist went to the printers there have been two prosecutions as the result of incidents involving cranes being used in the construction industry. These cases illustrate the importance of maintaining cranes and showing people how to use them properly.

In one of the cases, David Collins of Manchester was left a paraplegic because a lifting sling detached from the hook of a crane on his lorry while he was unloading, spilling the load of scaffolding poles on to him. The hook had a faulty safety catch.

In the other case, Mark Thornton, from near Preston, died after a poorly maintained crane he was using on site was overstretched and toppled on top of him.

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE), prosecuting in both cases, found that the external alarm on the crane that killed Mark Thornton could not be heard by those working nearby. The override switches were faulty, including the switch that prevented the crane lifting loads beyond its capacity, so that when it was used to try to lift a six-tonne steel column nearly 18m away, taking it well outside its safe operating limits, it fell over.

HSE’s investigation into the incident involving David Collins revealed that although the company had known about the faulty safety catch on the hook for some time before the incident, no action had been taken to replace it and David Collins had not received any training about its importance. In fact, he had not been properly trained or supervised regarding the use of the crane at all, the court heard.

The company employing Mr Collins, Spectra Scaffolding, now faces fines and costs of £85,000. The company employing Mark Thornton, Siteweld Construction, has since closed down, but Benjamin Lee, who was its Managing Director, was prosecuted and fined £80,000 with £18,478 costs.

With the Government having said it plans to scrap half the current health & safety regulations in the next three years (see the previous issue of NSS), there could be some changes to the regulations regarding lifting equipment at some time in the not too distant future. But it is a move to reduce red tape, not an open season on employees. If injuries and deaths start increasing the reaction is likely to be severe.

Legislation covering the installation and use of cranes, including jib cranes and gantries, currently includes the Lifting Operations & Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (known by the acronym Loler). They require the makers of cranes to state the safe operating limits of the equipment. They also require an operator to give the crane a visual inspection daily, for the crane to be serviced in accordance with the maker’s recommendations and for it to be checked by a competent person at least once a year. These are legal requirements of the company that owns the crane.

If you need a competent person to check your cranes, the Lifting Equipment Engineers Association can help (see their website: www.leea.co.uk). They also produce guidance on the safe use of lifting equipment, which, again, can be found on their website.

Lifting is also currently covered by the Manual Handling Operations Regulations 1992, as amended in 2002. They require employers to: avoid the need for hazardous manual handling, so far as is reasonably practicable; assess the risk of injury from any hazardous manual handling that can’t be avoided; reduce the risk of injury from hazardous manual handling, so far as is reasonably practicable.

Employees have duties too. They should: follow appropriate systems of work laid down for their safety; make proper use of equipment provided for their safety;

co-operate with their employer on health & safety matters; inform the employer if they identify hazardous handling activities; take care to ensure that their activities do not put others at risk.

When you are young it is easy to discount the permanent and progressive damage you are causing your body by lifting weights that are too heavy and / or too awkward. Later in life the injuries caused become all too painfully apparent.

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), which are often caused by lifting, are still prevalent in the construction industry, especially among the over 45s – because they often result from the accumulative effect of years of abuse (although they can also result from injuries sustained in an accident and the construction industry has a high incidence rate of accidents). Nearly three-quarters of the 476,000 people with work-related MSDs in 2010-11 had suffered with the problem for more than a year, showing what an impact MSDs have on the individual and the loss of skills in the workplace in general.

MSDs can affect muscles, joints and tendons in all parts of the body, and although in the UK as a whole they have been overtaken as the main cause of taking time off work by stress, depression and anxiety, in the construction industry they remain the main cause of lost working days.

The elephant in the room is that stress, depression and anxiety are as difficult to authenticate or disprove as backache, and no doubt some people exploit that. Nevertheless, most people complaining of MSDs probably are genuinely suffering – as far too many in the stone industry can testify.

There is really no excuse these days for manhandling stone around a factory or site. There are plenty of companies only too happy to install jib-cranes and gantries in your factory. There are plenty of vacuum, scissor and slab lifts to choose from to use with your cranes, and fork lift trucks are simply and inexpensively converted to slab lifters by putting the forks into a boom attachment with a slab lifter on the end.

Even if you do need to use muscle power to move stone, there are plenty of handles, dollies and trolleys to take the strain out of the work. Just ask your favourite machinery and consumables supplier for details of their range. If they don’t have what you want, ask your second favourite.

And if the welfare of everyone in the factory and on-site isn’t a persuasive enough argument, you might also like to consider the productivity improvements that can be achieved by re-thinking the logistics of workflow through your factory and reducing the risk of damage to worked stone by improving the way it is moved around.

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) offer guidance on handling on their website (www.hse.gov.uk), where you can also download PDF documents on the topic or, in some cases, order them as hard copies.

The Lifting Equipment Engineers Association also produce a Code of Practice for the Safe Use of Lifting Equipment. It is written for the lifting industry and might be more than most users need. Also, it is not cheap at £146, including delivery (UK only), but it does cover the subject thoroughly in its 500 pages.

The latest edition was published in 2009, when it was fully revised to incorporate the latest harmonised European product standards as well as all current health & safety legislation, including Loler. More than 8,000 copies of it have been sold, which makes it a best seller among such technical publications, and it is widely recognised as the authoritative guide to safe and legal lifting. Copies of it can be ordered from the LEEA website (www.leea.co.uk).

Waters Group will help you handle it

Waters Group Ltd work with a wide range of manufacturers of material handling and lifting equipment. Managing Director Nicola Waters says: “This type of product is a huge consideration for our customers, from off-loading slabs from the back of a lorry to moving work-pieces from station to station in a workshop.

“Having the right equipment reduces the risk of accidents and can go a long way to preventing damage or even breakages. Given the calibre of manufacturers we are working with, we believe we are exceptionally well placed to offer solutions to any material handling questions and issues that our customers might have.”

The offer from Waters includes pillar / jib cranes, Manzelli vacuum lifters and the full range of Aardwolf products.

Waters Group normally have in-stock carrying clamps, ‘A’ Frames, self locking trolleys, various slab racks, sink hole saver bars, and slab lifters for 30-75mm slabs with 1ton capacities.

The sink hole saver bars have proved invaluable for strengthening finished worktops to protect them from snapping around the cut-out when they are lifted in the workshop or installed on-site. They are available in 1.8m and 2.4m lengths.

Waters have their own wheeled workshop carts made for them by a local engineering company, while the Asinus German-made motorised cart that was on the Waters Group stand at the Natural Stone Show at ExCeL London last year, is still a good seller, despite the recession. The cart incorporates a motorised lift that takes a kitchen worktop from floor level to van height for transportation and unit top height for installation. You can see it in action on the website www.asinus.eu.

If you want to see what Waters have on offer they will happily mail or email manufacturers’ brochures and will quote for your requirements on request. Delivery times are usually short and prices competitive. And Waters Group believe in working with manufacturers who build serviceable, repairable kit, so spares are also readily available if necessary.

GGR Group makes lifting stone simple and safe

Lifting equipment specialists GGR Group have developed their range of stone handling products to provide a solution for lifting all types, sizes and finishes of stone. The variety of vacuum lifters that are available for purchase or hire means that practically any stone can be lifted safely with minimum handling and manpower required.

In special cases, GGR’s team of in-house engineers are able to create bespoke machines or modify existing vacuum lifters. And by making some inventive changes to lifters and robots, stone can be rotated and tilted at height safely and effectively, as they have demonstrated at the Museum of Liverpool.

GGR Group’s Homer (High Operation Mounted Emu Robot) is usually used with a telehandler for projects where craneage or scaffolding is impractical. But when five Jura limestone slabs inscribed with the name of the Museum needed to be installed on to the Museum of Liverpool entrance wall, GGR had to make some special adjustments to the Homer, which has a constant running vacuum system for secure lifting of up to 500kg.

With its ability to rotate through a full 360º, pivot left and right 80º and tilt 80º up and down, the Homer’s remote controlled robotic head was used to manoeuvre the slabs into position with precision.

Although the Homer lifter itself had been modified for the job, it used the same closed cell foam rings specially designed to work safely on sawn, flamed, honed, polished, grooved, chiselled and bush hammered stone that is used on all the below-the-hook stone lifters in the GGR range.

All GGR’s stone vacuum lifters also come with safety features such as audio-visual low vacuum alert, a fully tested Safe Working Load capacity and constantly running vacuum pumps as standard.

GGR’s range of single circuit stone vacuum lifters can lift loads of up to 680kg, with some models offering air powered tilting, the ability to isolate each vacuum pad individually and alternative frame configurations for lifting different shaped loads. Heavier loads can be handled by heavy duty models such as the 1tonne capacity SK1000 and the petrol-powered Kappa Levator, the highest capacity model in GGR’s stone lifting range capable of lifting up to 1,200kg.

These lifters provide a safe and simple way for porous, smooth and dense stone to be moved around a busy masonry workshop or stone yard with less risk of damage to the stone itself and those handling it. The tilt function allows stone slabs to be safely moved from an upright to flat position so they can be placed on to a cutting table without causing wrist or back strain to the stonemason.

The vacuum technology in GGR’s lifters can be used to assist with lifting anything from stone kerbs, blocks and bricks to slabs, pipes, plates and cladding with help from a crane or telehandler. The clamps, gantries and manual lifters available from the Group also provide safer solutions to moving concrete and natural stone borders, gravestones and boulders.

This wide range of specialist lifting equipment has been designed to make moving stone as risk-free as possible, using the latest technology to make safety a top priority for quick and economical lifting with no need for extra man power.