Having watched few episodes of Digging for Britain over the past few weeks I note that on quite a few sites all the members of the archaeology dig crews are wearing hard hats, safety glasses and hi-vis tops and trousers. Aerial shots show the only "machinery" is a shovel, trowel and a wheel barrow. No deep holes and flat landscape.
Is this Elfin Safety gone mad?
It's not half as mad as the building site next door to us, where they were operating heavy machinery, and there was no PPE being worn.
Given that is being 'televised', and people just love to pick on stuff[1]:
"Won't someone think of all the kiddies who will watch this and...!"
I would be astonished if they didn't go the safe route (read that however you choose).
[1] Of course, this thread shows that they are on a hiding to nothing whatever they do.In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> writes
I've got all my PPE from my work days However I did have to return the ear defenders and anti-laser googles . The full Monty apart from those. Maybe I should use it for going down to the shops - well you never know.
I quite fancy this
Brian
I suppose some digs are deeper and it is probably easier to have one rule to cover all circumstances rather than making individual risk assessments as which PPE is required.
Even back in the '90s, when I was supervising the installation of the controls on new sewage works scraper bridges, one of the electricians struggled to make terminations inside a control panel, with his hard-hat on. After repeated problems, he took it off and was immediately pounced on by site management. There were no cranes on site, no work within 100m of him and the panel was the highest point on the site! There was no common sense, even then.
You might not need to wait that long. It's been terribly sunny these last few days and I would rate that lot as Sun Protection Factor 120.
The TV program covers various digs in the same episode and no PPE to that extent, no hard hats, no safety glasses, no hi-vis on the other digs.
Some of the sites they do are for HS2, road projects, etc. Perhaps those projects have blanket rules about PPE? eg railway hi viz is orange, so if you see orange on a railway project it's likely to have been mandated by the project management. Often the rules apply to both direct employees and contractors - the archaeologists might be working for a consultancy like Oxford Archaeology, but as they're contractors then the standard PPE rules will apply.
Theo
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