Safety Fears For High Rise Window Cleaners - Abu Dhabi

Safety fears for high-rise cleaners (ABU DHABI): The case of a worker injured when he fell while washing windows has underscored the need for better safety regulations following a spate of deaths, experts warned. The cleaner was in a maintenance cradle near the mezzanine level of the Ministry of Economy building on Hamdan Street at 12.30am on Sunday when he fell to the ground. Hariff Kallungal, 49, from India, who saw the incident, said the steel basket that held the man also collapsed. “This cradle fell down, and this man was on top of the cradle,” Mr Kallungal said. He said he was bleeding from the back of his head and could not talk because of pain.

The man, who was not strapped into a safety harness, was taken to Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC) for treatment. “He fell five metres and received a laceration to his scalp,” Dr Murray Van Dyke, the chairman of SKMC’s emergency ward, said. “He was seen in this emergency department, worked up thoroughly, he had sutures placed in his laceration and he was released in good condition.” While it was not a serious accident, “it certainly was a potentially serious injury”, Dr Van Dyke said.

Statistically, about 50 per cent of people who fall from four-storey heights are killed, he said, and few will survive a seven-storey fall. Of the 85,000 patients admitted in a year at SKMC’s emergency ward, Dr Van Dyke estimated about five per cent of those cases were work-related, excluding motor vehicle accidents. Patients injured from falls were relatively “infrequent”, he said, but he pointed out the hospital would count only survivors. “We may have a bias here because if the person has fallen from a high enough point, they will have died. We only see the people who are actually making it to the emergency department, so we can’t infer that the number is the overall number.”

Unless problems such as inadequate training and equipment are addressed, the dangers persist. Four men died in a similar incident in June, plunging six storeys outside Sharjah’s Ansar Mall. The workers had been erecting a sign when their maintenance cradle snapped in half. None were wearing safety harnesses. In July, three workers died in Sharjah when the scaffolding holding them came apart. Falls from heights have been identified as a “top priority” issue in occupational death in the emirate, according to Dr Jens Thomsen, the head of occupational and environmental health at the Health Authority-Abu Dhabi (HAAD).

Last year, HAAD logged 108 fatal workplace injuries, of which 28 deaths (or 26 per cent) were due to falls from heights. In 2008, there were 66 deaths on the job, with 26 of those (or 39 per cent) resulting from falls from a height. “If you put the numbers together of falls from heights and deaths from falling objects, this is by far the leading cause of occupational injury in Abu Dhabi emirate,” Dr Thomsen said yesterday. HAAD recently printed 5,000 copies of an occupational hazards booklet for distribution to company owners. Among the topics covered was falls and falling objects, Dr Thomsen said. “It’s quite obvious that the safety standards are not followed everywhere as they should be, and especially with these window-cleaning fatalities. I’ve noticed there were a couple of reports recently in Sharjah with similar fatalities.”

Such accidents are far too preventable to be so common, said Dr Fikri Abu-Zidan, a professor of medicine at UAE University, who last year co-authored a study on occupational injuries in Al Ain. “More than half – 51 per cent – of work-related injuries are from falls from heights, mainly more than three metres high, which by definition is high-energy trauma,” he said. “Everyone [working from heights] should have those slings on at work. The equipment should be better and training should be better.” Rather than waiting for near-misses to occur, prevention means early detection of problems, Dr Abu-Zidan said. “It’s not enough to just bring in labourers. They should have an educational period with training for safety and surveillance for accidents.”

In the UAE University report, which used 2008 data collected from Al Ain’s trauma registry, the most common cause of injury on work sites was falls from heights (51 per cent), followed by injuries from falling objects (15 per cent). Dr Michal Grivna, another co-author on the study, said regulations should be put in place “not only regarding safety on construction sites, but also for window cleaners working at heights”. He also said that awareness about the risks of heatstroke was an important consideration. “The weather and heat-related stress is a challenge if it’s someone standing outside on a platform washing windows,” Dr Grivna said. “They could get dizzy outside working many hours in the sunshine.”

Dr Grivna noted that unlike in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi does not have limitations on building heights, meaning workers who fall from the capital’s high-rises might be less likely to survive.
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