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LEIAANNUALREVIEW2016PAGE10 I N March this year the focus of the LEIA Safety Forum was occupational healtha topic close to the heart of the Associations Safety andTraining Manager Lawrence Dooley. Believing that the culture of safe working is now well embedded in the lift and escalator industryLawrence has turned to health related matters. The issues around asbestos are known although we still need to be vigilant about where it can be found and how best to manage it he says. The surprise for me is other types of dust encountered on any construction site and in particular the dangers of Respirable Crystalline Silica RCS a risk for anyone involved in cutting masonry. Addressing this topic at the LEIA Safety Forumwhich took place at the Motorcycle Museum in Solihullwas Ian Baggelaar Group EnvironmentalHealth Safety Manager at Otis. Before joining Otis in 2014Ian spent nearly eight years with conglomerate Hanson UK so is well placed to talk about the risks associated with construction materials. RCS dust is created when working on silica containing materials like concretemortar and sandstone and more than 500 construction workers are believed to die from exposure to silica dust every year. Shockinglythe daily amounts needed to cause this damage are not largeas shown by the graphic image produced by the HSE. As Lawrence points outthere is as yet no legislation to cover safe working with these materialsit is simply a duty of care issue. Wearing the appropriate Personal Protection Equipment and minimising dust by using local exhaust ventilation or wet saws when cutting brickwork and masonry are some of the steps to be taken to minimise the risk of inhaling damaging dust. Another key speaker at the Safety Forum was Dr Simon Houghton of Bardon Environmentalwho talked about asbestos and the two types of survey required the Management Survey to locateas far as reasonably practicablethe presence and extent of any suspect materials in the buildingwhich could be damagedor disturbed during normal occupancy the Refurbishment and Demolition Surveyneeded before any refurbishment or demolition work is carried out.This is of particular importance with the current growth in modernisation of lifts and escalators. The LEIA Safety Forum topic was a timely one. In Januaryas Lawrence Dooley was confirming programme speakers and timingsrepresentatives from across the construction sector were being told that the industry is good at shouting about safetybut only whispers about health. The speaker was Crossrails Chief ExecutiveAndrewWolstenholmeone of several industry leaders gathering for the launch of Committing Construction to a Healthier Futureorganised by the Health in Construction Leadership Group established in 2015 after members of the HSEs Construction IndustryAdvisory Committee CONIAC were given a presentation on the scale of the ill health and premature deaths suffered by workers in the industry by Dr Lesley Rushton of Imperial CollegeLondon. For examplethe industrys toll of work-related cancer is three times higher than in any other employment sector. The first speaker was Simon Clarkwho formerly ran a small electrical contracting business but who was diagnosed with the fatal lung cancer mesothelioma in 2012 following exposure to asbestos as an apprentice electrician 35 years ago. His message was that the industry needed to reform its attitudes for the sake of the young apprentices entering the industry today. TidewaysAndy Mitchell commented that the summit delegates were hardly representative of a workforce that is often transient or far from homewith the stress of minimal security of employment. He described howTideway was setting up well-equipped health centres on its sites putting all workers through a five-day induction processand offering workers and their families trips on theThames to find out more about the project theyre working to deliver. Heather Bryantdirector of health and safety at contractor Balfour Beatty and one of the driving forces behind the Committing Construction to a Healthier Future campaignexplained that the summit event was designed to get the industry to the starting pointby raising SHOUT OUT ABOFit for life as well as purpose MANAGEMENT IAN BAGGELAAR GIVES THE SOBERING FACTS ABOUT RESPIRABLE CRYSTALLINE SILICA Simon gave a very entertaining explanation of the pervasiveness of asbestos in the UK relating it to the prevalence of the material in the Commonwealth countries and therefore the limited availability to continental industry during and after the SecondWorldWar. A new topic for the Forum was stress managementwith a talk by counsellor and psychotherapist Joan Kellywho has delivered workshops on managing stress in the workplace for a variety of organisations including the Institution of Civil Engineers Benevolent Society. In his presentationPhil Beresford Chair of the LEIA Safety and Environment Committee warned of the recent changes to the courts Sentencing Guidelineswhich may result in considerably higher fines applied to H S offences. Feedback for the speakers at the Forum was extremely positivewith an average 91 satisfaction rating from the delegates.