FALL ARREST VS FALL RESTRAINT

T&I Solutions are keen to simply the access industry and we believe that an often misunderstood area of roof access is where fall arrest or fall restraint fall within the hierarchy of control; simply put it falls very near the bottom. Any fall arrest or fall restraint equipment should be considered as PPE and as such should only be used where a) the fall risk cannot be eliminated and b) there is not suitable collective fall protection alternative.  Already the phrase collective or passive fall protection must be understood before the concept of fall arrest or restraint can be fully appreciated. Simply put a passive system will protect all users and required no user input in order to function (i.e. a handrail system) whereas a fall arrest system requires additional inspection and testing and all users to have the appropriate, training and inspected equipment. Should any of these not be in place then the operative will be in great danger should they be exposed to any fall risk.

Taking the above into account; before any fall arrest system can be used as a means of fall protection the testing, maintenance and training of both the equipment and any potential operatives must be implemented. When this is considered together with the need to rule out any collective protection measure; the situations where fall arrest is appropriate become very limited. A true fall arrest system so has very specific requirements, for example consideration has to be given to the required distance for the system to fully arrest a fall, this can be up to 6.5m. In addition a system can impose considerable loads on the roof structure. Again these requirements further limit the situations where a fallarrest system is the correct equipment.

These considerations are very well described in the HSE publication indg284 (available from the HSE website: http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg284.pdf). However before fall arrests systems are dismissed there are a number of positive factors that should be considered. Generally speaking a fall arrest system is a very cost effective system and has little visual impact so are often easier to pass through planning. The other important distinction to make is between fall ARREST and fall RESTRAINT. Simply put fall arrest will stop the operative hitting the floor after they have fall whereas a fall restraint system will stop the operative from reaching the roof edge, eliminating the fall risk entirely. As such it could be argued that a fall restraint system, correctly designed and installed can mitigate the fall risk entirely.