Scaffolds.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 5, 1 March 1911, Page 590

Scaffolds.

The care of scaffolds taken by one of our statutes is a thing of the goodness of which one is reminded by the following paragraph from The Builder: — curious scaffolding fatality, illustrating at once the very slight margin of safety that is often considered sufficient in scaffold construction, and the clangor of dropping heavy

objects on a scaffold, is reported from Sheffield. At an inquest held on the body of John Ogden, builder's labourer, it was shown that deceased met his death through the breaking of a cross-bar supporting one end of the scaffold on which he was at work. The foreman in charge at the time of the accident,, attributed the breaking of the bar to the way in which deceased emptied the bricks out of his hod. He dropped them when some distance from the ground, instead of lowering them. He had often been spoken to about this practice, but he had said in reply that he was too tall to bend down. Other witnesses, also attributed the accident to the dropping of the bricks, and the jury decided that death was due to an accident which could not have been foreseen.