Things we forgot

I learned about three unlrelated things this weekend that have passed out of the public consciousness (as far as I know). They are only vaguely relevant to safety, but I offer them anyway.

• There used to be "lorry girls" in the 1930s and 1940s who hung around the cafes on the A roads (precursors of the motorway services) and hitched rides with what would now be called LGV drivers up and down the country for thrills.
• Also in the 30s, there was a group of Americans lured from the depression hit US to the Soviet Union with the promise of work and wages to help industrialise the USSR during Stalin's five-year plans. They were then among the first to come under suspicion in the purges and ended their lives in the gulags. Their story is in The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Jim Tzouliadis, which I strongly recommend.
• Before cows routinely had their horns removed, farmers sometimes used to screw brass knobs (bedknobs or cupboard handles) into the top of them to make them less hazardous.

Louis

Fake testicles at the Olympics site

I went to the Olympic park in East London this morning and i can testify to the fact that it is one very well ordered site. Driving round, all the materials were neatly stored, pedestrians and vehicles were carefully segregated and I don't think it was a show put on for visitors. I've written about these features before, see here but then I had to take them on trust (albeit from ODA safety head Lawrence Waterman, who is as trustworthy as the come); good to see it first hand.

Construction progress is also impressive, the structure of the main stadium is pretty well complete, Zaha Hadid's floating roof for the aquatics centre is taking shape and the velodrome piling is complete. The lift cores for the Olympic village blocks (which will eventually be sold off as des-res flats) are also up, along with the frame of the press centre.

I was there because safety minister Lord McKenzie was touring the occupational helath centre which mixes the standard health surveillance the contractors are obliged to do anyway with some remarkable work (for the construction sector) trying to get builders to take their health seriously. This includes toolbox talks with a pair of fake testicles, to teach labourers to check their own for cancer, and a competition to find the strongest men and women on the site (using a grip test, which is a very good tell-tale for upper limb disorders).

McKenzie said he was impressed. I asked him if this sort of service could be mandated for all major publicly-funded projects, since there are a fair few of those coming up - all those accelerated public works the government has green-lit to help construction and civil engineering firms weather the recession - and the reason it's there on the Olympics is because the ODA as client paid for it.

He said he would go away and "talk about it", which is something.

Louis

Laser precision

For anyone who thought the lack of any talk in the past couple of years about the Artificial Optical Radiation Directive (which basically covers protection from lasers) meant it had gone away, perhaps kicked into the long grass like its sister law on electro-magnetic fields...think again.

We have nine months and counting to bring in UK regulations protecting workers from thin beams of light. The hazards are pretty well covered here by the Management Regs and UK users of powerful lasers used in medicine, welding and glass making and are working to guidelines from the International Commission for Non-Ionising Radiation Protection which set the same exposure limits as the Directive.

But we can't get out of the requirement to transpose it, anymore than we could with the other "physical agents" Directives on noise and vibration. So the HSE has to run round and draft a set of low-impact regs and try and get them into statute by next April.

Louis