Working Platforms for Tracked Piling Plant—Current Worldwide Practice and Guidance for the USA: Fid-Bau Portal

Working Platforms for Tracked Piling Plant—Current Worldwide Practice and Guidance for the USA

Gildea, Paul A. / Faust, Peter / Richards, Thomas D.

Every year in the USA, dedicated tracked base pile installation rigs, drilling rigs, and cranes tip over or experience near misses due to issues involving inadequate working platforms. These preventable incidents often involve serious injuries or fatalities to operators and ground crews and extensive damage to equipment. Despite the importance of safe, stable working platforms and the dire consequences that can result in their absence, there are currently no specific guidelines or regulations in the U.S. for the design, construction, and ongoing maintenance of safe working platforms. Exacerbating the issue, due to increasing demand for bigger structures that require more intricate, deeper, and larger-diameter foundations, deep foundation construction equipment has become larger, heavier, and more complex in order to deliver challenging requirements. For similar reasons to those behind establishment of guidelines for working platforms in the U.K., an industry-wide Working Platform Working Group (WPWG) was established in 2015, including ADSC-IAFD and PDCA, in order to facilitate industry discussion on improving and standardizing design and construction practices to ensure safe working platforms for all tracked plant and equipment used to install deep foundations across the United States. This paper will discuss best practices with respect to design, installation, and maintenance of working platforms elsewhere in the world and how these practices might best be adapted to the piling industry in the USA. We hope that this is considered to be a major step towards implementing a safe approach to providing working platforms for tracked plant across the USA.