Dropped spanner from a bridge hits a passing van
You are the Level 3 supervisor on a 36 m concrete bridge inspection over a two-lane road. The road is reduced to one lane with a 3.5 m coned exclusion under the work area. At 10:40 a 0.9 kg podger spanner slips from a Level 2 technician's open tool bag while he traverses under the deck. It falls 22 m, misses the coned lane, hits the roof of a passing van, dents the roof and cracks the windscreen. The driver stops, shaken but uninjured. The tool was not tethered. The site is 400 m from a hospital. Your client's HSE officer arrives and says 'no harm, no report, just replace the windscreen.' The technician's IRATA card is valid. The permit is still open and the team is due to continue after lunch.
1. What are your immediate actions and notifications in the first hour?
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Stop all work and suspend the permit. Make the area safe: stop traffic if needed, keep the van and driver in a safe position, and prevent anyone walking under the bridge. Check the driver: ask if they are injured, call emergency services if there is any doubt, and do not move the vehicle unless it is unsafe. Treat it as an incident scene: photograph the van, the tool, the drop path and the exclusion zone; bag and tag the spanner; record names and contact details of witnesses; note times, weather, wind and what the technician was doing. Account for all personnel and check other tools and bags for untethered items.
Notify your member company duty manager and the client's site manager immediately; notify the police/road authority if required by local procedure, and the statutory regulator if the incident meets the reporting threshold. Do not agree with the HSE officer's 'no report' instruction. The fact that no one was hurt is luck, not a reason to suppress a report. A damaged vehicle and a dropped tool from height are a reportable near miss/dangerous occurrence under many regimes and always an internal incident.
2. What root causes and lessons should the investigation capture?
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Immediate cause: the spanner was loose in an open bag and not tethered. Underlying causes: no dropped-object plan for the bridge; the exclusion zone was sized for the lane rather than the actual fall path and bounce; tools were not subject to secondary retention; the Level 2 was allowed to traverse with an open bag; there was no pre-task check of tool bags; supervision did not catch the practice. Contributing factors include schedule pressure, traffic management and a belief that small tools do not matter.
Lessons: every tool and rigging item above people must be tethered or in a closed container; use tool lanyards rated for the load and attached to a strong point, not the harness ring unless designed for it; use a tool transfer line; set the exclusion zone from a dropped-object assessment considering height, weight, wind and deflection; consider a catch net or closed deck; add a dropped-object check to the toolbox talk and permit; empower anyone to stop work. The investigation should also check whether the same practice exists on other teams.
3. What records and reports do you complete, and how do you communicate them?
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Complete your member company's incident report and the client's incident form with facts, photographs, statements and the permit/toolbox records. Record the immediate actions, tool identification, drop height, exclusion-zone dimensions and the driver's details. If the incident is reportable under the local statutory regime, for example as a dangerous occurrence, the responsible person must submit it within the required timeframe; do not wait for the client's HSE officer to decide. Follow IRATA member company reporting requirements and submit to IRATA if the scheme requires it. Notify your insurer if there is a third-party claim.
Issue a safety alert and lessons-learned briefing to the team and, if appropriate, to the client and other crews. Verify corrective actions by audit, not just a memo.