The fall protection program in many companies is woefully out of touch with the reality of materials and physics. Often, it consists of the user performing a perfunctory visual inspection and a “feel test” for defects such as frayed stitches. Yes, this step is important but it alone is insufficient. A harness that looks perfectly good might not be able to hold you if you fall.
It might seem to make sense to use a harness until it has only one use left in it. But there is no reliable way to tell if that one last use will be a safe catch — or if it will be one last use because the harness failed and you took a lethal fall to the ground.
Your control over harness safety depends on whether you keep it as your personal PPE or check it out of a tool crib as needed.
Personal PPE
If you’ve had the harness for 10 years or more, replace it. The fibers age with time, even if not subjected to the stress of a fall. And that is for a premium-grade harness that is rated for 10 years. Your particular harness may have been rated for a shorter period. Find your model and the manufacturer’s specification.
This 10-year (or less) limit also assumes ideal storage conditions. It does not assume the harness was sharply bent and jammed into a small but convenient space. It does not assume the harness generally lay in the bottom of a gangbox where things were tossed on top of it creating small stress marks in the fibers. The assumption is you kept it, unused, and was gently folded (or hung up) in a dry location, or that you wore it but never fell while doing so.
From that point, work backward to each fall. Depending upon what you weigh and how far you fell each time, the magnitude of each fall varies. If you fell 12 feet from the last point of protection, that fall caused severe stress to the harness. If you’ve had three or four of these, buy a new harness.
There’s not an exact formula, so err on the side of caution. A good harness isn’t cheap, but it’s not a bank breaker, either.
Tool crib
The harness should also have its manufacturing date right on it. If that date is missing, the harness might be well past its freshness date. Do not use.
Look for an ID tag on the harness. It might be a brass tag or an RFID tag placed there by the tool crib crew. It should have an asset number, serial number, or the like. If it’s not there, then there is no history on this harness. That means someone else may have taken a hard fall and left it with 90% of one last safe use. Your company isn’t properly guarding your safety in this case, because it isn’t tracking PPE usage history. Refuse to use that harness.
If there’s an ID tag and a manufacturing date, you’re not past the final hurdle. At this point, you need to ask about the history of the harness. The tool crib attendant should be able to quickly lookup that history and tell you or, alternatively, explain how the history is used to remove harnesses from service so they aren’t even in the crib for checking out.
If the harness check-out process fails at any of these points, don’t use the harness. You and your supervisor need to walk this issue through the proper chain of command. The liability risk to the company can be bad. The fatality risk to you, even worse.
