How Fall Protection Lanyards Safeguard Lives and Careers

What kinds of dangers do you face working at elevation? Could the way you use protective gear be making your career unnecessarily risky? Fall protection lanyards and arresting systems are crucial to your safety, so it's important to understand just how these devices function.

What Does Protective Equipment Do?

Fall protection equipment is designed to anchor the wearer to a stable object at height. Should a user fall due to fatigue, carelessness or environmental conditions, their belt, lanyard or harness may prevent them from impacting the ground and potentially sustaining serious injuries.

Fall Equipment for Every Situation

Fall protection lanyards incorporate numerous features that make them appropriate for diverse working conditions, so it's important to choose yours according to the parameters of the job at hand. The lanyard needs to be long enough to accommodate wearer mobility, for instance, but it can't be so long that it fails to prevent a fall impact or gets tangled around someone's legs.

Technical factors, such as the amount of force a lanyard of a specific length might impart when stopping a fall, also need to be considered. Connecting components, energy absorbers, interchangeable harnesses and other gear can all modify the way safety equipment works. For a fall protection lanyard to function properly, it must be used or customized in compliance with the manufacturer's instructions.

Keeping Safety Equipment Safe

Maintenance is an easily overlooked aspect of using fall protective equipment. Like any other workplace tool, lanyards, body belts and personal fall arrest systems need to be inspected for wear and tear on a regular basis.

When verifying the condition of a fall protection lanyard, it's advisable to examine the whole package; in addition to inspecting the webbing, rope and other soft parts, users should scrutinize the hardware for defects, damage or improper fit. While signs of wear like frayed webbing, torn rope and bent buckle edges are easily detectable, seemingly minor issues, such as loose stitching or bent grommets, deserve just as much attention.

How do your fall protection lanyards keep you and your workers safe? There's a good chance that if your safety equipment functions well, it's because you use and maintain it correctly. When cleaned, stored and inspected properly, fall arresting systems contribute to workplaces where injury incidents and unexpected stoppages are far less likely.