Making Your Work Site Reversing-Ready With These Strategies

Moving vehicles and heavy equipment on the move can be risky. If not properly managed and properly coordinated, this tricky situation can cause work disruptions, injuries or worse, costly hospitalization for drivers and workers involved. For this reason, project managers and the Human Resource Management team should come up with a good traffic management plan and other practices to keep everyone safe in the presence of moving vehicles and heavy equipment.

Design a traffic control plan

The most basic change that can be made on the work site is the design of a traffic control plan. This should coordinate the flow of vehicles and the work areas of employees to avoid or at least minimize their contact and proximity. To inform and guide drivers, the management can use barricades, cones and reflective devices. Signs should also be present at different points of the project site to inform and remind drivers and the workers.

Use the help of signallers/spotters

Another best practice that can be done is to assign signallers or spotters that will help direct the flow of traffic in the project site. Signallers should be trained first on the program before they are allowed to perform their tasks. For example, they should be aware of the hand signals and their meanings, and these should be imparted to workers and other employees as well. Also, it’s important that the drivers or operators and signallers should coordinate perfectly with one another. Signallers should have visual contact with the vehicle drivers when reversing.

Invest in safety equipment/reversing aids

Installing reversing cameras and other reversing aids can help drivers. Reversing camera systems can work with reversing alarms and mirrors to provide the drivers with improved visibility on the road and the project site. However, drivers and operators should not solely rely on these reversing aids when operating the vehicles. It’s still best to manually check the surroundings, be in contact with signallers and exercise responsible reversing. In short, there should always be a complete education and training of all personnel involved when promoting safety in the workplace.