Rescue plan
Also called Emergency and rescue plan, Rescue procedure
A rescue plan is the arrangement for getting a person down after a fall has been arrested — who performs the rescue, with what equipment, from where, and how long it takes — settled before the work starts rather than improvised once someone is in the net. Under the Work at Height Regulations 2005 rescue is not a contingency appended to a method statement: planning for emergencies and rescue is part of the duty to plan the work at all.
The UK position
Four separate places in the Work at Height Regulations 2005 point at rescue, and read together they leave very little room to treat it as optional. Regulation 4 requires work at height to be properly planned and states that the reference to planning of work includes planning for emergencies and rescue. Regulation 7 requires an employer selecting work equipment for work at height to take account of the need for easy and timely evacuation and rescue in an emergency, and of any additional risk posed by evacuation and rescue from that equipment — so the rescue method is an input to choosing the fall protection, not a consequence of having chosen it. Schedule 4 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 permits a collective safeguard to be used only where a sufficient number of available persons have received adequate training specific to the safeguard, including rescue procedures, and requires its anchors to be strong and stable enough for the foreseeable loading in arresting any fall and during any subsequent rescue. Schedule 5 of the Work at Height Regulations 2005 places the equivalent training requirement on personal fall protection systems. The plan is the employer’s, and it has to exist before anyone goes up.
Cited by number and title:
- The Work at Height Regulations 2005, regulation 4 — Organisation and planning
- The Work at Height Regulations 2005, Schedules 4 and 5 — training specific to the safeguard or system, including rescue procedures
Where it matters on site
The test of a rescue plan is whether it names a method and a time, and most do not. "Call the emergency services" is not a plan for a person lying in a net two floors up, because it hands the timing to somebody else. "Use a MEWP" is a plan only if a MEWP can physically reach the underside of the net at that position, on that day, with the frame at that stage — and that constraint is precisely what our own system was built for, after a customer found that floor heights and obstructions ruled the MEWP out. Our Safety Net Recovery System is a stated method with a stated time against it: a modular kit weighing 25 kg, stored on the floor below the netted area, battery-powered, inflating in around one minute for the standard system and around one and a half minutes for the larger one, recovering a stranded operative weighing up to 150 kg in under three minutes, from a floor-to-floor height of around 3.0 m for the standard system and around 4.5 m for the larger one. A method statement for it is published for you to put straight into your RAMS, and we train your crew on the system free of charge — which is the point at which a rescue plan stops being a paragraph and becomes something a person has actually done once.