The Redesign of a Container Lifting Operation to Improve User Safety and Reduce the Risk of Organisational Costs Incurred by Employee Injury

Abstract Steel erection is a dangerous charge for construction workers and is fraught with risk to life. Many associated hazards, such as working at height and moving object strikes, are highly represented in annual fatality statistics for the United Kingdom. Organisations operating in extremely remote locations, such as the British Antarctic Survey, incur greater risk by conducting steel erection activities in inclement conditions. Moreover, being distanced from sufficient medical facilities further exacerbates the hazards, potentially leading to costly litigation, capability loss and damage to international prestige if an incident was to occur. The construction task under evaluation for redesign is the erection of a temporary steel A-frame used to support the lifting of intermodal shipping containers into a building. For every container move, the steel frame must be built, used to conduct a lift, deconstructed, and subsequently relocated and re-erected to receive the next container. This project contends that replacing the transient A-frame with a permanent structure and automating elements of the procedure to remove the human element from the task is a reasonably practicable and prudent design choice to explore, protecting individuals and reducing the risk of organisational costs due to incidents. After simulation modelling, the proposed structure meets the parameters of the task by being able to lift the required loads capably. An undergraduate dissertation in partial fulfilment of the requirements of The Open University for the Degree of Bachelor of Engineering (Honours).