Wire Rope – The Role It Plays in Health & Safety in the Workplace

While many may not realize this, wire rope is something that will most likely play a part in our lives every single day. From helping with the production lines of the manufactured items that we use, to being used as internal structuring support in buildings, you’ll have come across wire rope more than you think.

This is because it’s such a highly adaptable and versatile piece of lifting equipment, providing users total safety and reliability. This also makes it one of the most useful and widely used pieces of equipment in the workplace too.

Health and safety is one of the most important things for a business in a workplace

Not only does it help workplaces to run smoothly and efficiently, but it also contributes heavily to health and safety in the workplace too. We explain just how this is done below.

What are the rules and laws for health and safety in the workplace?

While there are specific rules, regulations and laws relating to the health and safety in different workplaces, they generally fall under the umbrella of the large and widely known Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. This act ensures that all other acts that relate to different workplaces and equipment, which we have touched on below, are enforced by all relevant authorities, bodies and businesses.

This is a lengthy piece of legislation, including sections on general duties, the Health and Safety Commission, enforcement, the obtaining and disclosure of information, financial provisions, and many more categories, with 85 sub categories in total.

While we don’t expect you to read all of this in-depth, it’s important to be aware of just how wide ranging this legislation is, and depending on your workplace, you could be subject to hundreds of different rules and functions that you must follow. This is why there is differing legislation depending on the workplace and the industry you work in.

More specifically relating to lifting equipment, the category that wire rope falls into, is the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER). Again, this is a lengthy piece of legislation, but the parts that relate most specifically to wire rope are:

• That all lifting operations are carried out using equipment of adequate strength, stability and suitability
• Any lifting operations that involve lifting people, which wire rope regularly helps with, are done in such a manner so as to prevent any injury to these persons

An explanation of wire rope

Before we look at just why wire rope is so useful in contributing to health and safety in the workplace, it is useful to explain more on its composition and construction. Wire rope is made from several metals wires wrapped around each other to form strands, which are then woven around each other and a strong core to form the finished wire rope product.

This produces a piece of equipment that is incredibly strong, and shares the pressure and weight of loads across all of the various wires and strands, meaning that you aren’t only reliant on one section of the equipment as a whole.

How this helps with health and safety in the workplace

So how does all of this leave wire rope playing such a vital role when it comes to health and safety in the workplace?

Firstly, its structure means that it’s a piece of equipment that you can heavily rely upon. It’s been designed with quality, safety and reliability in mind. It has a long service life, a high lifting strength, and is heavily resistant to things such as the elements, which may wear other equipment down quicker.

Wire rope helps to protect workers

It is also great for taking the strain off of workers from any lifting or lowering tasks. Wire rope is able to handle an incredibly high weightage of loads, and can be utilized with remotely operated lifting gear. This means workers can stay well out of the way of any operations.

There’s also many occasions when workers themselves need to be lifted within a workplace, often to great heights. Wire rope is one of the go-to pieces of equipment for doing this, keeping workers safe whatever height they’re at.

Why this means that wire rope is used in so many industries around the world

Wire rope also has many other properties too, such as a good level of electric conductivity and a high resistance to things such as corrosion and rust. This means that wire rope is used in dozens of other applications and industries around the world, often for safety.

One such example is as wire rope isolators in military vehicles, helping to absorb the shock of things such as explosions. A military vehicle is technically a workplace, so this is just another way that wire rope helps with health and safety!

Regardless of where or how you work, there’s a very high chance that wire rope has contributed to your work in some way, making it one of the most useful pieces of equipment in the world.

Image credit: HypnoArt and cegoh