Two tips for those who plan to hire earthmoving equipment for their construction project
If you will be carrying out construction work soon and are planning to rent a few pieces of equipment from an earthmoving equipment hire business for your project, you might find the advice below to be quite helpful.
Draw up a pre-operation to-do list
The earthmoving equipment that the rental company provides will be in good working order when it arrives at your building site. However, every time that it is used, there is a risk that the equipment may sustain damage, which, if it goes unnoticed, could put your workers at risk of being injured the next time it is used.
For example, if during an earthmoving operation, the operator of the excavator repeatedly overloads the bucket with too much soil, there is a chance that the screws and other attachments that connect the bucket to the arm may loosen.
If this excavator is not inspected before the next earthmoving operation, the bucket may detach from the arm whilst it is in an elevated position and is holding a large load of soil. If there are people standing below the bucket when this happens, they could be struck by the soil or crushed by the bucket and left with serious injuries as a result of the impact.
As such, it is crucial to draw up a pre-operation to-do list, which stipulates the checks need to be carried out before the equipment can be used.
Some examples of tasks that should be put on this list include checking that all of the equipment's accessible screws and bolts are tightened and are free from corrosion, and making sure that the equipment's hydraulic fluids are neither leaking nor degraded (as these fluids play an important role in ensuring that the arms and buckets of excavators and skid steer loaders remain stable whilst they are in their elevated positions).
Do not permit operators to use the earthmoving equipment for anything other than earthmoving-related tasks
In an effort to get the construction work carried out quickly and efficiently, the people you ask to operate your rented earthmoving equipment may decide to use this machinery for other tasks that are unrelated to earthmoving, instead of finding the appropriate equipment and using that for these jobs.
It is vital to discourage your earthmoving equipment operators from doing this, as it is likely to have disastrous consequences.
For example, perhaps a pile of heavy construction materials needs to be moved out of the way, and one of your workers decides to use a bulldozer to move these goods to another area of the site instead of finding and using a forklift for this task. In this situation, these materials could be badly damaged, as the bulldozer won't actually lift the materials but will instead push them.
The pressure this pushing motion will subject the materials to could cause them to break (particularly if they are made from a relatively fragile material, like plywood). You would then have to incur the cost of replacing these items and would have to wait for the new materials to arrive before you could carry on with the construction work.
Furthermore, if, as a result of your worker's poor judgement in this situation, the rented bulldozer sustains damage, you may have to pay to have the earthmoving hire company send a replacement or for them to repair the damaged parts.
