Keeping Scaffolds Safe

I’ve been lucky. After 20 years of stretching from ladders, climbing on roofs, and bouncing across over-extended staging planks, I’ve never fallen. Like most conscientious builders, I always put safety first — well almost always. Looking back, I could have easily avoided the few staging failures that occurred on my projects. They were all caused either by using the wrong material correctly or by using the right material incorrectly. So it’s no surprise to me that experts blame improper material selection and misuse for most scaffold failures. Planks Wooden planks seem to lie at the heart of most residential scaffold failures. Some experts claim plank failures are the cause of injury in 90% of the cases they investigate. Knots and cross-grain play a