Hazard assessment and OSHA's rules

A week after the Hillcrest job, Sam asked Dani a question that many new workers ask. 'Is the pre-task plan actually the law, or is it just a company rule?' Dani did not answer straight away. She called Leila Haddad, Coldwater Field Services Inc.'s health and safety advisor, who was in the yard that morning. 'Good question,' Leila said. 'The short answer is that the law requires hazards to be assessed and controlled, and the pre-task plan is one of the main ways we meet that requirement on site. The long answer takes about twenty minutes.'

This lesson is the long answer. You do not need to become a lawyer to do a good pre-task plan, but knowing where the duty comes from helps you understand why the form asks what it asks, why supervisors check it, and why a sloppy one can matter a great deal if something goes wrong.

Where the duty comes from under OSHA

In Oklahoma, private employers are covered by federal OSHA. Oklahoma has a state plan only for public employees, run by the state Department of Labor, so Coldwater's crews follow the federal rules. Three layers matter. The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 sets out the general duties. OSHA's standards contain the detailed technical requirements, mainly 29 CFR 1910 for general industry and 29 CFR 1926 for construction. OSHA compliance officers inspect work sites, investigate serious incidents and issue citations.

Unlike some countries, the United States does not have one general OSHA standard that says 'every crew must fill in a pre-task plan.' Instead, the duty to find and control hazards comes from several places:

• The general duty clause. Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act requires each employer to furnish a workplace free from recognized hazards that are causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm. An employer cannot control a hazard it has not looked for, so finding hazards is part of meeting this duty.
• Training to recognize hazards. The construction standard at 29 CFR 1926.21(b)(2) requires employers to instruct each employee in the recognition and avoidance of unsafe conditions and the regulations that apply to their work.
• Inspections by competent persons. Under 29 CFR 1926.20(b)(2), construction safety programs must provide for frequent and regular inspections of job sites, materials and equipment by competent persons.
• Specific assessments. Many standards require a specific assessment: a written certification of the PPE hazard assessment under 1910.132(d), daily inspections of excavations by a competent person under 1926.651(k), energy control procedures under 1910.147, and permit evaluations for confined spaces under 1910.146 and Subpart AA of Part 1926.
• OSHA's recommended practices. OSHA's Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs, published in 2016, list hazard identification and assessment as a core element and recommend involving workers in it. They are guidance, not a standard, but OSHA and many clients treat them as the benchmark.

A pre-task plan is how Coldwater, like many contractors, meets all of these duties at the crew level. The JHA prepared for each type of job covers the routine hazards. The pre-task plan covers the parts that only the crew on site can do: checking the specific location on the day, re-checking when the work changes, involving the workers who will do the job, and making sure each of them knows the hazards and controls. Many clients, especially utilities and pipeline operators, write the pre-task plan into their contracts as a firm requirement.

Who carries which duty

The law gives different people different duties. On a field crew, it is worth being clear about who is responsible for what, because the pre-task plan form brings all of them together on one page.

• Employers must provide a workplace free of recognized serious hazards and comply with OSHA standards. That includes finding hazards, training workers, providing competent supervisors and providing the equipment needed to control the hazards. An employer cannot hand this duty to the workers by asking them to sign a form.
• Supervisors and foremen act for the employer. Under OSHA's approach, what a supervisor knows, the employer is treated as knowing. A foreman who sees a hazard on the pre-task plan and does nothing about it creates exposure for the company as well as risk for the crew.
• Workers must comply with the standards and rules that apply to their own actions, under section 5(b) of the Act. OSHA does not cite workers, but employers can and do discipline workers who ignore safety rules, and a worker's knowledge of the site is essential to a good pre-task plan.
• Controlling contractors on multi-employer sites can be cited under OSHA's multi-employer citation policy for hazards they could reasonably have prevented or detected, along with the creating, exposing and correcting employers. That is why many general contractors and owners require subcontractors to use or share their pre-task plans.
• Owners and clients are expected to share information about hazards they know of, such as buried lines, process conditions and isolations, and often write that duty into contracts.

Competent persons

OSHA's construction standards define a competent person, at 29 CFR 1926.32(f), as one who is capable of identifying existing and predictable hazards in the surroundings or working conditions which are unsanitary, hazardous or dangerous to employees, and who has authorization to take prompt corrective measures to eliminate them. Excavation, scaffolding, fall protection and several other standards require a competent person. On a pre-task plan, the crew should write down who the competent person is for each of those tasks.

Dani is the competent person for excavation on most of her jobs, and Rick is the competent person for the hydrovac truck. Grace is qualified for the welding and the fire watch. Sam is not yet competent for any of those, so the form names who will supervise him on each step.

Citations, enforcement and why the paperwork matters

When OSHA investigates a serious incident, compliance officers look at what the employer knew, what it did, and whether the hazard was recognized and could feasibly have been controlled. Pre-task plans are among the first records they ask for. A specific, signed plan that names the hazard and the controls shows that the company recognized the hazard and acted. A copied, generic form can suggest that the hazard was never really assessed, or worse, that it was recognized and ignored.

Serious cases can go further. Under the OSH Act, a willful violation that causes the death of an employee can be prosecuted as a criminal offense, and prosecutors have also used general criminal laws after workplace deaths. Supervisors and company officers have faced charges. That is not a reason to be afraid of being a foreman. It is a reason to take the pre-task plan seriously.

Leila put it to Sam this way. 'If something happens on your job and someone asks what you did to prevent it, you want to be able to hand them a form that shows you looked at the real hazards and did something real about them. But the form only counts if it describes what you actually did. Writing down a control you did not use is worse than writing nothing.'

Prequalification and client requirements

Most utility, pipeline and industrial clients require contractors to pass a safety prequalification before they can bid. Prequalification services collect each contractor's injury rates, written programs and training records, and clients often ask for samples of completed pre-task plans. Gas utilities and pipeline operators also follow federal pipeline safety rules, including operator qualification requirements for people who perform certain tasks on regulated pipelines, so the pre-task plan for those jobs often records each worker's qualification. Some contractors also take part in OSHA's cooperative programs, such as the Voluntary Protection Programs, where hazard analysis is a core element.

Clients also set their own rules. Southplains Gas, the gas utility that hires Coldwater for most of its work, requires a written pre-task plan for every job, signed by every person on site, kept on site during the work and kept by the contractor for at least a year. It also requires the pre-task plan to reference the utility's own permit numbers for any hot work or confined space entry. Dani keeps a copy of those requirements taped inside the truck.

Your rights while doing a pre-task plan

The pre-task plan also connects to workers' rights. Under the OSH Act, workers have the right to information about hazards, the right to raise safety concerns and file complaints, and protection from retaliation under section 11(c). OSHA also recognizes a narrow right to refuse work that poses an imminent danger of death or serious injury, when the worker has asked the employer to fix it, there is no time to get an inspection, and a reasonable person would see the danger. If the pre-task plan turns up a hazard that cannot be controlled, the right step is to stop and tell the foreman. Lesson 9 looks at stop-work authority and refusing work in more detail.

What the law means for your form

Leila finished by turning the legal duties into a short checklist that any crew can use when they review their own form before signing it. Each item on the list comes straight from a duty described above:

• Is it dated, with the time and the exact location? The law expects a dated, written assessment, and the client wants to know which site it covers.
• Does it describe today's job and today's conditions? A form that could have been written for any job on any day does not show that this job was assessed.
• Does every hazard have a control that someone will actually use? Controls must be real, specific and in the right order, starting with elimination where it is practicable.
• Is the competent person named for each task that needs one? Excavation, confined space testing, hot work and similar tasks need a named person.
• Did every worker take part and sign? Signatures should come after the discussion, not before it, and late arrivals must be briefed.
• Does it show re-assessment? When the job changed during the day, the form should show what changed, when, and what the crew did about it.
• Is it kept as required? The form stays on site during the work and is filed afterwards so the company, the client and any auditor can see it.

Sam copied the list into the back of his notebook. Dani told him that if he could answer yes to all seven questions, the form would stand up to almost any audit, and more importantly, it would probably mean the crew had done the thinking that keeps people safe.

In practice, most crews never get close to a formal refusal. A good pre-task plan finds the problem early, the crew and the supervisor fix it, and the job goes ahead. That is the point. The law sets the floor; the pre-task plan is how the crew gets well above it.