Safety
How we keep people alive on site.
Steel erection and roofing kill people in this country every month, and almost always the same way: a fall. This page is not a certificate. It is what we actually do, written so that a client's safety officer can audit it and find a real answer rather than a slogan.
If a contractor cannot describe their controls in this much detail, that silence is the answer to the question you were asking.
01
Falls from height
This is the one. Almost every fatal accident in this trade is a man off a roof, a purlin line or a scaffold. It is also the hazard our own photographs showed most often before we withdrew them.
- Nobody works above 1.8 m without a full-body harness on a double lanyard, anchored to a designated point — not to a purlin, not to a sheet.
- Roof edges get guardrails or a perimeter line before sheeting starts, not after. Where neither is possible, the work is done from a boom lift or a scaffold, not from the roof.
- Openings and voids are covered and marked the shift they are created. Insulation and sheeting crews work off crawl boards or staging, never off the bare sheet run.
- Harnesses are inspected and logged before issue and at each shift. A harness that has arrested a fall is destroyed, not reissued.
02
Lifting operations
Portal frames are heavy, long and unforgiving. A dropped rafter kills the rigger and anyone under it, and it does not need much height to do it.
- Every lift of a frame, truss or bundle has a lift plan: load weight, radius, rigging arrangement, and the exclusion zone drawn on the ground.
- Tag lines on every long member. Nobody stands under a suspended load, and nobody uses their hands to steady a load being landed.
- Riggers and the crane operator are certificated, and the lift is stopped if the wind takes the load or the ground bears down under an outrigger.
- Ground bearing is checked before the crane is set up. On made ground we use spreader mats.
03
Hot work and fire
Welding and cutting at height throws slag further than people expect, and a roofing void is a chimney. Fires that start during sheeting are usually found after the crew has left.
- Hot work runs on a permit, with a fire watch posted, screens around the work, and an extinguisher at the point of work.
- The fire watch stays for thirty minutes after the last weld. This is the rule that gets skipped and the one that matters.
- Gas cylinders are stored upright, separated, and never left on a roof deck or under a bundle.
- Combustibles — insulation, packaging, PUF offcuts — are cleared from the level below before hot work starts.
04
Plant, machinery and the site around it
Most of our work happens inside a running factory or on a yard that is still operating. The plant does not stop because we arrived.
- Telehandlers and booms move on a defined route with a banksman. Reversing without one does not happen.
- Pedestrian and vehicle routes are separated. Excavations are barricaded and lit.
- Guards stay on grinding and cutting equipment, and the correct disc is fitted for the material and the speed.
- Temporary electrical supplies run through an ELCB. Leads are routed overhead or protected, never across a walkway in a puddle.
On every site, not just the big ones
A two-day re-roof gets the same discipline as a five-month warehouse. The accidents happen on the small jobs, because that is where the paperwork gets skipped.
- A site induction before anyone touches the job, in the language the crew actually speaks, signed for.
- A method statement and risk assessment for the activity of the day, briefed at a toolbox talk at the start of the shift.
- Helmet, safety footwear, hi-vis and eye protection as the floor. Task-specific PPE on top: harness, welding shield, gloves, ear defence.
- A permit to work where the site is live — an operating plant, a hot-work area, a confined space, an isolation.
- Housekeeping at the end of every shift. A yard full of offcuts and trailing leads is how people turn an ankle off a scaffold.
- Every incident and near miss reported and reviewed. A near miss that goes unrecorded is a rehearsal.
Working inside a plant that is still running
Much of our work is inside an operating factory, where the client's production does not stop and their permit system governs the site. We work to their rules, not ours, and we plan the job around their shutdown windows rather than asking production to fit around us.
That means isolations agreed with their electrical department, hot-work permits countersigned by their safety officer, and an interface meeting before the crew mobilises — not a phone call on the morning.
The rule we apply to our own photographs
We withdrew nine photographs from this site. Each one showed work that was unsafe to look at: men on a roof edge with no harness, a barefoot fitter on an unguarded tower scaffold, a fabrication yard where not one worker had a helmet or safety boots.
We took them down because publishing them would have been dishonest in both directions. It would have told you that this is how we run a site, and it would have told our own crews that it does not matter. A contractor that shows you a crew without fall protection is telling you what will happen on your job.
See the work we do publishWhat we will put in front of you
Before you place an order, ask any contractor for these. Ask us for them too. If the documents do not exist, the system does not exist.
- Method statement and risk assessment for the activities in your scope
- Lift plan for any crane work, with the rigging arrangement drawn
- Harness and lifting-gear inspection records
- PPE issue register and induction register for the crew on your site
- Insurance certificate and statutory registrations
- Incident and near-miss record for the last twelve months
Ask for them at contact@aken.firm.in or call +91 82800 76864. We would rather be measured on this than on a brochure.
Next step
Planning a job inside a live plant?
Send the location, the plot size and what the facility needs to handle. You will get a site visit within 72 hours and a costed scope after the drawing review — no obligation, no sales sequence.
Mon–Sat · 9:00 – 19:00 IST · Site visit scheduled within 72 hours of enquiry