Scaffolds standing over Christmas: wind, storms and an empty site

Most scaffolds that stand over Christmas were never planned to. The programme slipped, the client wanted the elevation kept, or the strike was cheaper in January than it was in December. Whatever the reason, the structure is now standing through the stormiest fortnight of the British year with the gate locked and nobody walking past it.

That is a genuinely different situation from a scaffold on a live site, and it is worth planning for rather than discovering. The two things that change are the weather and the absence of people — and of the two, the absence of people is the one that costs more.

Wind is the load nobody sees

A scaffold is designed against a set of assumptions about what the wind will do to it, and the single biggest variable in that is what it is wearing. Sheeting and debris netting turn an open frame into something closer to a sail, which is why the decision to sheet is a design question rather than a site one — covered properly in sheeting, netting and wind.

The seasonal version of that problem is torn sheeting. A panel that has come loose at one corner flogs in the wind, loads the ties it is fixed back through, and takes the rest of the sheet with it over a few days. Nobody is there to see the first corner go.

The honest options are to strike the sheeting before the break, to secure it properly and plan to check it, or to accept that it will need attention on the first day back. What does not work is leaving it and hoping, which is the option that gets chosen by default when nobody makes a decision.

The inspection clock does not stop for the holidays

A scaffold in use needs inspecting before first use, after anything that could affect its stability, and at the intervals the Work at Height Regulations set — a point we cover in seven-day inspections. A shutdown does not suspend any of that. It changes who is available to do it.

Two things follow. First, if the structure is genuinely out of use and nobody can access it, say so and secure it — a scaffold with its access ladder removed or boxed off is a different proposition from one standing open behind a locked gate. Second, if anybody might use it, somebody competent has to be available to inspect it, and that person needs to be named before the break rather than found during it.

The event-triggered inspection is the one that catches people out. A named storm passes through on a Sunday; the structure is used on the Monday on the strength of a report dated before Christmas. Adverse weather is explicitly one of the things that triggers a fresh inspection, and after bad weather goes through what that walk should actually cover.

Before you lock the gate

A pre-shutdown walk is worth more than any amount of planning, because it is the last chance anybody has to look at the structure for a fortnight. The scaffold inspection report is the right vehicle for it, and the things worth particular attention are the ones weather acts on:

• –Sheeting and netting — secure, undamaged, or removed entirely rather than left partly attached
• –Ties — all present, none dropped for a trade that has now finished, and nothing removed to get a window or door through
• –Foundations — sole boards still bearing, and nothing that has softened with weeks of rain or will move with a freeze and thaw
• –Loose material on lifts — anything that can be picked up by wind should not be on the structure over a break
• –Brick guards and toe boards — the containment for everything above the ground
• –Access — either properly available with the tag current, or genuinely prevented rather than discouraged

Update the tag and the register to reflect whatever the structure's status actually is over the break. A tag showing an inspection from three weeks ago on a structure somebody has decided is out of use is the kind of ambiguity that gets resolved badly at eight on a dark morning.

And before anybody climbs it in January

The first day back is the moment the structure is most likely to be used without being looked at. Everybody is busy, the programme has lost a fortnight, and the scaffold looks exactly as it did in December. Build the inspection into the restart rather than hoping somebody remembers: the gang that arrives first should not be the gang that decides whether it is safe.

If anything did move — a tie, a board, a sheet — the structure has been altered by the weather rather than by a person, and it is treated the same way as any other adaptation: inspected before further use, with the tag and the register brought back into step.