ITA Working Group Five suspends future activities
27 May 2014The ITA Working Group on Health and Safety in Works (WG5) has been forced to temporarily suspend future activities due to poor attendance. Speaking at the ITA General Assembly in Brazil last month, group animateur Donald Lamont also warned that the level of scrutiny afforded the current documents up for review was not as great as he had hoped, and could result into a delay of up to a year for the work programme.
Current work programmes will be completed. "WG5 is working on a revision of the joint ITA/BTS CAWG guidelines on high pressure compressed air work for which the target date for publication is WTC 2015," said Lamont. "We are also working on a guideline for safety requirements of underground vehicles in conjunction with ITATech. Publication is planned for WTC 2016.
"The suspension of future new activity is only temporary as we had not enough of the core membership in Brazil to allocate tasks other than those already allocated. Animateurs and vice animateurs do most of the work."
Lamont told Tunnels that he thought the poor attendance was "a matter of location/distance [of WTC 2014], and employers being unwilling to fund the trip". He added, "With hindsight I think Iguassu was possibly a more favourable location than Sao Paulo despite the additional travelling involved."
The WG5 report was also critical of the absences of health and safety content in both the pre WTC training course and in general ITACET courses. Lamont noted that the General Assembly had previously agreed that every ITA training course immediately prior to WTC would include a session on health and safety. This has not happened since WTC Vancouver.
