A10.48 may not mean much to a lay person, but for the telecommunications industry, it’s a very important new standard set by the A10 committee. The Criteria for Safety Practices with the Construction, Demolition, Modification and Maintenance of Communications Structures is a standard that is a subset of the TIA 1019A standard, which came out of OSHA’s partnership with the National Association of Tower Erectors.
According to OSHA, the original standard covered engineering and use, which was “unwieldy,” so the committee split it, with use in the A10.48 standard and engineering into TIA322. Both will be effective January 1, 2017.
Gordon Lyman, CEO of eSystem Training Solutions, chairs the A10 subcommittee, and told Occupational Health and Safety that the effective date was “fast-tracked” and since 1019 was already in existence, the “industry can cope with a faster-than-usual implementation date.” He is happy with the split of an engineering and a use standard. He added: “Probably 98 percent of the standards out there are design standards, they’re how you manufacture something. It’s only in the last few years that use standards are actually starting to evolve.” The new standard fills about 110 pages, according to Lyman, and deals with something the industry needed work on—training—especially after two incidents in 2014.
“What has happened is, with such a small industry, big training companies didn’t develop what I call canned training programs because there’s not enough people to buy and not enough money in it to produce them. So there was never any official or standardized training program developed for the telecom industry, and so the industry relied completely on on-the-job training. And if you got with some good crews who knew what they were doing, you learned well, but most of the people really didn’t know what they were doing and the training was really very poor. And we are still struggling with that, as a matter of fact,” he told OSHA.
More education is to come on the heels of A10.48 and TIA322, with the National Wireless Safety Alliance developing Telecommunications Tower Technician I and II certification and competency testing using A10.48 material. The Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprenticeship Program partnership funded by DOL will also rely on the new standard, OSHA reported.
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