Pedestrian guardrails play a vital role in ensuring safety in a range of on and off-highway settings including warehouses, construction sites, and car parks where the risks are just as significant as on pavements, roads and highways.
Maintaining these structures is essential to channel pedestrians away from potential hazards in such environments.
Armco Direct offers advice for the challenges of off-highway guardrail maintenance. This blog post explores our recommendations for reliable and long-lasting guardrails that offer pedestrian safety.
Maintenance of Pedestrian Guardrails
If you follow these key points, you can be sure that your guardrails will last decades.
- Regular Inspections: Establish a routine schedule to examine guardrails for signs of wear, corrosion, and structural damage. Ensure all connections are secure.
- Immediate Repairs: Promptly address any loose or damaged parts by tightening or replacing them to maintain structural integrity.
- Routine Cleaning: Regularly clean guardrails to remove debris, dirt, and residues that can accelerate rusting.
- Compliance with Standards: Use materials and components for repairs and replacements that adhere to current British Standards safety regulations BS7818, ensuring compliance and reliability.
Why Maintenance is Important
Remember: if guardrails are damaged, they won’t do their job. Ask yourself the following questions before deciding that your guardrails will keep your environment safe.
Do you want your guardrails to become unintentionally dangerous when they fail to do what they were installed for?
Would you like the potentially huge legal costs of failing to keep your employees and pedestrians safe?
Are you willing to show the public that you neglect health and safety measures by allowing your guardrails to deteriorate?
Pedestrian guardrails play a key role in a variety of contexts, each with potential dangers. Make sure that you take the safety of pedestrians and the people they protect seriously.
Replacing Pedestrian Guardrails
When considering replacing or upgrading pedestrian guardrails, it’s vital to identify and account for signs of wear and tear that compromise safety, such as significant rusting, deformation, or loose fixings, all of which will limit the pedestrian guardrail performance.
The decision to replace pedestrian guardrailing should adhere to the correct set by safety regulations, ensuring the new installation can withstand environmental stresses and impacts. For replacements, consider PG1 and PG2 pedestrian guardrails, which are renowned for their robust construction and compliance with safety standards.
The Last Word
Regular inspections, timely installation and maintenance, and the strategic replacement of worn-out guardrails are critical steps to safeguard pedestrians.
For those managing vehicles in any on or off-highway environments, consulting with us at Armco Direct can provide peace of mind through bespoke protection solutions
Armco Direct offers durable and reliable pedestrian guardrails.
Don’t leave safety to chance.
Contact us for a free quote and delivery in 48 hours.
FAQs
We’ve done our best to answer some frequently asked questions about how to maintain pedestrian guardrails.
How often should guardrails be inspected?
For pedestrian guardrails located in on or off-highway environments such as pavements, road crossings, industrial sites, car parks, warehouses, distribution centres, sports facilities, construction sites, and in and around buildings, where exposure to frequent mechanical impacts and heavy site usage is common, inspections should happen often.
These guardrails should be inspected at least bi-annually to ensure their functionality. Industrial and construction environments, in particular, may require quarterly inspections due to the higher likelihood of damage from machinery and ongoing operations.
Each inspection should assess the pedestrian guardrails for signs of wear, corrosion, and any structural damage. Establishing and adhering to a strict inspection schedule is paramount in these settings to promptly address repairs or replacements.
What are guardrails installed to prevent?
Guardrails are installed primarily to enhance safety by preventing accidents where pedestrians are at risk of entering dangerous areas. In warehouses, construction sites, and other on or off-highway settings, these structures are crucial for both visibility and delineating safe pathways for pedestrian crossing away from machinery, open worksites, and vehicular traffic.
They serve as physical barriers to prevent falls from heights, such as from elevated platforms, and to shield pedestrians from potential impacts with moving equipment and vehicles. By clearly marking a safe crossing point and restricting access to dangerous areas, guardrails play a vital role in preventing injuries and accidents and ensuring a safer environment for workers and visitors alike.