Jim Poage has a new podcast called The Billboard Safety Guy.  On December 3 he talked about OSHA’s top ten citation list.  Here are some items which made the list together with Jim’s comments.

Machine guarding.

And a lot of people in outdoor and billboards say, well, we don’t really need to worry about machine guarding. There’s not a lot that we do that requires that. I beg to differ because many times I walk into a shop and see a pedestal grinder sitting there with an open, exposed wheel.  And according to OSHA standards, 75% of that wheel is supposed to be covered and the work rest is supposed to be within an eighth of an inch of the spinning wheel so that tools can’t get lodged in between it and cause the wheel to explode.

Fall Protection Training 

And the number one, which made up 1,216 of those violations, the employer shall provide a training program for each employee who might be exposed to fall hazards. They didn’t have a program. They knew their people were having to work at heights, but they did nothing to try and prepare a program.  Enough said on that…

Failure to secure a ladder

1,632 violations were for failure to have ladder secured, extended three feet above the landing surface, or secured in a way that it couldn’t shift with another method of supporting yourself as you come up like an extension on the side rail…this is a situation where a Formetco ladder stabilizer mounted properly would have kept someone from getting a violation here in this point. But over half of these were issues that were not trained to the employees because many times they say, well, I didn’t know, the employer never told me.  And that is when the citation comes.

The Number 1 Violation – No Fall Protection

And number one, for the at least 15th year…is fall protection, general requirements…The total violations were 5,914 of those.  4,446 violations, were for failure to protect by guardrail, safety net, or personal fall arrest systems. And that’s horrible. There was essentially people working with no fall protection for almost two thirds of the citations that were issued.  You can go down and the rest are like change compared to those, pocket change, so to speak. Each person, or each employee on a walking, working service, horizontal and vertical with unprotected sides from falling. There were 563 violations.  I mean, you drop radically. That is the big ticket item. Failure to provide proper fall protection to employees when working at heights.

You can reach Jim Poage at thebillboardsafetyguy@gmail.com. To learn more about staying safe, sign up for Formetco’s 2026 Safety Training event which takes place February 9-12, 2026 at the LGH Innovation Center in Duluth Georgia.

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