The Slippery Rock Gazette was the first trade publication I ever received after going into business for myself. As such, I eagerly anticipated its arrival and breathlessly thumbed through the pages perusing the latest in stone cutting technology advertisements. Occasionally I even skimmed some of the articles.
One Sunday before church, I did more than skim the articles, I actually read one. It ruined my morning. In fact, it ruined my whole day. I can remember sitting in a cold sweat during the service, unable to concentrate and a knot in the pit of my stomach.
The author's name escapes me (it's been at least ten years), but the jarring subject of his article still affects me to this day. To summarize his point: sporadically slapping "butterballs" (his term) of mortar to the back of a shower wall or wainscot was a commonly used, but dangerously insufficient technique for vertically installed granite slabs.
He brought vivid pictures of shower walls falling on unsuspecting customers to the forefront of my consciousness and I wondered if his indictment of "un-anchored" panels included fireplace surrounds.
That I had been "trained" by my former employer to install fireplace surrounds using just such a butterball technique was little consolation for the fact that only a month prior, I had installed a large 3cm surround and hearth for them as a subcontractor. I had never given so much as a second thought to whether my installation was sound or sufficient, much less safe.
The next morning, having worked myself into a near panic, I called the Slippery Rock, nonchalantly requested the contact information for the author of said article, and made the attempt to sound calm, cool, and collected when he unexpectedly answered his phone.
That decade-old conversation is only relevant to this article in so much as it sets the stage for another potentially uncomfortable conversation about another safety related subject. This subject though, is more urgent and more potentially life threatening to our employees and the general public.
The subject is slab loading and transport standards.
While 100 fabrication companies in a given city might collectively install 25 shower walls in a year, those same 100 fabricators will easily make over 5,000 (100 x 52 weeks) slab pick-ups from suppliers in the same time frame. Multiply that number by the number of cities with 100 more fabricators and the figures get big really quick. Being conservative, let's say there are 50 cities in the US with more than 100 fabricators making weekly trips to the slab supplier to pick up material.
That's 250,000 times a year, granite fabricators pull up to the dock with trailers and trucks, suppliers load slabs, and drivers secure the load to drive back to the shop! That's a shocking number and a lot of room for error.
How many of those trucks or trailers are rated for the weight they will inevitably carry? How many of those A-Frames are engineered and built to handle the strain that 6 slabs of 3cm will place on them racing around a curve at 50 mph? How many of those drivers have adequately secured their load with chains and straps?
Those questions should make us nervous as an industry and put a knot in our collective stomachs.
In the last month, the MIA's Cutting Edge Newsletter had a front page write up on slab handling safety because of the recent rash of slab handling deaths and more recently, in our neck of the woods, a man was seriously injured while loading slabs onto his truck.
The more I ponder this issue, two questions come to mind...how can universal slab transport standards be created and what is the best way for ensuring they are followed? This is a question I intend to research and report back to you on next month.
In the mean time, we should all do a gut check evaluation of our own slab transport equipment, training, and procedures and ask ourselves if we're putting our employees and other drivers in harms way.
Aaron J. Crowley is the founder and president of FabricatorsFriend.com, the exclusive promoter of Stone Sleeve fabricator sleeves and Bullet Proof aprons.
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