Safety advice for performing an excavation for your house building project
When building a new home, the first thing you need to do is to excavate the ground where you want to establish your foundation. Excavation and earthmoving projects can be challenging, and it's of utmost importance that you know what you're doing if you don't wish to hire excavation and earthmoving services to do the job for you. The most important thing when performing your own excavation and earthmoving project is, however, that you make sure that you and everyone around you stay safe while the project is ongoing. In order to do so, there are a few things you should think about.
Marking the site
The first thing you need to do when performing excavation work to prepare the land for your house building project is to mark the area carefully to make sure you keep unauthorised people out of there. If you plan for the excavation work to take several weeks, you should opt for installing a fence that can keep people away from the site. If your plan is that the process won't take more than a few days, then it might be enough to only put up brightly coloured flags to mark the boundaries of the project. You should also make sure to put up signs some distance away from the site where people might pass through to make them aware of the project.
Dug up soil
As the excavation process starts, you also need to make sure that your earthmoving procedure is as quick as possible. It's not safe for you, the people who are helping you with the project, or people just passing by the site if the dug up soil is lying around the site. Piles of dug-up soil can increase the risk of tripping and limit the movements of the excavation equipment you're using. As a result, you might not be able to use the machine to its full potential and you may have to find alternative roads for it. This can be dangerous to the public, as they might not be able to foresee what way you'll take with the machine as they pass by the site.
Safety gear
You also need to make sure that you and all the people that are working on the excavation project are wearing the appropriate safety equipment. You should wear sturdy boots that minimise the risk from tripping, but that can also stand to get wet or muddy in case you have to go down into the excavation. You should also wear a hardhat to protect yourself if any soil were to fall on you while the project is ongoing.
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