Reinventing The Guardrail: The Hilmerson Safety Rail System™

Traditional job-built 2×4 wooden guardrails are an obsolete technology that is still used all over the world. “The way we have always done it” may look safe and compliant from a distance, but quality and OSHA compliance are never guaranteed with job-built guardrails. Because each section, carpenter, and jobsite is different, safety inspections rarely find uniformly safe wooden guardrail protection. The best examples of a job-built wooden guardrail are labor intensive, costly, and typically thrown away at the end of a project. The worst examples are quickly and poorly built, missing critical components, and give construction workers a false sense of safety and security.

The Opportunity:

There is an opportunity to revolutionize the way we protect construction workers from fall hazards while dramatically reducing waste and inefficiency in the construction industry. The Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ was designed and engineered with feedback from industry experts with one goal in mind: Reinvent the guardrail to eliminate inefficiencies, cut costs, send zero waste to landfills, and improve workplace safety.

Fatal falls in the construction industry are not a recent development. In fact, fatal falls have plagued the global construction industry as long as humans have been building vertical structures. Yet to this day, the leading cause of private sector worker deaths in the construction industry is falls (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Despite OSHA enforcement efforts, corporate risk management strategies, and advances in safety technologies, fatal fall totals in construction remain on the rise (OSHA, 2016) and worker falls cost employers over $16 billion annually (Bureau of Labor Statistics/Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index, 2017). Inadequate fall protection is also OSHA’s most frequently cited violation.

Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ Benefits:

Job-built wooden guardrails are costly, unsafe, and wasteful and we knew there was a better way. The Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ is an engineered steel guardrail system that has a variety of installation options. The guardrail system is quickly mounted to concrete substrates with a single penetrating anchor bolt or a pre-pour embed bolt. The system can also be installed on a wide variety of other surfaces with our weighted base plates. By design, 200-linear feet of our OSHA compliant guardrail system can be installed in minutes instead of the hours it takes to construct a wooden equivalent. Once installed, the Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ provides uniform engineered leading edge protection throughout a job-site. When a project is completed the system is easily disassembled, palleted, and reused or re-rented for the entire life of the product.

The Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ delivers all of the following benefits:

Our market research found the cost of job-built wooden guardrails averages $15.58/linear foot, and that does not factor in lumber cost increases as high as 30% since the start of 2017. Estimators are also often failing to include significant “true cost” factors like transportation, disposal, inspections, and maintenance required for job-built wooden guardrails in their cost estimates. The Hilmerson Safety Rail System™ will not only eliminate many recurring project-based costs, the benefits listed above in the “Cost Benefits & ROI” section will also allow for quick recovery of initial one-time costs to purchase and provide a significant return on investment.