Safety

Lubrication

Safety Tips for Handling Petroleum Products

High-pressure injection injuries, also known as grease gun injuries, are caused by the accidental injection of a foreign material–such as grease, oil, or solvent under pressure–through the skin and into the underlying tissue. This is analogous to medical techniques used to administer immunization shots without a needle. A grease gun injury can cause serious delayed soft tissue damage and should be treated as a surgical emergency. Any person sustaining an injury of this sort should seek immediate medical attention, regardless of the appearance of the wound or its size. Accidents involving injection injuries can occur when using any type of pressurized equipment.

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Safety

Improving Safety: 10 Tips, Tricks, Rules and Suggestions

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers sustained a collective 2.9 million workplace injuries and illnesses in 2015, and nearly 5,000 workers were killed on the job—an average of 13 employees every day. As employers try to curtail those shocking numbers and improve safety throughout their facility, it’s important to examine the relationship between a safer workplace and ensuring uptime, reliability and quality asset performance.

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Safety

Engineers Need a Nap

The overwhelming majority of industrial accidents result from human error. Engineers who sleep less than eight hours per night are less productive and almost 10 percent more likely to cause an accident, and many don’t get enough sleep. The solution: engineers need a nap.

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Safety

11 Tips for Effective Workplace Housekeeping

To some people, the word “housekeeping” calls to mind cleaning floors and surfaces, removing dust, and organizing clutter. But in a work setting, it means much more. Housekeeping is crucial to safe workplaces. It can help prevent injuries and improve productivity and morale, as well as make a good first impression on visitors, according to Cari Gray, safety consultant for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. It also can help an employer avoid potential fines for non-compliance.

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Safety

Asbestos Risk in Manufacturing Plants

Many of today’s manufacturing plants have removed asbestos from their facilities, but some still manufacture products that contain legal amounts of asbestos. Although exposure at these plants is well monitored and minimal, there is no safe level of asbestos exposure according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Safety

NFPA’s Hazard Diamond

The National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA) developed a rating system to identify and rank the hazards of a material.  If you have previously worked in construction you’ve probably seen the colorful labels used to explain these hazards.  The NFPA’s hazard rating is diamond-shaped, made up of four smaller diamonds.  The NFPA symbol colors are blue, red, yellow and white.  Inside the colored smaller diamonds are numbers or symbols loaded with a wealth of knowledge.

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Safety

Safety Incidents: Is Safety a Backseat Driver?

Have safety efforts gravitated into the back seat driver technique being applied in your workplace?  When an employee’s actions are observed as not in accordance with the safety rules and procedures, their error is brought to their attention. The workplace reality is that this error often goes unaddressed, or even unobserved, until a safety incident occurs. The safety incident becomes the trigger for an investigation. The investigation determines what actions led up to the safety incident and often stop at the point of identifying the human error. The resulting corrective measures attempt to contain the human error by revising policies, enhancing procedures, retraining employees, punishing offenders, or some combination thereof. Such corrective measures lag behind the worker’s thought process.

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Safety

Focusing RCM on Equipment Critical to Electrical Safety

Business and commerce are totally dependent on electrical equipment and systems for energy, control and communications. These systems can be complex and the task to analyze failure consequences can be equally complex. Unrecognized consequence of failure, especially if the failure impacts personnel safety, can have unacceptable moral and legal implications as well as significant financial costs. Recent trends in workplace electrical safety shed new light on reliability needs for certain equipment in electric power and control systems. One trend is the increasing attention given to mitigating arc flash hazards in electric power systems.

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