Safety

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.

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.

The most critical piping for any building
property or plant operation is unquestionably at the fire sprinkler system. Corrosion problems at tower water, chill water, steam, or other HVAC and plumbing piping may produce a loss of service, inconvenience, property damage, shutdown, and even millions of dollars in monetary losses, but the failure of a fire sprinkler line always threatens the loss of human life.

In the past few years, Hydrovacs and “daylighting” have gained industry acceptance by minimizing the challenges of exposing underground pipelines, fiber-optics, and utilities. “Daylighting” is a non-destructive process using pressurized water (hydro) and a vacuum system (vac) to remove soil cover, thereby allowing a visual observation of underground lines. Hydrovacs expose these facilities to daylight, thus the term “daylighting”.

Most efforts to decrease the frequency and severity of injuries to miners have stressed miner training and work procedures, improved work environments and safety and environmental control equipment, improved personal protective equipment, improved equipment control and display design, enhanced lighting and visibility-related research, and organizational issues. However, the industry has paid much less attention to the design of the mining machine itself with respect to maintenance cost or safety for the maintainer.

The force acting on a general purpose relay is near the fulcrum of the arm. With a force guided relay, the force acting on the relay is about as close to the contact point as one can reasonably get.

Trelleborg has developed a product, that can withstand a jet fire – the cause of the Piper Alpha disaster. The product is already in use on several platforms, primarily in the North Sea. To date, some NOK 7 million in development costs- has been invested annually. These costs are shared by the project sponsors, comprising the Norwegian government and a number of oil companies. Continued development is not expected to be as costly and will focus more on handling other derivatives, such as gas and oil, and possibly being able to offer a material in other colors for customers who wish to customize their equipment using their own color schemes.