Safety

Certified mail has arrived. The letter carrier isn’t Ed McMahon. Uh Oh! It’s a citation package from the USDOL/OSHA. What do you do? You glance at the paperwork to be sure it really relates to an OSHA inspection at one of your sites. You notice some rather heavy penalties. You are shocked, irate and feel as if you’ve been branded “corporate slime.” You try to convince yourself that you’ve been in lots of workplaces that are more dangerous than yours. You need this like a centipede needs sore feet. Options pop through you mind.

We as safety professionals aren’t exempt. Have you seen this: Workers don’t change their actions? Tell them again (with a why-didn’t-you-listen undertone). Policies and procedures not followed? Write additional (and more detailed) rules. Training didn’t change their behavior? Put them through the same training again and again (until they “get it”). Try, try, try again to solve safety problems, but don’t confuse persistence with obstinancy.

ISO 12100 is a fundamental safety standard being developed that will apply to a very broad array of machinery.  There are many machines that have specific industry consensus standards that pertain to the particular equipment (e.g., power presses, robots, packaging machinery).  There are many more machines for which no industry specific standard exists.  In this case, the ISO “A level” standard ISO 12100 Safety of Machinery applies.  Complying with the requirements of ISO 12100 is a critical first step in achieving mobility of equipment and consistent operations.

“Prevention is better than cure”, this proverb sounds rightly in case of maintenance also. If the maintenance is prevented, then the availability of the plant increases and the overall cost reduces. Every effort should be made to avoid maintenance, which can be achieved through continuous monitoring of equipment and upgrading the sophistication of the equipment through better design and process improvement.

Life without standards would result in near chaos for both manufactures and consumers. Just think if you could not rely on the strength of a critical fastener in an aircraft fuselage, the quality of the glass in a high rise building, the voltage fluctuation of the electrical grid at a faraway vacation destination, a crucial replacement for an electrical motor, the purity of a critical medication or the mere annoyance of not finding a correct battery for that digital camera. In short, as consumers, we would soon notice the lack of standards when the safety, quality, fit, reliability and compatibility of the products we consume, purchase and rely on are compromised.

Reactive maintenance is here defined as all maintenance work that was scheduled less than 20 hours before it was executed. It makes sense that there is a strong correlation between safety incidents, injuries and reactive maintenance. In a reactive situation you might not take the time you should to plan and think before you take action. The urgency also call out the so common hero in maintenance crafts people and they take risks they should not take.

The notions “one tool does all” or “any tool will do” result in wasted effort, poor quality work, damage to the misused tool, and exposing the user to possible injury, according to the Hand Tools Institute, an association of American manufacturers of quality hand tools. As with hammers, pliers, wrenches and all other hand tools, design is a key element to the type of work a tool is intended to do properly and safely, says HTI. Clamps are no exception and should be selected to conform to the work they are to perform.

Republic Windows & Doors transformed their plant safety for the sake of their workers. By implementing 3 “outs” they were able to make significant safety gains in just a few short years, even with high turnover rates and unskilled labor. If they can improve safety and job quality at the same time, so can you!

When we have catastrophic events such as the club fire in RI, the inspection process that allowed code violations to go uncorrected for two years needs to be revisited. Many inspectors view their daily work in a way that results in the low hanging fruit getting picked, but the more difficult to reach fruit on high branches going untouched. When an agency is responsible for inspections for compliance with safety, health, fire and/or environmental standards there needs to be a meaningful quality control or improvement program in place. Citizens or your community deserve no less.