Rules are so easy to make that safety offices are often accused of being a “Rule Mill” because they continuously produce their rule-of-the month. Why do we create so many rules? One particular cog in our mill that causes us to create rules is incidents. When we suffer an incident, we want to throw every tool in the arsenal to keep it from happening again.
In a recent safety excellence workshop, our firm facilitated a brainstorming exercise with a group of safety professionals interested in solving a particular problem they were experiencing in their safety journey. Their safety process was boring them to tears and they worried it would grow stale and become irrelevant with the workforce.
How confident are you that a costly, serious safety event isn’t just around the next corner? If your organization has ever been surprised or caught off-guard by a sudden deterioration in its safety performance, it may be that you’re simply not getting the whole picture when it comes to operational risk.
Not long ago gloves were considered just another uncomfortable piece of PPE that one was obliged to wear. Leather was the material of choice for premium protection, while less expensive fabric offered basic hand coverage.
For operations that produce toxic or explosive dusts, it is a priority to keep the workplace safe and compliant. Industrial dust collectors equipped with integrated safety monitoring filters (iSMFs) can isolate dust particulates to ensure that no measurable weight of emissions is discharged.
Although it’s an intricate piece of equipment with a number of components — including a facepiece, a breathing tube and a blower that passes contaminated air through a HEPA filter — a powered air purifying respirator (PAPR) depends heavily on something fairly ordinary in order to function well: a battery.
Warehouse hazards create more accidents because of the massive quantities of products of all different sizes, shapes and weights stored on shelves, floors and anyplace else someone can find a place to put a box, pallet or carton.
From R&D specialists to the disposal crew, products and projects often require a village of workers onsite. While some of these workers may be part of your organization, successful businesses often require third-party contractors to better manage resources and deliver quality results.
In his mega-popular book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell centers his thesis on the claim that experts come to the point where “they just know.” They develop intuition, based on diligent practice. So experts get the answer without having to go through a step-by-step process of analysis.
A multi-disciplinary approach and a first year focused on inspections and engagement are two elements of a new Process Safety initiative launched this year by WorkSafeBC, a governmental agency that looks after the safety of workers in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
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