If you have been following our work at COVE, you know that we are all about the importance of Seeing the Whole PICTURE® so that we can be more effective in our safety processes. It is by Learning to See that we can improve our ability to interpret the environment around us and the things that we are doing so that we can identify hazards and understand risk.

Recognizing dangerous combustible dust situations in manufacturing plants and processing facilities helps you to quickly observe and recognize an unsafe situation in everyday work environments, evaluate whether you and your coworkers are in harm’s way, and decide what steps are necessary to make the area safe. 

Lagging indicators are simply rates of injuries that have already happened. If we know how and why these incidents occurred, we can transfer this knowledge into our continual hazard analysis, improve our hazard controls, communicate them and begin to validate their use.

Each day that they are in use, forklifts and other types of powered industrial equipment must be inspected prior to operation. But often, not nearly as much thought is given to the battery charging stations that keep many of these essential machines running.

Mobile EHS software is improving workplace health and safety programs by disseminating critical tasks – like incident reporting – and making EHS a part of everyone’s job. Now every employee has the ability to feed real-time information on workplace risks directly into a centralized location.

Typically, anxiety disorders are chronic. Often, there is a waxing and waning course. The severity of the anxiety condition(s) depends upon several factors including adequate treatment, absence of precipitating factors, etc.

Although it seems to make perfect, intuitive sense that people would get hurt when they are doing the most dangerous things, that isn’t what actually happens to more than 95 percent of us. So, what does this mean in terms of the old risk assessment matrix?

Working alone and working at heights for me began years ago as an instrument technician in a large steel mill in western Pennsylvania. We always tried to work in pairs but there were occasions when I had to work alone or apart from my buddy.