Features
The Backup Plan: Make conveyor blockages a less tense situation Featured
Written by PEM Staff Wednesday, 02 May 2012
Two fatalities in just one year — related to the same piece of equipment — led to important improvements in worker protection. Arguably, these did not go far enough, but one solution may help provide an extra boost of safety.
Mining, as anyone who works within it knows only too well, can be a dangerous industry. It is not just underground and at the coal face where serious (and even fatal) accidents can occur. There is one piece of equipment in particular that has led to serious accidents: the inclined conveyor. But a solution from Renold Couplings promises to alleviate the risk, and Rio Tinto is just one company that has taken advantage of the innovation to protect its workers.
The mining industry would find it hard to function without the inclined conveyor to transport coal. However, in the event of a loss of power, their design means that they can run backwards, out of control, if in a loaded condition. For that reason, for many years, these systems have been fitted with backstop sprag clutches. These work by allowing a shaft to rotate in one direction as the sprags slip. But if the shaft tries to turn the other way — as it will do if the conveyor begins to run backwards — the sprags immediately stand up and lock.
These same safety components are also fitted to theme park rides to prevent cars from running downhill in the event of a power failure.
Although this effectively solves the problem it was designed to, another associated problem can also occur, for which it is not only no help but is also actually the direct cause.
If a blockage occurs between the lower belt and the return end shaft, the conveyor will stall. The backstop sprag clutch then comes into operation to prevent the belt from running backwards — but as a result, tension builds in the upper belt, because the slack in the lower belt can’t feed back through the drive.
The natural reaction of the operator is to remove whatever is causing the obstruction to get the conveyor back in operation as quickly as possible. But if the tension in the upper belt isn’t released first, the sudden release that occurs when the blockage is removed will cause it to pull the lower belt rapidly around the return roller with huge force. This force can be so powerful that it has been known to cause the load on the top belt to explode in all directions, and has even pulled the worker removing the blockage into the conveyor.
One answer, developed by Renold, is the tension release and torque limiting safety holdback sprag clutch, which has been designed to enable the extreme tension in the upper belt to be released in a controlled way through controlled friction slippage of the sprag clutch element of the backstop.
With the tension released in this controlled manner, maintenance work can be carried out to remove the blockage and get the conveyor up and running again, quickly and safely.
This is an edited article provided by Renold Couplings. For more information, visit www.renold.com.
Mining, as anyone who works within it knows only too well, can be a dangerous industry. It is not just underground and at the coal face where serious (and even fatal) accidents can occur. There is one piece of equipment in particular that has led to serious accidents: the inclined conveyor. But a solution from Renold Couplings promises to alleviate the risk, and Rio Tinto is just one company that has taken advantage of the innovation to protect its workers.
The mining industry would find it hard to function without the inclined conveyor to transport coal. However, in the event of a loss of power, their design means that they can run backwards, out of control, if in a loaded condition. For that reason, for many years, these systems have been fitted with backstop sprag clutches. These work by allowing a shaft to rotate in one direction as the sprags slip. But if the shaft tries to turn the other way — as it will do if the conveyor begins to run backwards — the sprags immediately stand up and lock.
These same safety components are also fitted to theme park rides to prevent cars from running downhill in the event of a power failure.
Although this effectively solves the problem it was designed to, another associated problem can also occur, for which it is not only no help but is also actually the direct cause.
If a blockage occurs between the lower belt and the return end shaft, the conveyor will stall. The backstop sprag clutch then comes into operation to prevent the belt from running backwards — but as a result, tension builds in the upper belt, because the slack in the lower belt can’t feed back through the drive.
The natural reaction of the operator is to remove whatever is causing the obstruction to get the conveyor back in operation as quickly as possible. But if the tension in the upper belt isn’t released first, the sudden release that occurs when the blockage is removed will cause it to pull the lower belt rapidly around the return roller with huge force. This force can be so powerful that it has been known to cause the load on the top belt to explode in all directions, and has even pulled the worker removing the blockage into the conveyor.
One answer, developed by Renold, is the tension release and torque limiting safety holdback sprag clutch, which has been designed to enable the extreme tension in the upper belt to be released in a controlled way through controlled friction slippage of the sprag clutch element of the backstop.
With the tension released in this controlled manner, maintenance work can be carried out to remove the blockage and get the conveyor up and running again, quickly and safely.
This is an edited article provided by Renold Couplings. For more information, visit www.renold.com.
Left in the Dust: Protecting plants from catastrophic combustible dust explosions Featured
Written by PEM Staff Thursday, 16 February 2012
The issue of dust explosions has been a hot topic since the early 20 century. In a book published by the NFPA in 1922, titled Dust Explosions, the authors, David J. Price and Harold H. Brown, acknowledge the need for a vacuum that can withstand the rigors of an industrial environment stating that despite every precaution to capture dust at the source, small amounts of it “will get out into the atmosphere of the mill and gather on floors, walls and ledges.”
The authors of the book knew then, as it still stands today, “if there is no accumulation of dust and the plant is perfectly clean, the explosion cannot propagate and the plant will not be destroyed.”
Even without a sufficient vacuum cleaner for industrial environments at the 1922 publishing of the book, the authors still warned against using brooms and compressed air in housekeeping practices because those methods often cause dust to be suspended in the environment during cleaning and could itself ignite, or would settle back onto floors, equipment and beams, lending itself to potential secondary explosions later.
Primary dust explosions occur when combustible dust is present, forms a dust cloud (in sufficient amounts), in an enclosed environment, with an ignition source and oxygen.
Bill Stevenson, vice-president of engineering at Cv Technology and NFPA 654 committee member, says, “the explosion is caused by the rapid pressure rise as a result of the rapid burning of the dust cloud. So it has to be in an enclosure. If it were outside you’d just have a big flash.”
Cv Technology is a Florida based corporation dedicated to the prevention, protection, and mitigation of industrial dust explosions and related fires
Stevenson further explains that if there was a layer of combustible dust sitting on a desk, “you could get it to burn by putting a flame to it, but it wouldn’t explode. If you took the torch away it would smolder and most would self extinguish; but, if you take the same dust, throw it in the air and then light it on fire, it would literally blow up in your face,” he says.
Catastrophic secondary explosions occur when the force from the primary explosion dislodges fugitive dust, producing more dust clouds, and creating a domino type effect that can cause further explosions. So if you took that same dust smoldering on the desk and waved a piece of paper to make the particles airborne, a dust cloud could form and explode.
According to an NFPA Fact Sheet titled, U.S. Industrial and Manufacturing Property Structure Fires, “U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 10,500 structure fires in industrial and manufacturing properties per year in 2003-2006,” averaging 29 fires per day in the industrial sector. Of those fires, 29 percent involved shop tools or industrial equipment, and the manufacturing area was the leading origin of the fires.
Controlling the Explosion Pentagon
The explosion pentagon includes the three elements of the fire triangle, fuel (combustible dust), ignition source (heat) and an oxidizer (air), but needs two additional elements, dispersion of dust particles (in sufficient quantity and concentration), and the confinement of the dust cloud (vessel, area or building),.
If one of the elements is missing, a fire, or explosion can not occur. While it is difficult to remove air and fuel from the triangle, the first rule of fire prevention, and therefore explosion prevention, is to eliminate the ignition source. While most machinery manufacturers design equipment with safety in mind, mechanical equipment is capable of malfunctioning, heating up, and causing ignitions.
Although every precaution is taken to eliminate ignition sources to prevent fires, and dust collection equipment designed to safely contain most of the dust in the plant, manufacturers must make housekeeping for fugitive dust, that can be formed into a dust cloud, equally important to prevent dust explosions.
Industrial vacuum cleaners to control fugitive combustible dust should be suitable for use in Class II Div 2 areas. “Vacuum cleaners in particular are vulnerable to ignition and that is why there are only a few companies that know how to do that properly and VAC-U-MAX is one of them that does it right,” says Stevenson. “They take extraordinary care to make sure there is no chance for the product to come into contact with anything ignitable.”
Vac-u-Max, the pioneer in industrial vacuum cleaning and pneumatic conveying since 1954, makes a line of combustible dust vacuums that are redundantly grounded and ideal for combustible dust.
Any time there is powder flowing in one direction through a plastic vacuum-cleaning hose it can create a significant static electric charge. In addition, there is the possibility that there may be static electricity build-up on individual dust particles. If a charged, ungrounded hose used to vacuum combustible dust powder were to contact an object that was grounded, the static electricity could then arc and trigger a violent explosion. This is why OSHA has issued numerous citations for using standard vacuum cleaners where Class II Div 2 equipment is required.
The Right Tool for Combustible Dust
Bill Bobbitt of Bobit Associates Environmental Systems, who’s been working in the clean air industry for over 25 years, says, “I always tell my clients, it not a matter of if, but when. Conditions have to be perfect and that ‘when’ can be 30 years from now, or it could be next week. But if you eliminate the fugitive dust, it cannot create a secondary dust explosion,” he says.
Bobbitt sees a lot of standard shop type vacuums in plants. "There are so many problems with them. They themselves are hazards in an industrial environment," he says. First and foremost, they are not grounded or classified for Class II Div 2 areas, they shock workers, they clog easily and the workers don’t want to use them, and if workers don’t use them, fugitive dust is accumulating in the plant.
Employing an industrial vacuum cleaner that is redundantly grounded in five different ways, “eliminates the possibility of any kind of explosion from the vacuum,” says Bobbitt. Although Vac-u-Max does make electric vacuums designed for Class II Div 2 environments, the most economical solution for cleaning combustible fugitive dust is its air-operated vacuums.
Beyond the fact that air operated vacuums use no electricity and have no moving parts, the first of the five ways that VAC-U-MAX vacuums are grounded begins with the air line that supplies the compressed air to the units. Because most plants have compressed air lines made from iron that conducts electricity, the company’s air operated vacuums use static conductive high pressure compressed air lines. In addition to the static conductive air lines, static conductive hoses, filters and casters are employed to further reduce risk. A grounding lug and strap that travels from the vacuum head down to the 55-gallon drum, eliminates the potential for arcing.
Air operated vacuums for combustible dust are safer in terms of grounding, they also work more efficiently in the industrial environment. Bobbitt says on a recent visit to a coal fired electric power plant he was shown five different electric vacuums sitting in a warehouse not being used because after 20 minutes, the filters would bind and workers just didn’t want to use them because they would have to lift the head from the vacuum and tap the cake off before they would get any more suction.
The power plant and now two sister facilities, Bobbitt says, “now use an air powered VAC-U-MAX model with a pulse cleaning system on the filters, that with the push of a button releases the dust from the filter and they can resume cleaning.”
Compliance when Regulations aren’t Clear
Fugitive dust “is a moving target that changes depending on the nature of the process and how well plants manage keeping the dust contained,” says Stevenson. Most NFPA guidelines for combustible dust state that a layer of dust the thickness of a paperclip is enough dust to cause a significant secondary explosion. The problem he says, “is that it doesn’t account for the different Kst values between different dusts. Some are more reactive than others. Some are more easily suspended into a cloud. Some tests found that depending on the type of dust, even half of the thickness of a paper clip would be too much.”
Kst values classify dusts according to their explosivity—the rate of pressure rise of a dust in the test vessel upon being ignited.
In situations where many different dusts are handled, testing all of them can be prohibitively expensive. For instance, in a high performance rubber plant where several different products are manufactured within the same plant, the dust in each area of the plant may have different Kst values in each area. For this circumstance it is recommended to work with an expert in the field to select samples for test that represent the worst case.
This is why, Bobbitt says, that when you are dealing with explosive dust, you may need a Class II Div 2 vacuum in a non Class II Div 2 area. “You might have explosive dust small quantities, and it might take a very hot and prolonged source of ignition, but with the new combustible dust initiative, facilities need to be very careful that they comply because there is a lot of question as to what compliance means.”
“Although the regulations for combustible dust aren’t real clear,” Bobbitt says, “I find that a lot of companies are simply just trying to get better at general housecleaning.”
Cv Technology’s Stevenson agrees. “The one thing you can do very simply and easily is to keep everything clean—it is as simple as that. If you clean the place up and protect your dust collectors, you’ve gone a long way toward minimizing the chance for an explosion even if you do nothing else and those are pretty straight forward easy things that everyone can do,” he says.
www.vac-u-max.com
The authors of the book knew then, as it still stands today, “if there is no accumulation of dust and the plant is perfectly clean, the explosion cannot propagate and the plant will not be destroyed.”
Even without a sufficient vacuum cleaner for industrial environments at the 1922 publishing of the book, the authors still warned against using brooms and compressed air in housekeeping practices because those methods often cause dust to be suspended in the environment during cleaning and could itself ignite, or would settle back onto floors, equipment and beams, lending itself to potential secondary explosions later.
Primary dust explosions occur when combustible dust is present, forms a dust cloud (in sufficient amounts), in an enclosed environment, with an ignition source and oxygen.
Bill Stevenson, vice-president of engineering at Cv Technology and NFPA 654 committee member, says, “the explosion is caused by the rapid pressure rise as a result of the rapid burning of the dust cloud. So it has to be in an enclosure. If it were outside you’d just have a big flash.”
Cv Technology is a Florida based corporation dedicated to the prevention, protection, and mitigation of industrial dust explosions and related fires
Stevenson further explains that if there was a layer of combustible dust sitting on a desk, “you could get it to burn by putting a flame to it, but it wouldn’t explode. If you took the torch away it would smolder and most would self extinguish; but, if you take the same dust, throw it in the air and then light it on fire, it would literally blow up in your face,” he says.
Catastrophic secondary explosions occur when the force from the primary explosion dislodges fugitive dust, producing more dust clouds, and creating a domino type effect that can cause further explosions. So if you took that same dust smoldering on the desk and waved a piece of paper to make the particles airborne, a dust cloud could form and explode.
According to an NFPA Fact Sheet titled, U.S. Industrial and Manufacturing Property Structure Fires, “U.S. fire departments responded to an estimated average of 10,500 structure fires in industrial and manufacturing properties per year in 2003-2006,” averaging 29 fires per day in the industrial sector. Of those fires, 29 percent involved shop tools or industrial equipment, and the manufacturing area was the leading origin of the fires.
Controlling the Explosion Pentagon
The explosion pentagon includes the three elements of the fire triangle, fuel (combustible dust), ignition source (heat) and an oxidizer (air), but needs two additional elements, dispersion of dust particles (in sufficient quantity and concentration), and the confinement of the dust cloud (vessel, area or building),.
If one of the elements is missing, a fire, or explosion can not occur. While it is difficult to remove air and fuel from the triangle, the first rule of fire prevention, and therefore explosion prevention, is to eliminate the ignition source. While most machinery manufacturers design equipment with safety in mind, mechanical equipment is capable of malfunctioning, heating up, and causing ignitions.
Although every precaution is taken to eliminate ignition sources to prevent fires, and dust collection equipment designed to safely contain most of the dust in the plant, manufacturers must make housekeeping for fugitive dust, that can be formed into a dust cloud, equally important to prevent dust explosions.
Industrial vacuum cleaners to control fugitive combustible dust should be suitable for use in Class II Div 2 areas. “Vacuum cleaners in particular are vulnerable to ignition and that is why there are only a few companies that know how to do that properly and VAC-U-MAX is one of them that does it right,” says Stevenson. “They take extraordinary care to make sure there is no chance for the product to come into contact with anything ignitable.”
Vac-u-Max, the pioneer in industrial vacuum cleaning and pneumatic conveying since 1954, makes a line of combustible dust vacuums that are redundantly grounded and ideal for combustible dust.
Any time there is powder flowing in one direction through a plastic vacuum-cleaning hose it can create a significant static electric charge. In addition, there is the possibility that there may be static electricity build-up on individual dust particles. If a charged, ungrounded hose used to vacuum combustible dust powder were to contact an object that was grounded, the static electricity could then arc and trigger a violent explosion. This is why OSHA has issued numerous citations for using standard vacuum cleaners where Class II Div 2 equipment is required.
The Right Tool for Combustible Dust
Bill Bobbitt of Bobit Associates Environmental Systems, who’s been working in the clean air industry for over 25 years, says, “I always tell my clients, it not a matter of if, but when. Conditions have to be perfect and that ‘when’ can be 30 years from now, or it could be next week. But if you eliminate the fugitive dust, it cannot create a secondary dust explosion,” he says.
Bobbitt sees a lot of standard shop type vacuums in plants. "There are so many problems with them. They themselves are hazards in an industrial environment," he says. First and foremost, they are not grounded or classified for Class II Div 2 areas, they shock workers, they clog easily and the workers don’t want to use them, and if workers don’t use them, fugitive dust is accumulating in the plant.
Employing an industrial vacuum cleaner that is redundantly grounded in five different ways, “eliminates the possibility of any kind of explosion from the vacuum,” says Bobbitt. Although Vac-u-Max does make electric vacuums designed for Class II Div 2 environments, the most economical solution for cleaning combustible fugitive dust is its air-operated vacuums.
Beyond the fact that air operated vacuums use no electricity and have no moving parts, the first of the five ways that VAC-U-MAX vacuums are grounded begins with the air line that supplies the compressed air to the units. Because most plants have compressed air lines made from iron that conducts electricity, the company’s air operated vacuums use static conductive high pressure compressed air lines. In addition to the static conductive air lines, static conductive hoses, filters and casters are employed to further reduce risk. A grounding lug and strap that travels from the vacuum head down to the 55-gallon drum, eliminates the potential for arcing.
Air operated vacuums for combustible dust are safer in terms of grounding, they also work more efficiently in the industrial environment. Bobbitt says on a recent visit to a coal fired electric power plant he was shown five different electric vacuums sitting in a warehouse not being used because after 20 minutes, the filters would bind and workers just didn’t want to use them because they would have to lift the head from the vacuum and tap the cake off before they would get any more suction.
The power plant and now two sister facilities, Bobbitt says, “now use an air powered VAC-U-MAX model with a pulse cleaning system on the filters, that with the push of a button releases the dust from the filter and they can resume cleaning.”
Compliance when Regulations aren’t Clear
Fugitive dust “is a moving target that changes depending on the nature of the process and how well plants manage keeping the dust contained,” says Stevenson. Most NFPA guidelines for combustible dust state that a layer of dust the thickness of a paperclip is enough dust to cause a significant secondary explosion. The problem he says, “is that it doesn’t account for the different Kst values between different dusts. Some are more reactive than others. Some are more easily suspended into a cloud. Some tests found that depending on the type of dust, even half of the thickness of a paper clip would be too much.”
Kst values classify dusts according to their explosivity—the rate of pressure rise of a dust in the test vessel upon being ignited.
In situations where many different dusts are handled, testing all of them can be prohibitively expensive. For instance, in a high performance rubber plant where several different products are manufactured within the same plant, the dust in each area of the plant may have different Kst values in each area. For this circumstance it is recommended to work with an expert in the field to select samples for test that represent the worst case.
This is why, Bobbitt says, that when you are dealing with explosive dust, you may need a Class II Div 2 vacuum in a non Class II Div 2 area. “You might have explosive dust small quantities, and it might take a very hot and prolonged source of ignition, but with the new combustible dust initiative, facilities need to be very careful that they comply because there is a lot of question as to what compliance means.”
“Although the regulations for combustible dust aren’t real clear,” Bobbitt says, “I find that a lot of companies are simply just trying to get better at general housecleaning.”
Cv Technology’s Stevenson agrees. “The one thing you can do very simply and easily is to keep everything clean—it is as simple as that. If you clean the place up and protect your dust collectors, you’ve gone a long way toward minimizing the chance for an explosion even if you do nothing else and those are pretty straight forward easy things that everyone can do,” he says.
www.vac-u-max.com
6 tips to achieve the best results for your safety efforts
Written by Alan D. Quilley, CRSP Monday, 23 January 2012
In any business venture, we get results through careful planning of activities and through measuring not only the results but the activities that the people undertake to get those results. The creation of safety excellence is accomplished in exactly the same way.
I’m currently preparing a report for a client and I’m listing the things I’ve observed at their various workplaces when I visited over a two-week period. My personal observations and the discussions I had with over 1,100 employees and contractors will be categorized into the areas of discussion listed below. What I’m recommending to my client isn’t really different than what I would recommend to any company that wants to excel at achieving safety results for their considerable efforts.
Here are some of the high-level recommendations for the client and I would ask that you consider these for your company.
Make safety activities personal for everyone. To measure is to motivate. Everyone in the company needs to help create safety. Everyone — from the CEO to the lowest paid employee — needs to have personal activities to assist in the creation of safety and a culture of safety that not only holds people responsible for the creation of safety but holds them accountable by measurement. Normally, this is done through objective setting and measurements during performance reviews. Make safety activities measurable and then hold everyone responsible for doing those activities through performance reviews.
Shift focus from ‘prevention’ to ‘creating safety’. Do the things that have been proven to create safe environments and behaviours. Work on those activities that have high payback. Shifting from the negative measurements of loss and injury will empower the workers to create safety rather than avoid injury. It’s an important distinction that companies achieving safety excellence understand.
Identify and make critical behaviours habitual. Select behaviours that you want to become a habit and work on strategies and tactics with your employees to get those behaviours to happen naturally — not unlike wearing a seatbelt, which has become a habit for most of us. A common example of making something habitual is taking medication or vitamins on a regular basis. Following the ABC — activator, behaviour, consequence — model of human behaviour, the first thing one needs to do is to activate the new behaviour of taking the pill. Leaving the pills in a place where you will notice them will increase the chances that you will remember to take them. Experiencing the consequences of being healthier and having the internal feeling of doing something positive for your health will be a natural consequence of the regimen. It is extremely important to choose these behaviours with your employees. Simply giving them a list of behaviours without allowing them to be part of the decision process leads to less than stellar performance.
Increase the use of tools/equipment and inspection checklists. For us to be safe at work, it’s essential that we use the right tools and that those tools are in good working order. The right equipment to do our work is essential. Serious injuries and fatalities happen because of people using the wrong equipment for a critical task or when the equipment used is not up to standard. Each time we do an inspection, we should ensure that everything we need to do our work is in place.
Increase the observations of safe/unsafe behaviours. The real benefits of behaviour observations are the discussions they create — not the “observation cards.” Far too many companies gradually shift their goal to the number of observation cards.
Improve the number and quality of safety discussions. Have great safety discussions and meetings. We can do this by first defining what a great meeting would look like, and then go about creating meetings that happen the way we designed them. Participants in the meeting need to have the power to give input into the meeting process and content. Without their input, these meetings have little chance of achieving the expectations of the participants. Make the participants responsible for the design and quality of the safety meetings that are held.
Creating safety is much different than preventing injuries and loss. When companies change their focus to better align their safety activities to their business processes, their safety outcomes improve.
There’s an old saying that’s been attributed to a number of famous people, and it goes like this: “Do what I do and you’ll get what I get.” I usually like to give credit for the statement to Edwards Deming, who not only taught us how to improve production, but that if we use the same approach and processes, we’ll get much improved safety results.
Here are some of the high-level recommendations for the client and I would ask that you consider these for your company.
Make safety activities personal for everyone. To measure is to motivate. Everyone in the company needs to help create safety. Everyone — from the CEO to the lowest paid employee — needs to have personal activities to assist in the creation of safety and a culture of safety that not only holds people responsible for the creation of safety but holds them accountable by measurement. Normally, this is done through objective setting and measurements during performance reviews. Make safety activities measurable and then hold everyone responsible for doing those activities through performance reviews.
Shift focus from ‘prevention’ to ‘creating safety’. Do the things that have been proven to create safe environments and behaviours. Work on those activities that have high payback. Shifting from the negative measurements of loss and injury will empower the workers to create safety rather than avoid injury. It’s an important distinction that companies achieving safety excellence understand.
Identify and make critical behaviours habitual. Select behaviours that you want to become a habit and work on strategies and tactics with your employees to get those behaviours to happen naturally — not unlike wearing a seatbelt, which has become a habit for most of us. A common example of making something habitual is taking medication or vitamins on a regular basis. Following the ABC — activator, behaviour, consequence — model of human behaviour, the first thing one needs to do is to activate the new behaviour of taking the pill. Leaving the pills in a place where you will notice them will increase the chances that you will remember to take them. Experiencing the consequences of being healthier and having the internal feeling of doing something positive for your health will be a natural consequence of the regimen. It is extremely important to choose these behaviours with your employees. Simply giving them a list of behaviours without allowing them to be part of the decision process leads to less than stellar performance.
Increase the use of tools/equipment and inspection checklists. For us to be safe at work, it’s essential that we use the right tools and that those tools are in good working order. The right equipment to do our work is essential. Serious injuries and fatalities happen because of people using the wrong equipment for a critical task or when the equipment used is not up to standard. Each time we do an inspection, we should ensure that everything we need to do our work is in place.
Increase the observations of safe/unsafe behaviours. The real benefits of behaviour observations are the discussions they create — not the “observation cards.” Far too many companies gradually shift their goal to the number of observation cards.
Improve the number and quality of safety discussions. Have great safety discussions and meetings. We can do this by first defining what a great meeting would look like, and then go about creating meetings that happen the way we designed them. Participants in the meeting need to have the power to give input into the meeting process and content. Without their input, these meetings have little chance of achieving the expectations of the participants. Make the participants responsible for the design and quality of the safety meetings that are held.
Creating safety is much different than preventing injuries and loss. When companies change their focus to better align their safety activities to their business processes, their safety outcomes improve.
There’s an old saying that’s been attributed to a number of famous people, and it goes like this: “Do what I do and you’ll get what I get.” I usually like to give credit for the statement to Edwards Deming, who not only taught us how to improve production, but that if we use the same approach and processes, we’ll get much improved safety results.
Alan Quilley is the president of Safety Results Ltd., a Sherwood Park, Alta., OH&S consulting company, and author of The Emperor Has No Hard Hat and Creating and Maintaining a Practical Based Safety Culture. Visit his blog at www.safetyresults.wordpress.com.
Risky Business: The risk analysis game is changing right under our noses Featured
Written by Robb Knock Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Have asset-intensive industries learned anything from recent disasters and world events? Because the risk analysis game is not just for oil & gas companies.
Organizations around the world have grown in size and spread across the globe over several years with the nature, scale and range of operations changing with newer technologies and processes. In the face of increasing competition and demand, organizations, especially in highly asset-intensive industries like oil & gas, utilities, and discrete and process manufacturing, have ramped up their output generation by expanding their operational, production and distribution facilities and channels.
The risk analysis game is changing right under our noses, and not for the better. The resource industry, for example, may be grossly underestimating its potential liabilities. Over the years, potential liabilities from accidents have jumped from calculable with a decent level of certainty to incalculable with a high degree of uncertainty. Risk analysis and risk management are struggling to keep up.
Numerically speaking, risk can be simplified to a formula: anticipated cost multiplied by likelihood or, if deemed likely, multiplied by frequency. Common sense tells us, however, these estimates and predictions will never be easy. Actual costs from roughly similar operating failures and accidents can vary from a few million dollars to more than a billion dollars, an enormous range to fit into any calculation. Because they require predicting the future, likelihood/frequency can be even harder to quantify.
Among many other imponderables in risk analysis are the consequences of on-the-spot operational decisions that have enormously different consequences. An example comes from two drilling rigs owned by Transocean Ltd., one of the world’s largest offshore drilling contractors, and decisions made just a few days apart in April 2010. The decisions were to replacing drilling fluids (“mud”) with seawater, a common practice in offshore operations. On both rigs, blowouts occurred.
The blowout on one rig, Sedco 711 in the North Sea, was contained by the rig’s blowout preventer; there were no serious injuries and damage was less than US$10 million. The other blowout was the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. As it caught fire, exploded and sank, 11 workers died. For BP, to which Transocean had contracted Deepwater Horizon, that disaster has led to pretax charges against earnings of US$43.5 billion as of May 2011.
Virtually all industry players are rethinking how they design, engineer and build for the Gulf of Mexico. The same is true for Canada’s sprawling oilsands in Northern Alberta and the pipeline projects that get this oil to market.
Technological advances need to go hand in hand with changes in corporate culture. Designers need to speak out about risks they perceive and explain why they are skeptical. Risk analysts and risk managers need to be more open to the skeptics and be more skeptical themselves about safety margins, engineering rules of thumb, and industry standards that have been in use for many years.
Upper managements need to allocate time and money in globally competitive marketplaces for deep dives into real-world risks and liabilities, and ascertaining the ramifications of responsibilities and decisions.
In oil & gas, engineers are tasked with designing equipment that grows bigger and more complex every year. As every engineer is taught, uncertainty can grow geometrically, and perhaps even exponentially, as size and complexity increase. Layers of uncertainty pile on — starting with who really, deep down, fully understands how these enormous new oil & gas structures work. Economy of scale leads to mammoth projects to extract hydrocarbons profitably from increasingly difficult places.
Industry standards, safety factors and rules of thumb have a built-in bias toward incremental steps and away from innovation. And in part due to litigation, a hostile media and unfriendly regulators, risk taking is being discouraged just when it’s most needed. Unfortunately these challenges aren’t going away anytime soon. From a business perspective, however, understanding risks properly can be an opportunity to differentiate one’s firm from the competition.
Risk-analysis experts are fully aware that many time-honored guidelines no longer stand up to scrutiny. Common sense tells us these guidelines bear hidden risks of their own; over-reliance on them makes iffy situations worse. This adds up to what SimuTech Group regards as Exhibit A for the transformation in the ways we look at risk.
Engineering-intensive organizations, such as SimuTech Group, are being contracted more frequently to apply the latest numerical techniques and solutions — especially for analytics, the science of understanding inherent behaviors of systems. Our insights, based on decades of experience, are sought by many oil & gas companies to beef up their internal risk-analysis processes.
Over the past 20-plus years, we have learned that nothing is ever foolproof. Nor are there any straightforward, easily grasped answers, much as we wish there were. We at SimuTech Group believe the oil & gas industry has entered a new era of risk analysis and risk management. In this new era, anything may be dangerous if its engineering relies on outdated company safety margins/factors, obsolete engineering rules of thumb, or industry standards that no longer apply. We can help build the requisite body of knowledge, put it through peer review and then transfer that knowledge to the users’ simulation tools and, finally, add it to their best practices.
There are four fundamental factors in up-to-date risk analyses:
This means conventional, tried-and-true risk metrics cannot reliably assess the scale, scope and magnitude of foreseeable impacts — especially if the metrics are simply based on the costs of reimbursing customers for failed components, assemblies or systems.
Constraining the liability metrics to a bill of materials is completely inadequate and unrealistic. This blinkered approach can lead to grossly underestimating potential impacts. This is why traditional risk analysis is losing ground to the more predictive approach of failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
Other factors are at work in the persistent underestimation of risk. At the leading edge in any industry, accidents happen more frequently than across the entire industry; this is obscured by industry averages commonly used to calculate risks. Historical industry data underestimate future costs of spills, blowouts, fires and rig explosions; some indirect costs may have been left out.
Conventional risk analyses usually represent too conservative a view of conditions in the field, and often embody outdated views of components and systems. This gets to an engineering and risk-analysis paradox: What seems like a prudent, and even cautious, approach itself has hidden risks, in some of them unacceptably high.
Risk lies at the heart of engineering. For us at SimuTech Group dealing successfully with risk is the heart of engineering, and thus at the heart of innovation as well.
What to do? Start with words, numbers and expertise. “Failures in waiting” is a much more descriptive, and more accurate, way to characterize risks than “potential liabilities.” Viewing risk as the sum of potential liabilities can never suffice. It’s too easy to ignore or rationalize away, and won’t grab the attention of hard-pressed upper managements. “Potential” merely implies a probabilistic eventuality, a statistical function, a bell-shaped curve. Statistics, dry or otherwise, rarely change the course of events except maybe after the fact, when it’s too late.
Then insist on questioning all the numbers in every risk evaluation. That won’t be easy, of course, but avoiding euphemisms in favor of more compelling terminology should help garner the necessary support in time, data and budget. And finally, outside expertise can be of enormous value. n
Robb Knock is the regional director of SimuTech Group Inc. in Calgary, and he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . For more information, visit www.simutechgroup.com.
Organizations around the world have grown in size and spread across the globe over several years with the nature, scale and range of operations changing with newer technologies and processes. In the face of increasing competition and demand, organizations, especially in highly asset-intensive industries like oil & gas, utilities, and discrete and process manufacturing, have ramped up their output generation by expanding their operational, production and distribution facilities and channels.
The risk analysis game is changing right under our noses, and not for the better. The resource industry, for example, may be grossly underestimating its potential liabilities. Over the years, potential liabilities from accidents have jumped from calculable with a decent level of certainty to incalculable with a high degree of uncertainty. Risk analysis and risk management are struggling to keep up.
Numerically speaking, risk can be simplified to a formula: anticipated cost multiplied by likelihood or, if deemed likely, multiplied by frequency. Common sense tells us, however, these estimates and predictions will never be easy. Actual costs from roughly similar operating failures and accidents can vary from a few million dollars to more than a billion dollars, an enormous range to fit into any calculation. Because they require predicting the future, likelihood/frequency can be even harder to quantify.
Among many other imponderables in risk analysis are the consequences of on-the-spot operational decisions that have enormously different consequences. An example comes from two drilling rigs owned by Transocean Ltd., one of the world’s largest offshore drilling contractors, and decisions made just a few days apart in April 2010. The decisions were to replacing drilling fluids (“mud”) with seawater, a common practice in offshore operations. On both rigs, blowouts occurred.
The blowout on one rig, Sedco 711 in the North Sea, was contained by the rig’s blowout preventer; there were no serious injuries and damage was less than US$10 million. The other blowout was the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. As it caught fire, exploded and sank, 11 workers died. For BP, to which Transocean had contracted Deepwater Horizon, that disaster has led to pretax charges against earnings of US$43.5 billion as of May 2011.
Virtually all industry players are rethinking how they design, engineer and build for the Gulf of Mexico. The same is true for Canada’s sprawling oilsands in Northern Alberta and the pipeline projects that get this oil to market.
Technological advances need to go hand in hand with changes in corporate culture. Designers need to speak out about risks they perceive and explain why they are skeptical. Risk analysts and risk managers need to be more open to the skeptics and be more skeptical themselves about safety margins, engineering rules of thumb, and industry standards that have been in use for many years.
Upper managements need to allocate time and money in globally competitive marketplaces for deep dives into real-world risks and liabilities, and ascertaining the ramifications of responsibilities and decisions.
In oil & gas, engineers are tasked with designing equipment that grows bigger and more complex every year. As every engineer is taught, uncertainty can grow geometrically, and perhaps even exponentially, as size and complexity increase. Layers of uncertainty pile on — starting with who really, deep down, fully understands how these enormous new oil & gas structures work. Economy of scale leads to mammoth projects to extract hydrocarbons profitably from increasingly difficult places.
Industry standards, safety factors and rules of thumb have a built-in bias toward incremental steps and away from innovation. And in part due to litigation, a hostile media and unfriendly regulators, risk taking is being discouraged just when it’s most needed. Unfortunately these challenges aren’t going away anytime soon. From a business perspective, however, understanding risks properly can be an opportunity to differentiate one’s firm from the competition.
Risk-analysis experts are fully aware that many time-honored guidelines no longer stand up to scrutiny. Common sense tells us these guidelines bear hidden risks of their own; over-reliance on them makes iffy situations worse. This adds up to what SimuTech Group regards as Exhibit A for the transformation in the ways we look at risk.
Engineering-intensive organizations, such as SimuTech Group, are being contracted more frequently to apply the latest numerical techniques and solutions — especially for analytics, the science of understanding inherent behaviors of systems. Our insights, based on decades of experience, are sought by many oil & gas companies to beef up their internal risk-analysis processes.
Over the past 20-plus years, we have learned that nothing is ever foolproof. Nor are there any straightforward, easily grasped answers, much as we wish there were. We at SimuTech Group believe the oil & gas industry has entered a new era of risk analysis and risk management. In this new era, anything may be dangerous if its engineering relies on outdated company safety margins/factors, obsolete engineering rules of thumb, or industry standards that no longer apply. We can help build the requisite body of knowledge, put it through peer review and then transfer that knowledge to the users’ simulation tools and, finally, add it to their best practices.
There are four fundamental factors in up-to-date risk analyses:
- Accidents and spills, even in remote areas, are televised and often go viral on YouTube and other social media.
- There is no real security for corporate and professional reputations in conforming to guidelines, yesterday’s or today’s. Many once-reliable margins, rules and standards have been made irrelevant. They are industry road kill, kicked to the curb by technology, economics and the steady accumulation of experience and understanding of the systems and components we build.
- Caps on damage liabilities, statutory or otherwise, have been made meaningless by litigation, especially in the U.S. Litigation can dwarf all the other costs of an accident combined; for engineers, it is becoming the risk factor.
- Liabilities have become open ended and can quickly can add two or three zeroes to a company’s exposure.
This means conventional, tried-and-true risk metrics cannot reliably assess the scale, scope and magnitude of foreseeable impacts — especially if the metrics are simply based on the costs of reimbursing customers for failed components, assemblies or systems.
Constraining the liability metrics to a bill of materials is completely inadequate and unrealistic. This blinkered approach can lead to grossly underestimating potential impacts. This is why traditional risk analysis is losing ground to the more predictive approach of failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
Other factors are at work in the persistent underestimation of risk. At the leading edge in any industry, accidents happen more frequently than across the entire industry; this is obscured by industry averages commonly used to calculate risks. Historical industry data underestimate future costs of spills, blowouts, fires and rig explosions; some indirect costs may have been left out.
Conventional risk analyses usually represent too conservative a view of conditions in the field, and often embody outdated views of components and systems. This gets to an engineering and risk-analysis paradox: What seems like a prudent, and even cautious, approach itself has hidden risks, in some of them unacceptably high.
Risk lies at the heart of engineering. For us at SimuTech Group dealing successfully with risk is the heart of engineering, and thus at the heart of innovation as well.
What to do? Start with words, numbers and expertise. “Failures in waiting” is a much more descriptive, and more accurate, way to characterize risks than “potential liabilities.” Viewing risk as the sum of potential liabilities can never suffice. It’s too easy to ignore or rationalize away, and won’t grab the attention of hard-pressed upper managements. “Potential” merely implies a probabilistic eventuality, a statistical function, a bell-shaped curve. Statistics, dry or otherwise, rarely change the course of events except maybe after the fact, when it’s too late.
Then insist on questioning all the numbers in every risk evaluation. That won’t be easy, of course, but avoiding euphemisms in favor of more compelling terminology should help garner the necessary support in time, data and budget. And finally, outside expertise can be of enormous value. n
Robb Knock is the regional director of SimuTech Group Inc. in Calgary, and he can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . For more information, visit www.simutechgroup.com.
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10 eye injury pitfalls to watch for at work Featured
Written by Michelle Morra with COS Tuesday, 06 December 2011
Wear your safety glasses. It’s a simple rule, and one that workers obey more than ever thanks to awareness campaigns, enforcement and the wide array of technologically advanced, funky-looking protective eyewear on the market today. Yet many Canadian eyes remain unprotected, with injuries occurring at an alarming rate. A recent study found that 60 per cent of workplace eye injuries result from not wearing eye protection.
What goes wrong
COS asked Gerry Culina, manager of general health and safety services at the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), about some of the common errors or deficiencies in the workplace that can lead to eye injuries. Here’s what he says can go wrong:
Not knowing the hazards — It’s important to conduct a needs assessment, since whether or not you need eye protection (and what kind) depends on the work, the work environment and the hazards in the workplace. The process can involve, for example, a workplace survey that asks what types of accidents have taken place, what hazards people are reporting, whether the Ministry of Labour has ever issued an order, and whether someone has had an eye injury in the last few years. Inspect, audit, interview — do whatever is necessary to fully understand the hazards of everyone’s job.
Using PPE as a safety shortcut — The way to address a workplace hazard, according to virtually every safety authority in the world, is to eliminate the hazard at the source, eliminate the hazard along the path, and as a last resort, eliminate it at the worker. That means before relying on protective eyewear, it’s much safer to eliminate the hazard altogether or, if that’s not possible, along the path via labeling, administration controls, automating dangerous tasks, and/or keeping workers at a distance from the hazard. “The farther away, or least amount of time we can expose a person to a chemical or particulates, the less chance of injury,” Culina says. He adds that PPE is a short-term method that shouldn’t be considered a long-term solution.
Improper fit — The chances of safety eyewear fitting the wearer are greater now that manufacturers offer them in various shapes and sizes, a vast improvement over the one-size-fits-all era of the past. When selecting eyewear, make sure it is form fitting to protect the eyes from particulates and liquids getting in.
Inappropriate lenses for the circumstances — The term “safety eyewear” can mean many things, so know what yours is meant to protect you from. If it keeps out harmful chemicals it might not necessarily protect you from a high-speed projectile. If it’s practically bulletproof it might not necessarily be designed to keep out small, airborne particulates. Find out all you can about exactly what features you need in your protective eyewear. Watch out for tinted lenses. There are right and wrong applications for tinted lenses. They might actually be mandated for outdoor workers, as long as they have the appropriate UV protection rating. Some workplaces, however, forbid the use of tinted lenses, Culina says, because it’s hard to see out of them once you enter an indoor hazardous environment.
Not safety approved — Beware of products that call themselves “safety glasses”. Make sure they fit the standards referenced in your occupational health and safety legislation.
Wear glasses when glasses aren’t enough — Some work environments call for mono goggles or a face shield for maximum protection, or both safety glasses and a face shield. You wouldn’t want dangerous chemicals, for instance, to get inside your glasses and drip anywhere near your eyes. A workplace hazard assessment should clearly indicate what level of protection is needed.
The wrong lens for the environmental conditions — Some lens materials are made to withstand hot or cold environments. Get the right one to avoid the kind of compromised vision that happens when glasses steam up in a steel mill or frost up in sub-zero weather.
Wearing eyewear somewhere else (other than over the eyes!) — “Wearing safety glasses” doesn’t mean wearing them on your head or around your neck. Eye safety glasses are for your eyes only.
Not wanting to trouble the employer for yet another replacement pair — Protective eyewear should be replaced if scratched, damaged or broken. Unfortunately what often happens, Culina says, is that workers who need prescription safety eyewear, especially bifocals or trifocals, tend to hang onto scratched, damaged ones longer because they’re so costly to the employer. The solution: Wear your regular glasses and wear mono goggles over top.
No access to an eyewash station — Again, your workplace hazard assessment should identify whether an eyewash station is needed, what type, and where it should be located. Currently there is no Canadian standard for the design or placement of eyewash standards for emergencies, but there is an American standard, ANSI Z358.1.
The water should be just the right temperature so that the affected worker will be abe to tolerate the recommended minimum 15-minute eye rinse. Some eyewash stations contain a saline solution that’s self-contained, eliminating concerns for water that’s too hot or cold.
COS asked Gerry Culina, manager of general health and safety services at the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), about some of the common errors or deficiencies in the workplace that can lead to eye injuries. Here’s what he says can go wrong:
Not knowing the hazards — It’s important to conduct a needs assessment, since whether or not you need eye protection (and what kind) depends on the work, the work environment and the hazards in the workplace. The process can involve, for example, a workplace survey that asks what types of accidents have taken place, what hazards people are reporting, whether the Ministry of Labour has ever issued an order, and whether someone has had an eye injury in the last few years. Inspect, audit, interview — do whatever is necessary to fully understand the hazards of everyone’s job.
Using PPE as a safety shortcut — The way to address a workplace hazard, according to virtually every safety authority in the world, is to eliminate the hazard at the source, eliminate the hazard along the path, and as a last resort, eliminate it at the worker. That means before relying on protective eyewear, it’s much safer to eliminate the hazard altogether or, if that’s not possible, along the path via labeling, administration controls, automating dangerous tasks, and/or keeping workers at a distance from the hazard. “The farther away, or least amount of time we can expose a person to a chemical or particulates, the less chance of injury,” Culina says. He adds that PPE is a short-term method that shouldn’t be considered a long-term solution.
Improper fit — The chances of safety eyewear fitting the wearer are greater now that manufacturers offer them in various shapes and sizes, a vast improvement over the one-size-fits-all era of the past. When selecting eyewear, make sure it is form fitting to protect the eyes from particulates and liquids getting in.
Inappropriate lenses for the circumstances — The term “safety eyewear” can mean many things, so know what yours is meant to protect you from. If it keeps out harmful chemicals it might not necessarily protect you from a high-speed projectile. If it’s practically bulletproof it might not necessarily be designed to keep out small, airborne particulates. Find out all you can about exactly what features you need in your protective eyewear. Watch out for tinted lenses. There are right and wrong applications for tinted lenses. They might actually be mandated for outdoor workers, as long as they have the appropriate UV protection rating. Some workplaces, however, forbid the use of tinted lenses, Culina says, because it’s hard to see out of them once you enter an indoor hazardous environment.
Not safety approved — Beware of products that call themselves “safety glasses”. Make sure they fit the standards referenced in your occupational health and safety legislation.
Wear glasses when glasses aren’t enough — Some work environments call for mono goggles or a face shield for maximum protection, or both safety glasses and a face shield. You wouldn’t want dangerous chemicals, for instance, to get inside your glasses and drip anywhere near your eyes. A workplace hazard assessment should clearly indicate what level of protection is needed.
The wrong lens for the environmental conditions — Some lens materials are made to withstand hot or cold environments. Get the right one to avoid the kind of compromised vision that happens when glasses steam up in a steel mill or frost up in sub-zero weather.
Wearing eyewear somewhere else (other than over the eyes!) — “Wearing safety glasses” doesn’t mean wearing them on your head or around your neck. Eye safety glasses are for your eyes only.
Not wanting to trouble the employer for yet another replacement pair — Protective eyewear should be replaced if scratched, damaged or broken. Unfortunately what often happens, Culina says, is that workers who need prescription safety eyewear, especially bifocals or trifocals, tend to hang onto scratched, damaged ones longer because they’re so costly to the employer. The solution: Wear your regular glasses and wear mono goggles over top.
No access to an eyewash station — Again, your workplace hazard assessment should identify whether an eyewash station is needed, what type, and where it should be located. Currently there is no Canadian standard for the design or placement of eyewash standards for emergencies, but there is an American standard, ANSI Z358.1.
The water should be just the right temperature so that the affected worker will be abe to tolerate the recommended minimum 15-minute eye rinse. Some eyewash stations contain a saline solution that’s self-contained, eliminating concerns for water that’s too hot or cold.
Michelle Morra is a freelance writer with Canadian Occupation Safety magazine.
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10 steps to achieving machine safety in the workplace
Written by Mary Del Ciancio Wednesday, 30 November 2011
The majority of Canadian manufacturers understand their responsibilities when it comes to machine safety - that employers are required to take reasonable steps to prevent bodily harm in the workplace. But many of them are unknowingly applying the wrong solution, or misapplying safeguarding solutions, resulting in the loss of productivity and opening themselves up to injury - or worse.This was the message from the group of six safety experts who travelled to Aurora, Ont., in October for Manufacturing AUTOMATION's third annual machine safety roundtable. (This magazine is a sister publication.)
"I think in most cases," says Calvin Wallace, regional sales manager with Beckhoff Automation, "the biggest challenge end users would have right now is properly implementing all of the safety devices and systems that they are purchasing. They are spending a lot of money to attempt to have safe machines. Are they truly implementing safe systems?"
Wallace then turned to fellow panelist Ryan Conlin, a partner with SBH Management Lawyers, and said: "I'm sure you meet people all the time who say, 'I thought the machine was safe.'"
"Oh, absolutely," says Conlin. "'I never could have imagined that this would happen. We had no idea.' If I had a dollar for every time I heard that. It's a very common thing, because a lot of accidents are not foreseeable," he explains. "What you're expected to do is to take into account that the workers that are going to come in make mistakes and to think of the unanticipated."
With that in mind, the six panelists offered their thoughts on how to achieve a safe workplace during the 90-minute lively discussion.
Thank you to this year's participants: Ian Brough, safety applications specialist, Sick Inc.; Darren Osmond, technical sales specialist, Jokab Safety, ABB Inc.; Calvin Wallace, regional sales manager, Beckhoff Automation; Ryan Conlin, a partner with SBH Management Lawyers; Stephen Loftus, general manager, Innovative Automation, a custom machine manufacturer building industrial automation solutions - and a Canada's Safest Employer winner; and Michael Wilson, machine guarding specialist, Workplace Safety and Prevention Services.
1. Think about safety from the beginning.
"When we quote the supply of equipment, a big part of the explanation of the pricing has to do with the safety," says Stephen Loftus, general manager with Innovative Automation, a custom machine manufacturer building industrial automation solutions. "And if it's going up for competitive bid, are all of the machinery builders supplying a safe system? I would question that. A lot of people bid what the customer asks for, and if it's not up to standards, the thought process is, well, we'll have to deal with that later, which, in reality, is a huge cost impact to that customer. It needs to be explained to them so that they understand that engineering prior to build is much cheaper than modification on their floor after the equipment is built."
2. Assess risk.
What's unfortunate, says Darren Osmond, technical sales specialist with Jokab Safety, ABB Inc., is that many customers have not conducted a formal risk assessment on their equipment. "They don't even know what it is and how to start one," he says.
"I think people in the safety industry talk about it a lot, but a formal risk assessment really isn't a concept that a lot of people are aware of or follow," says Wallace, adding that a risk assessment can open the door to savings. "Your risk assessment will tell you what performance level your control systems and your electrical design need to meet. So without a risk assessment, in a lot of cases, people are potentially spending more money on the safety process than they need. Perhaps they don't need full category 4...If you do a proper risk assessment, in a lot of cases, you're able to design the safety systems to the risk to be determined. So there is an opportunity for savings there."
Ian Brough, safety applications specialist with Sick Inc., says that some standards are changing to require users to conduct risk assessments. For example, the CSA's robot safety standard - Z434 - is going to require all adopters to conduct a risk assessment.
"The very first thing they'll ask the user to do is perform a risk assessment," he says. "What the standards are now going to require is that you formally document that, so you can say, 'This is how we analysed the risk.'"
Osmond reminds end users that a risk assessment is an ongoing, live document. "If something changes, the process changes, you have to keep updating it."
3. Select the right people.
Who should conduct the risk assessment, and what type of due diligence should an employer do to ensure that they have the appropriate person conducting their risk assessment?
Michael Wilson, machine guarding specialist with Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, says that many companies already have that expertise in house.
"They have operators who do the job every day who know exactly what they're dealing with [in terms of risk]. What they may lack on occasion is simply, how does the [risk assessment] process go, how do I put this into print, what are some of the tools I can use," Wilson says.
"The people that operate the equipment, the people that supervise that department, most of them can do the risk assessment," says Loftus. "I think it's critical that everybody does the risk assessments. They may need to look for somebody to help them with the solutions, but the first step is to actually do the risk assessment and identify the hazards."
"A lot of end users I find, and more the smaller type companies, they're hiring people to come in and do the risk assessments for them, but those people that they're hiring to do the risk assessment don't understand their culture; they don't understand their machinery; they don't know that Joe comes in once a month to get underneath the machine to do a special function. So I think it's really key that the risk assessment is done by the [end user] with the appropriate person, a qualified person, to come in and help them," says Osmond.
"The best risk assessments, risk analysis, risk reductions, safeguarding strategies or safe strategies are performed by a number of people; it's not just by an engineer or by purchasing or by maintenance. Involve the operators," Brough says.
Whether you're hiring a safety consultant to conduct a risk assessment, or a professional engineer to conduct a Pre-Start Health and Safety Review, Conlin says to make sure they are qualified.
"In the court of law, to be qualified to testify as an expert, you'd have to show me that you have, not only a licence, but thousands of hours of experience in actually doing something and having the background...And there's many of them that I've seen who are out there doing this kind of stuff where there's not a snowball's chance that a judge would ever qualify them as an expert because they just don't have the background," he says.
Conlin recommends you do your homework. "Did you check the references for this person? Could you name four or five other guarding projects they worked on, along with a contact person? Did you phone that person? Did you get a copy of their CV?"
4. Find the appropriate solution.
If there is an incentive to bypass the guard, says Brough, "clearly things have been done that impede the operator's job, impede the production of the machine, and that is the number one worst kind of guard."
"It goes back to the risk and dealing with the operators, dealing with the maintenance people and understanding how that safety system needs to function within that particular business," says Wilson. "We can't take company A and say here's a cookie cutter safety solution that needs to fit their operation, again, because we don't want to impede productivity...But again at the same time, we need to work safely. So let's understand what we're dealing with and apply a solution that works best for us that might not only not impact productivity, but certainly make a safe environment to work in as well.
"We recommend that they talk to people on the floor, so that when you are applying that safeguard, it's not impeding your process, it's not going to make things take longer," Wilson continues. "Let's talk to those people, let's understand how they work, let's make the solution fit the operation, and make sure everybody works safely. What happens sometimes is that some people think it is conflicting, if you will, productivity versus safety, which is really not the case. Safety is part of your business. It's just a matter of applying those tools and moving forward."
Wallace says determining the appropriate solution starts with determining the proper standards to use. "Defining your machine and being able to define your machine clear enough to match it to the standards, I think that's the challenge. I think once you're able to match your machine or your application to a standard, then it's pretty clear cut."
Loftus says that it's important to make it a competitive process and get several quotes. "I would find two or three people, look at different thoughts, different ideas that people have. And pick the one that actually suits your business best."
Wallace adds that when users are evaluating safety upgrades, it's also an opportunity to evaluate their processes.
"I think it's an opportunity to evaluate their process at the same time, to see, we're not just putting gates up and electrical switches and safety systems; what we're doing is, can we evaluate our process...How can we possibly change our process to ensure that the operators don't get frustrated and encouraged to override switches and so on."
5. Apply the solution correctly.
Brough questions how many guards are actually applied correctly. "I think we can probably answer that probably 80 to 90 percent of most safeguarding devices aren't installed correctly or at the appropriate safety distance. The other 10 percent are probably not wired right. And almost all of them, [if] it's some kind of a guard, just throw it on and hope for the best."
Osmond agrees that sometimes devices are not installed correctly or appropriately. "I look at how many light curtains you sell versus how many stop time analyzers you sell. Everybody who owns a light curtain really should have a stop time analyzer. You should know what the stop time is and what the proper safety distance is, but people don't. They pick the light curtain and they mount it where it's convenient."
"One of the biggest pet peeves is the application of, let's call them light curtains or guarding, and it's misapplied," explains Loftus. "People put light curtains on, there's no reaction time for the equipment, the reach through time on it won't allow the machine to stop in time to actually perform the function that it's put in place for. So, now not only do you have an unsafe piece of equipment, you have a perception that it's safe, which actually in my mind makes it worse than not having anything there."
Wallace agrees. "I do think in a lot of cases, a lot of companies are spending the money, but the implementation of the hardware isn't correct...I see it over and over and over where the money is spent, and it's still not really safe."
6. Comply with machine guarding standards.
"Safeguarding standards, robot safeguarding, press safeguarding - Those standards exist and are created by organizations like the CSA to help show people how to achieve safety around their machinery, as opposed to the why," says Wilson. "And really they do represent the latest technology, the latest thinking."
Osmond calls machine safety standards "the minimum requirements." He uses an example from a colleague: "If your kids come home from school and they get a D, [do] we all celebrate and take them to McDonalds? No, that's not the case. We don't celebrate. We actually work them towards the A. And I think that's what's important for [end users] to understand. Just getting the minimum requirements, getting a D, is sometimes not enough."
7. Safe design.
Loftus says that the best way to avoid the misapplication of safeguarding devices is to engineer the hazard out of the machinery during the design phase.
"If I can eliminate the hazard, there's no need for any of this [safety] equipment or very little of it," he says. "Now I have less restrictions on my machinery, probably easier flow, your operator is now closer to the work...We have some cells where the operators are back 36, 40 inches from the work area just because of the energy within the system when it's moving and the time it takes to stop it. So now you look at an operator who is loading a machine less than once a minute, who is walking 40 inches in, 40 inches out, to unload a machine and the same thing to load it. You're putting a lot of miles on in a day just to operate that piece of equipment...You've got to change all of that so that you come up with a method that is efficient, doesn't create other ergo issues with the operator, and reduces your costs for implementation."
"Safe design is a far, far, far, far superior strategy," agrees Brough. "Where safe design doesn't work, then you look at safeguarding technology."
"The safe design system would work with newer equipment," says Osmond. "But there's still a lot of old equipment out there that needs to be retrofitted, and engineering out the process is sometimes not as easy as applying the secondary measure in our hierarchy of safeguarding, which is applying safeguarding systems."
"With the newer technologies that are coming out, I think there are a lot more elegant solutions available to machine builders and end users for retrofits, and I think that we'll continue to make safer machines for operators," says Wallace.
8. Build a culture of safety.
"A good percentage of machine guarding cases are...tampering and defeating machine guarding systems that, if they were in place, would have prevented the accident," explains Conlin. "It's not a failure necessarily of guarding, but a failure of supervision. If you have people tampering with guards and your supervision isn't doing anything about it, you're grossly contravening health and safety legislation, and there's a bigger problem with your system than just the physical machine guards. The supervision has to go hand in hand. There's got to be a culture that guards can't be tampered with, and the second that's tolerated, the second you are in complete non-compliance, in my view.
"I think that organizations really need to look at safety starting from the top in terms of a safety culture," adds Conlin. "If you build a culture of safety in your organization, my perspective is the rest will take care of itself."
9. Measure the effectiveness of your safety strategy.
"I'd say that one of the biggest things you need to take a look at is the difference between what's on paper and what's in reality," explains Conlin. "If you have a system in your safety manual that says your machines will be audited for guarding risks or other safety risks on an annual basis, and then a Ministry of Labour inspector asks, 'Well have you done them? Well, I don't have any records whatsoever of that, it's never actually been done.' That's the number one thing. Is your program that you have written down, does it conform with reality?...And I can't tell you how many court decisions there are out there that say, 'Well the safety system on the ground is not the safety system in the book.' And so the employer's due diligence defence fails."
10. Be educated.
Loftus, whose company was the recent recipient of a Canada's Safest Employer Award, says that the key to safeguarding success is education. "The bottom line is that our employees understand the whole process. They're educated in the process because it's part of what we do, and then they apply it to our own manufacturing."
Brough agrees. "I think probably the common thread here is education - for the plant, for the user," he says. "Knowing about the latest technology; knowing about the latest legal requirements. Education is the biggest thing."
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2011 issue of Manufacturing AUTOMATION.
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Digitally Safe: Mobile systems improve safety-standard compliance and cut costs Featured
Written by Somen Mondal Monday, 28 November 2011
Mobile devices can help improve plant worker safety, ensure compliance with safety regulations and reduce costs at the same time. Thanks to advances in mobile hardware and software, safety management can now play a considerable role in broader efforts to enhance plant operations.
Worker safety has always been a top priority for manufacturers. But until recent years, inspection and safety compliance management (ISCM) technology had lagged other manufacturing technologies that have driven more efficient and cost-effective industrial processes. Increasingly sophisticated software and equipment have transformed plant operations, yet safety compliance continues to be stuck in a time warp of pencils, paper and filing cabinets.
With today’s technologies, the decision to go mobile is easier than ever before. Here’s how it works. Mobile handheld devices are used to read RFID tags or barcodes, which can be attached to virtually any type of equipment where safety is a factor: slings used in heavy lifting, harnesses, fire extinguishers and much more. Used in combination with ISCM software, a record of each inspection is automatically stored in a secure, cloud-based infrastructure.
Inspectors can use the system to conduct facility-wide audits and to verify the safety certification of each item is up to date. Moreover, such systems are also suited for tracking employee training and certifications in much the same way they are used to track assets.
A record of each inspection is permanently available for review by inspectors, safety managers and compliance officers, ensuring a facility always ready for a surprise audit.
The benefits are greater efficiency and reliability in both workplace safety and regulatory compliance. Mobile ISCM systems, such as Toronto-based Field ID, overcome challenges faced by many plants: the complexity of managing safety inspections for numerous pieces of equipment; safety audit preparedness; accident readiness; and more.
Here is a look at some of the most common challenges:
Lots of equipment, too much paperwork
Larger plants may have thousands of pieces of equipment requiring periodic safety compliance inspections. This can generate a huge paperwork burden.
Mobile safety compliance systems make it possible to instantly identify each unique piece of equipment and automatically determine if it complies with safety regulations. These setups are sutied for handling safety inspections as they automatically upload results to cloud-based infrastructure. Electronic inspection certificates can be generated directly from the web. Paper, clipboards and filing cabinets are taken out of the picture.
A tangle of safety standards
Different types of equipment are subject to different safety standards and varying inspection schedules. This generates a complex web of inspections and standards that can overwhelm paper-based compliance management. For manufacturers with multiple locations in different jurisdictions, the complexity is amplified by variances in standards.
Mobile ISCM systems bring order to this complexity by automatically identifying each piece of equipment, and linking it to its unique safety certification checklist and compliance record. In effect, safety standards are built right into the system, with all documentation digitized and securely stored in the cloud. This takes the guesswork out of inspections and ensures compliance throughout the plant. Technicians can even use the software to schedule inspections for individual pieces of equipment, according to the standards and schedule applicable to each item.
Compliance uncertainty
With numerous pieces of equipment scattered throughout a facility, how does one find out quickly and with certainty whether an individual item not only complies with safety standards but also is safe for workers to use? Paper records housed in back-office filing cabinets make it difficult, if not impossible, to confirm safety and compliance status on the spot.
ISCM software, combined with mobile devices and bar codes or RFID tags, provide plant managers with instant access to the information they need. The status of any piece of equipment can be checked in real time simply by scanning it with a mobile reader, reducing the risk of non-compliance. More importantly, workers can know right away if a piece of machinery is safe to use.
Audit readiness
Safety compliance audits can happen at any time, without any advance notice. When an audit does occur, the search for paper records can become a scramble to prove compliance: Is every piece of equipment accounted for? Where is the documentation proving compliance? Are the records up to date?
Mobile ISCM systems like Field ID digitize all compliance records and store them securely in the cloud. Reports and safety data can be produced in real time, day or night.
Accident preparedness
Despite a company’s best efforts, accidents can happen unexpectedly. Should an accident occur at a plant, will they be ready for the investigation that follows? Cumbersome, paper-based systems can add to the challenge of quickly proving safety standards compliance.
Mobile systems make proving compliance fast and easy, 24/7. Not only do they expedite post-accident investigations, but they also reduce the risk of fines and other sanctions that can result if paper records are out of date or cannot be located.
Universal application
Mobile safety inspection and compliance solutions can be applied to virtually any manufacturing operation. Food processing plants, to cite just one example, can use mobile systems to ensure their food manufacturing processes comply with strict health and safety regulations.
Whatever the type of plant, the questions asked are much the same:
Somen Mondal is the CEO of Toronto-based Field ID. For more information, visit www.fieldid.com.
Worker safety has always been a top priority for manufacturers. But until recent years, inspection and safety compliance management (ISCM) technology had lagged other manufacturing technologies that have driven more efficient and cost-effective industrial processes. Increasingly sophisticated software and equipment have transformed plant operations, yet safety compliance continues to be stuck in a time warp of pencils, paper and filing cabinets.
With today’s technologies, the decision to go mobile is easier than ever before. Here’s how it works. Mobile handheld devices are used to read RFID tags or barcodes, which can be attached to virtually any type of equipment where safety is a factor: slings used in heavy lifting, harnesses, fire extinguishers and much more. Used in combination with ISCM software, a record of each inspection is automatically stored in a secure, cloud-based infrastructure.
Inspectors can use the system to conduct facility-wide audits and to verify the safety certification of each item is up to date. Moreover, such systems are also suited for tracking employee training and certifications in much the same way they are used to track assets.
A record of each inspection is permanently available for review by inspectors, safety managers and compliance officers, ensuring a facility always ready for a surprise audit.
The benefits are greater efficiency and reliability in both workplace safety and regulatory compliance. Mobile ISCM systems, such as Toronto-based Field ID, overcome challenges faced by many plants: the complexity of managing safety inspections for numerous pieces of equipment; safety audit preparedness; accident readiness; and more.
Here is a look at some of the most common challenges:
Lots of equipment, too much paperwork
Larger plants may have thousands of pieces of equipment requiring periodic safety compliance inspections. This can generate a huge paperwork burden.
Mobile safety compliance systems make it possible to instantly identify each unique piece of equipment and automatically determine if it complies with safety regulations. These setups are sutied for handling safety inspections as they automatically upload results to cloud-based infrastructure. Electronic inspection certificates can be generated directly from the web. Paper, clipboards and filing cabinets are taken out of the picture.
A tangle of safety standards
Different types of equipment are subject to different safety standards and varying inspection schedules. This generates a complex web of inspections and standards that can overwhelm paper-based compliance management. For manufacturers with multiple locations in different jurisdictions, the complexity is amplified by variances in standards.
Mobile ISCM systems bring order to this complexity by automatically identifying each piece of equipment, and linking it to its unique safety certification checklist and compliance record. In effect, safety standards are built right into the system, with all documentation digitized and securely stored in the cloud. This takes the guesswork out of inspections and ensures compliance throughout the plant. Technicians can even use the software to schedule inspections for individual pieces of equipment, according to the standards and schedule applicable to each item.
Compliance uncertainty
With numerous pieces of equipment scattered throughout a facility, how does one find out quickly and with certainty whether an individual item not only complies with safety standards but also is safe for workers to use? Paper records housed in back-office filing cabinets make it difficult, if not impossible, to confirm safety and compliance status on the spot.
ISCM software, combined with mobile devices and bar codes or RFID tags, provide plant managers with instant access to the information they need. The status of any piece of equipment can be checked in real time simply by scanning it with a mobile reader, reducing the risk of non-compliance. More importantly, workers can know right away if a piece of machinery is safe to use.
Audit readiness
Safety compliance audits can happen at any time, without any advance notice. When an audit does occur, the search for paper records can become a scramble to prove compliance: Is every piece of equipment accounted for? Where is the documentation proving compliance? Are the records up to date?
Mobile ISCM systems like Field ID digitize all compliance records and store them securely in the cloud. Reports and safety data can be produced in real time, day or night.
Accident preparedness
Despite a company’s best efforts, accidents can happen unexpectedly. Should an accident occur at a plant, will they be ready for the investigation that follows? Cumbersome, paper-based systems can add to the challenge of quickly proving safety standards compliance.
Mobile systems make proving compliance fast and easy, 24/7. Not only do they expedite post-accident investigations, but they also reduce the risk of fines and other sanctions that can result if paper records are out of date or cannot be located.
Universal application
Mobile safety inspection and compliance solutions can be applied to virtually any manufacturing operation. Food processing plants, to cite just one example, can use mobile systems to ensure their food manufacturing processes comply with strict health and safety regulations.
Whatever the type of plant, the questions asked are much the same:
- Do we have the proper records for all our equipment?
- When was the last time our equipment was serviced and maintained?
- What must we do to maintain compliance?
- Are we ready for a safety audit?
- Are we conducting and storing the required safety inspections?
- Can we provide safety traceability?
- Is the training and certification of our employees up to date?
Somen Mondal is the CEO of Toronto-based Field ID. For more information, visit www.fieldid.com.
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Locked Out: Unilever Canada improves safety and cuts downtime with RFID switches Featured
Written by PEM Staff Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Since opening in 1963, the Unilever Canada Lipton dry soup and side-dish production and packaging plant in Brampton, Ont., has undergone several expansions. As a highly efficient producer, this location was the choice for the North American production base for over 150 different Lipton and Knorr soups and side dishes. The plant encompasses the entire process, from raw materials and mixing to packaging and shipping. Unilever produces more than 30 million cases of packaged products annually at this plant.Today, the company continues to upgrade its practices and facilities to achieve its sustainability goals, including a plan to increase machine operator safety while achieving faster production through reduced downtime.
An inefficient beginning
One of the pieces of equipment Unilever upgraded was its Bartelt-brand form, fill and seal machine, which produces its Knorr Asian SideKicks. Rollers feed the pre-printed airtight foil into the automated machine, where the foil is folded, sealed on three sides, cut into separate pouches, opened, filled, then laser-labeled and sealed before it exits the machine onto a conveyor. This entire process is done within an enclosed Plexiglas environment to keep the product sanitary and still provide visibility into the operations. Plexiglas access doors at each station used magnetic safety switches with relays that signaled the entire line to stop when a door is opened. This was designed to protect employees from moving machine parts.
With the magnetic safety switch system, the operator panel displayed “Guard Door Open”; however, it did not tell the operator which door it was referring to. Various machines have between 15 and 20 doors, so machine operators found it time consuming to figure out which door was open and, therefore, which station had the problem.
The existing hard-contact, safety-interlocking door switches kept the employees and machines safe, but if an issue occurred with the switches, it caused downtime, difficulty troubleshooting and lost production. The existing magnetic switch system could also be overridden, potentially creating unsafe conditions.
“It took time to contact an electrician, him to get there and find the problem, then maybe he has to go get parts — it can turn into half an hour or an hour,” says Jose Suarez, plant engineer at Unilever Canada.
To meet demand, the company produces about 100 pouches per minute. He estimates the value of downtime is about $7 per minute — so every second counts. Downtime doesn’t stop Unilever from filling its orders though. They must make up the lost production with a second shift and overtime pay that increases operations costs and decreases profits.
Unilever needed a solution that could indicate which of the many doors was open and which switch is faulty that would not allow override and would reduce the amount of safety relays.
“We wanted better efficiency, improved safety and complete reliability,” Suarez said.
Choosing RFID switches
Frustration with downtime inspired an innovative Unilever employee to suggest upgrading the safety switches. Unilever worked with Concord, Ont.-based Gerrie Electric, a Rockwell Automation authorized distributor, and its sensor and safety specialist, Gadi Hamou.
The food producer began a sample of Rockwell’s SensaGuard RFID non-contact safety switch on one machine. The switch uses inductive technology for sensing, and the RFID (radio frequency identification) technology uses a code that looks for the matching RFID partner block before the machine is allowed to start.
The machine cannot be operated if a monitored door is open, and it is undefeatable to steel or magnetics so it cannot be held open and overridden while it is still running.The product is designed and built to global standards rated Category 4/SIL 3 per EN954-1, and TUV functional safety approved to IEC61508. LED indicators located on the switch give a visual indication of door status; indicate door misalignment and offer advanced diagnostics to help identify faults.
“The SensaGuard was the perfect solution for Unilever’s application,” Hamou stated. “The ability to provide indication lights and reduce the amount of safety relays made this conversion possible.”
This solution provided the ability to connect 15 switches to one safety relay to communicate to the main panel. The light indication on the switches provides the information to diagnose a problem. “Green indicates everything is good,
flashing red indicates that a switch in the switch string is open, and red indicates that a particular switch is open or the switch is faulty,” Hamou explained.
Results
Unilever Canada installed about 170 SensaGuard non-contact safety switches on doors on various operations throughout the plant. The solution had standard and safety products working together to turn the safety capital outlay into an investment with positive returns.
The indicator lights on the switches help minimize downtime and makes troubleshooting easier by pinpointing the faulted sensor and identifying it to the operator. It helps operators safely access areas of the machine where there is motion and gives them more control to keep the line running as much as possible.
“The operators on the new machines love these sensors,” Suarez said. “They can identify the problem without calling an electrician. It actually helps improve morale, as the operators can resolve the problems themselves and have a greater sense of control.”
Unilever Canada’s solution met the criteria it was aiming for: to indicate which door is open, which switch is faulted, and be able to fix issues without the assistance of an electrician, while also reducing the amount of safety relays needed on each application. The combined experience of Gerrie Electric and Rockwell Automation in machine safety and industrial automation helped them to understand its factory-floor issues and the solutions.
These switch upgrades have helped Unilever increase efficiencies by three percent over the past 14 months. Unilever has many more sustainability projects in the pre-engineering phase and plans to upgrade its remaining machines with the same SensaGuard switches over time.
This is an edited article provided by Rockwell Automation. For more information, visit ca.rockwellautomation.com.
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Located on the edge of Lake Ontario just east of downtown Toronto, PEM’s 2011 Maintenance Award winner is Pickering Nuclear — one of the world's largest nuclear generating facilities. The massive plant has six operating CANDU reactors, and all together, the station has a total output of 3,100 megawatts. Learn how the maintenance team does it all.- Better Physical Asset Management - Initiatives that Work (May 28.05)
- PTDA Canadian Conference (June 07.06)
