For the first time ever, OSHA has made available to the public a decade’s worth of injury and ilness data. A searchable online database of 80,000 employers from the years 1996 to 2007 is now available.

“Making injury and illness information available to the public is part of OSHA’s response to the administration’s commitment to make government more transparent to the American people,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for OSHA.

OSHA also uses the data to target inspections. The Site Specific Targeting Program helps the agency focus its efforts on the appropriate area and industries.

Sometimes, in safety, people assume. Those assumptions can lead to some very nasty incidents. When it comes to machine guarding, assumptions can be deadly. Don’t let these common mistakes hurt you or anyone at your company:

Mistake #1— People assume that machines are safe when they purchase them.

This is a common misconception that ends up hurting people. Machine manufacturers are not responsible for guarding the machines they create. The consumer who purchases the item must evaluate the machine to ensure that all areas are properly guarded.

A simple, but effective tool is a machine guarding checklist that is used to inspect each piece of equipment in your facility. Use this OSHA resource to create a machine guarding checklist for your facility.

Mistake #2— People assume everyone understands machine guarding.

The idea of safety being common sense is rampant… and wrong. Safety is learned and, if safety is learned, we must educate.

Although many guards are created to prevent any contact with dangerous moving parts, it can still happen if an employee does not understand the equipment. Machine operators must be trained annually on machine guarding and the dangers they face.

OSHA states in their Machine Guarding E-Tool that we should train on the following:

1. a description and identification of the hazards associated with particular machines;
2. the safeguards themselves, how they provide protection, and the hazards for which they are intended;
3. how to use the safeguards and why;
4. how and under what circumstances safeguards can be removed, and by whom (in most cases, repair or maintenance personnel only); and
5. when a lockout/tagout program is required.
6. what to do (e.g., contact the supervisor) if a safeguard is damaged, missing, or unable to provide adequate protection.

Mistake #3— People assume machine guarding is good enough for lockout/tagout.

One type of guard is an interlock, a device which shuts down a piece of equipment when a specific piece of the machinery is moved or opened. This is a great way to guard machinery to prevent injuries.

It is not, however, acceptable for locking or tagging out a piece of equipment. Although the machine has been deactivated, it is not locked out. The threat of restart is still there with interlocks. Always use a full lockout/tagout program when working on equipment. Never rely on machine guarding to protect you.

Remember, machine guarding is extremely important. You could save your employees from losing time at work, losing an arm or losing their life.

A recent letter of interpretation from OSHA mandates high-visibility warning garments for highway and road construction workers .

“Highway construction workers should not suffer serious or fatal injuries simply because they could not be seen,” said Jordan Barab, acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA.

The new letter supersedes an earlier ruling requiring high-visibility garments only where mandated by the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). OSHA considers road and construction traffic a well-recognized hazard to highway/road construction workers, bolstered by Bureau of Labor Statistics data (2003-2007) showing 425 fatalities in road construction zones.

Image © Stephen Jacoby - Fotolia.com

Related posts:

How can 500 worker deaths be a worthy goal?

Coke is moving toward bottles made entirely from plant waste material. Plant bottles in bottling plants!

What may be the greenest material around? Steel. More is recycled than paper, plastic, glass, copper and aluminum combined. Steel is recycled from automobiles at a rate of 106% (because newer cars are lighter and use high-strength steel). See other impressive info here (opens a PDF).

Man trucks 400 miles with cardboard windshield.

Could the safety sign below possibly violate not eight, not nine, but ten OSHA/ANSI standards?

Yep. Take the quiz.

More thinking goes into the design of those things than you might guess …

I don’t want to include a link to the story, but I just read about a worker’s dying back in May while performing maintenance inside a large ice machine that suddenly powered up. The details are disturbing: OSHA found that the company had done nothing to protect workers as it relates to maintaining this machine: no safety measures or training. The person killed may not even have understood there was danger.

It’s a sad reminder that lockout/tagout helps prevent death and injury and that it’s vital for companies to meet their responsibilities to worker safety.

Quite a few Piggers were in on an email conversation last week regarding static-dissipative absorbent mats. I was asked to post some of my information from that.

A little background: Static-dissipative absorbents help reduce the risk of electrostatic discharge. This increases worker safety in fueling area cleanups and applications near flammable vapors. Static-dissipative mats are specially treated to meet NFPA 99 standards for static decay, which basically means that static charge is safely dissipated within half a second.

The material in our PIG® Stat-Mat® Absorbent Mats performs better than others we’ve tested. A particular competitor’s mat barely passes the .5 second static-dissipation cut-off, while ours does it in 0.01 seconds and has done so consistently for years. Another competitor’s mat isn’t bad, in a range between .25 and .35 seconds, but that’s still not close to our .01 seconds.

The big difference is in how the static-dissipative treatment is applied. We use a topical application while some folks out there use a polymer blend. Counter-intuitively, the topical application is better. The polymer blended material tends to “bloom off” the anti-static agent, as the agent isn’t compatible with the polymer, in as little as 6-12 months.

On the other hand, the topical solution doesn’t bloom off or lose effectiveness. We’ve taken mat from a seven-year-old PIG® Oil-Only Spill Kit at a local marina and sent it out for testing. The results came back like brand-new material.

This useful article on choosing reusable respirators highlights getting employee input

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Inspect any light poles at your site that came from Whitco Co. LP (now out of business). They may not be safe.

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Missouri lawmakers banned floating polypropylene but meant polystyrene.