Mike Darby
Darby Electric Co., Inc.
During the Management Services Committee meeting held in St. Louis last fall, I volunteered to write a safety-related article about the importance of being observant in the workplace. As I started to work on the article, it became evident that my words were just a series of general observations to make sure employees and coworkers are thinking and practicing safety in the workplace.
Suddenly, it occurred to me because safety is SO important, the scope of the article should be expanded to cover more than making sure that employees practice safety. It should also provide tips on making sure that employees are working in a safe facility and use safe equipment, hence this more comprehensive article.
Human nature and behavior
The people working in EASA service centers are human, so human nature guides their behavior. To make my point, has your teenage son (or daughter) ever cut the grass and then parked the lawn mower where it was in the way when you tried to walk through your garage? Did you step around it twice a day for a week, then forget it was ever in your way? I ask this question to illustrate that humans have a tendency to accept things as they are, especially after seeing them enough times. Eventually, your brain decides that going around the lawn mower is the proper route to your garage door. This same kind of behavior can also take place in the service center!
Getting into a bad habit
For instance, if someone uses an extension cord with a frayed spot every day of the week (which we don’t do or recommend), he or she might tend to think of it as “the cord with the frayed spot.” In such an instance, the employee might use it carefully, rather than thinking of it as a cord that needs to be replaced. The word “replaced” is emphasized here because OSHA does not allow repair of extension cords. This particular regulation gets under my skin, because most of us are capable of using a male plug, a length of cable, a cable clamp, and an outlet box to build a perfectly safe extension cord. While some might consider this to be “manufacturing” an extension cord, an OSHA inspector might determine it to be repair work. So you might want to consider that.
Different kind of safety inspection
What can you do to make sure your facility is safe? Here is my suggestion: start with a safety inspection – now. We will assume that you already have a detailed safety inspection checklist and make sure that every item is reviewed regularly. I suggest that you conduct this review with a different point of view. Pretend that you are the corporate safety director of your largest customer. Put on a different hat before your walk-through if that will help you play the part more effectively. Ask a lot of questions, as this will get your employees thinking about safety instead of thinking about what size wrench they are going to need as soon as you get out of the way. I have found that if I stand up in a meeting and ask if there any safety issues to report, I will usually get noth-ing. But, if I ask about something spe-cifc such as tools not working properly or if there are air hoses leaking, this will jog someone’s memory of a problem that hasn’t been reported yet. This helps us take care of the problem BEFORE an accident can occur.
Creating an inspection list
If you don’t have a detailed safety inspection list, here is a way to create one that works very effciently. Start at your front door and map a walk-through of your facility that takes you to every one of your fire extinguishers. This will set up your inspection route for future use. Then list the extinguishers on a sheet of paper (in order of the route) and leave several blank lines between them. Then, as you walk from one extinguisher to the next, look at what you see between them from underneath your “outsider’s” hat. Don’t forget to check the extinguishers themselves. I once observed an outside inspector place an “OK” tag on an extinguisher that had a wasp nest clogging the nozzle. It’s a good practice to invert dry powder extinguishers and listen for the media to flow inside the tank - because it can settle into a solid mass over time. Read the labels to make sure that a dry powder extinguisher has not been placed where you require a CO2 model.
Check your electrical panels, portable tools, hoists, jib cranes, chain falls, nylon slings and cable or chain slings, first aid kits, lighting and general housekeeping. Open up panel doors as you go, checking for missing breaker covers. Look above and behind things; and write down on the checklist every piece of equipment that you reviewed. Be sure to check the labeling of containers and confined spaces. If you haven’t labeled a container, you could be liable for a fine, whether the contents are dangerous or not!
Formalize the list
When you get all the way through your facility, formalize the list on your favorite word processor, placing a blank line next to each item for check-off and inspector’s comments. You now have a detailed inspection checklist that you can use over and over. It gets the job done with a single pass through your facility. If you assign the inspection to a different person each month, you will get a fresh point of view with every review. Since human nature is still at work here, note that your staff will tend to look more closely in other employee’s work areas.
Keep your inspection records on file, and update the form whenever something in your facility changes. If an accident ever does occur, you will have objective evidence of acting in good faith to prevent the injury from happening.
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