Fourth of July Fireworks, Be Safe Not Sorry

Everyone enjoys fireworks and around this time of the year, patriotic flashing colors coming from our neighbors' yards and shooting up in the sky cannot seem more appropriate. However, if you are one of the many Americans who celebrates the Fourth of July this way, it's a good idea to keep in mind that some fireworks can be dangerous. So when you go out this weekend to pick out Tuesday's firework line-up, it is highly recommended that you only buy consumer fireworks from a licensed store or stand.

Consumer fireworks regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission are packaged in bright colors and have safety warnings on the packaging. Typical consumer fireworks include fountains, cones, sparklers, fire crackers, bottle rockets and multiple tube products.

Illegal explosives are often unpackaged and are wrapped with plain brown paper. They are very unlikely to have any safety warnings, or place of manufacture. Many of them are hand made in illicit factories. They go by names such as M80, Quarter Stick or Cherry Bomb.

Also remember to follow these basic rules:

Only use fireworks outdoors.
Children under age 16 should only use fireworks with ADULT SUPERVISION.
Always have a bucket of water, or water hose, nearby.
Alcohol and fireworks do not mix!

Parents should pay special attention to children using sparkers. Sparklers reach temperatures up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. Children should not touch the lit portion of sparklers, throw them or play games with them. Sparklers can be dangerous, if used improperly.

Watch a 6 minute video on fireworks safety at http://www.fireworksafety.com/07/NCFSconsafety.html

For more information on safety tips, visit http://www.fireworksafety.com/.

The best practice of “5-S”

Among the world-class manufacturing technologies perhaps the most widely used is the 5-S system.

Originally conceived to create a clutter-free, well-organized, spic-and-span working environment in factories, 5S is now seen as a widely applicable concept regardless of industry and size of company.

Safety Links has almost 10 years of practical experience assisting our Safety Partners including government agencies, manufacturers, and even medical providers implement the 5-S system.

The principle behind 5-S is that in order to achieve high levels of quality, safety, and productivity, workers must have a conducive working environment. Conversely, a cluttered, disorganized workplace demotivates employees and hinders any attempt to improve their efficiencies.

Before & After

For more information about the 5-S System (Click Here) or call Trevor Reschny at 407-760-6170

It’s hurricane season- Time to think about your business continuity plans

Although a disaster could affect your company at any time, the beginning of the hurricane season is a great time to further develop your Business Continuity, Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery plans.

Developing a business continuity plan is an essential and unavoidable task. Although the creation of a sound plan may be a complex undertaking, it pays huge dividends in the event of an emergency. A great success story comes from one of our partners. In 2004 their Human Resources department would have lost the personnel records of over 1500 of their employees after a flood. Fortunately the vulnerability of their key business records was identified, and beginning the previous year they had digitized their paper records.

So what exactly is a Business Continuity Plan? In plain language, a Business Continuity Plan is how an organization prepares for future incidents that could jeopardize their core mission and their long-term competitiveness. These potential incidents include local incidents like building fires, regional incidents like hurricanes and national incidents like pandemic illnesses.

To start to develop or improve your plans follow these three basic steps.

Conduct Business Impact Analysis

The first step in a sensible business continuity process is to consider the potential impacts of each type of problem. After all, you cannot properly plan for a disaster if you don’t know the likely impacts on your business/organization.

A business impact analysis is essentially a means of systematically assessing the potential impacts resulting from various (unavailability) events or incidents

You should ask yourself “What do I do when we cannot use our facility?” or “What can I do now to better prepare my business unit to respond when our facility is unavailable?” Why it is unavailable isn’t the issue. It could be as a result of a fire, tornado or massive power outage. Consider that your offices and all of the resources you have available for day-to-day operations are no longer available.

The business impact analysis is intended to help you understand the degree of potential loss (and various other unwanted effects) which could occur. This will cover not just direct financial loss, but other issues, such as reputation damage, regulatory effects, etc.

Develop Plan

Creation of a living business continuity plan is far from a trivial exercise. Every aspect of the plan must be carefully managed to ensure that it does not fall short when most needed.

Having stated this however, it is equally true that the creation of a plan is often made far more difficult than actually necessary.

Essentially your plan must describe what you are going to do in the event of an emergency and what you are going to do to limit your losses?

For example, how will you communicate with your employees and the press? How will you notify your customers and key vendors? How will you ensure that you have what you need to operate if something happens? This includes business information, records, statements, and so on.

In this plan you must also define who will be responsible for what, how will you train your staff and employees, in addition you must define how will you update and distribute the plan.

Plan implementation, maintenance and testing

Having developed your business continuity plan, it is sensible to actually implement it and to perform an overall audit... not just initially, but at regular intervals. This helps ensure that it remains current, and that it stands up to rigorous examination. This should also cover all the plan's supporting contingency arrangements.

Various options are available. A common approach is to 'brainstorm' the plan, via intensive meetings and workshops. Another is to hire specialist consultants - recognized experts in the field.

Please feel free to contact Safety Links if you need any assistance developing or evaluating your plan. Whether you are entirely new to business continuity management, or whether you have an established contingency plan already in place, we can help!

For professional assistance, give us a call at 407-353-8165 or email at info@transportins.net to start your business continuity plan.

Let’s Not Overlook the Young Workers!

CareerSafe Online, an organization dedicated to promoting and educating young workers in the secondary and post-secondary levels on safety, has announced “National Young Worker Safety Day” on June 25. This is a smaller part of the larger safety campaign “A Million Safer: A Young Worker Safety Initiative” which its ultimate goal is to help 1,000,000 students attain OSHA training by December of 2015.

In order to raise awareness, the new campaign focuses on calling all the country’s mayors to participate in this initiative in efforts to lower injuries and fatalities in the workplace. Within the age demographic, every two minutes one young worker is injuried in the workplace and every five days, one young worker is killed. Eighty percent of this statistic comes from high school-aged workers.

Municipalities are encouraged to learn more and get involved. If you would like to find out more about National Young Worker Safety Day, visit http://www.skillsusa.org/ or http://www.careersafeonline.com/ to make a difference.

Working Safely With Nanomaterials

Recently, the topic of working safety with nanomaterials has been gathering more attention. According to The International Organization for Standardization Technical Committee 229, the definition of a nano-object is a material with one, two, or three external dimentions in the 1- to 100 nm size range. When arranged as a group, they are called nanomaterial. Basically, nano-particles are so small that they are able to penetrate cell membranes, integrate into larger molecules and sometimes even interfere with cell processes. This is expecially of concern when it could possibly be found in everyday cosmetics or grooming products that are highly under-regulated.

Resources with safety suggestions and methods for handling nanomaterial for research and development, however, are now easier to find. One of them by NIOSH, has been published as a public document with suggestions on engineering control and was created to be meant as an addition to an already established laboratory safety procedures and a chemical hygiene plan. A very thorough and easy to follow explanation of methods and suggestions, the main subjects to safely working with nano-particles in the document are as listed:

Risk Management- This includes the below hazard identification, exposure assessment, and exposure control.
Hazard Identification- Determining the type of danger a particle entails is part of this section. Also consider whether nanoparticles are hazardous by inhalation, dermal exposure, or ingestion.
Exposure Assessment- Identifying different ways of potential exposure through tasks done also help to safely prevent danger. Dustiness, process, and quantity, duration, and frequency of tasks can influence the level of danger when exposed.
Exposure Control- Some recommendations on control include elimination or substitution, isolation and engineering controls (such as containment or ventilation), administrative controls (employee training, labeling, storage), personal protective equipment (clothing, respirators, etc.), local exhaust ventilation,
Other Considerations- This includes scenarios such as fire control and explosion to spills management.

To view the full PDF document, visit http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2012-147/pdfs/2012-147.pdf.

Top Risk Assessment Mistakes

Here is an interesting risk assessment article found in EHS Today. Lyon and Bruce Hollcroft, CSP, ARM, CHMM are directors of risk control at Hays Companies and were present at this year’s ASSE Safety 2012 Conference on June 5 at the Colorado Convention Center.

According to the duo, the following lists the top 10 mistakes when a risk assessment done:

Failing to perform a formal risk assessment.
Failing to define the purpose and scope of the assessment.
Failing to understand organization's acceptable risk level.
Failing to assemble the best team possible to perform the risk assessment.
Failing to use the best risk assessment technique.
Failing to be objective and unemotional during the assessment.
Failing to identify hazards and see combined whole-system risk.
Failing to consider the hierarchies of controls or prioritize by risk.
Failing to perform risk assessment during the design/redesign stage.
Failing to communicate before, during and after the assessment.

"Figure out what you can share and share it," Hollcroft said. "Failure to communicate is a huge shortcoming when we conduct risk assessments."

To view the original article from EHS, visit http://ehstoday.com/safety/news/inadequate-risk-assessments-0607/.

It’s like a fully loaded Boing 737-700 crashes everyday in this country.

I read an interesting article yesterday about OSHA, safety and politics. Although I don’t agree with everything in the article I do feel it makes some interesting points.

What do you think about the article?

Please comment about it on our blog.

Now remember this conversation could get political so be nice!

http://www.nationofchange.org/us-steel-town-fatal-gas-explosion-goes-unpunished-osha-1337615484

Arc Flash Safety

The 2012 NFPA 70E, Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace, has been out for a while now. During the last revision cycle, the NFPA 70E committee received 548 proposals mostly (540 of them) from the public.

As a result, there were a number of new changes that occurred in the 2012 NFPA 70E version. Here is a brief description of some of the major changes:

Arc-Rated (New): The 2012 edition of NFPA 70E will use the term “arc-rated” or “AR” before any reference to “flame-resistant” or “FR.” The term “arc-rated” refers to a material property or attribute in terms of a material’s performance when exposed to an electric arc. Arc-rated material is flame-resistant, but flame-resistant material may not be arc-rated.

Incident Energy Analysis (New Definition): The 2012 edition features a new informational note added to the existing arc flash hazard analysis definition. It defines the term “incident energy analysis” as “a method used to predict the incident energy of an arc flash for a specified set of conditions.”

Arc Flash Boundary (Revision): Previous editions referred to the arc flash protection boundary. The 2012 edition uses the term “arc flash boundary” (AFB). The word “protection” has been deleted.

Section 110.5(C) (New): This section is new to the code and requires a documented meeting between the host employer and contract employer for multiemployer relationships.

Section 110.6(C) Emergency Procedures (Revision): The 2012 edition requires the use of an automatic external defibrillator (AED) in addition to the existing requirement of training and employer certification of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This is a great idea!

Section 110.6(D)(1)(f) (New): The language for this new section reads: “The employer shall determine through regular supervision and through inspections conducted on at least an annual basis that each employee is complying with the safety-related work practices required by this standard.” This mirrors similar language to the OSHA 29 CFR 1910.269(a)(2)(iii) standard.

Section 110.6(D)(3)(c) (Retraining) (New): The 2012 edition requires all employees to be retrained at intervals not to exceed three years.

Section 110.7(E) Electrical Safety Program Procedures (Revision): The 2012 edition incorporates language to include working within the AFB in addition to the existing requirement for working within the limited approach boundary (LAB). It is possible that the AFB could be greater than the LAB and vice versa.

Section 120.2(C)(2) (Form of Control) (Revision): The 2012 edition removes individual employee control as one of three forms of control of hazardous electrical energy, leaving the two methods: simple and complex lockout/tag out.

Section 130.1(A) General (Revision): The 2009 edition requires that energized conductors or circuit parts are placed into an electrically safe working condition before an employee works within the LAB. New language expands this requirement to apply if any of the following conditions exist:

The employee is within the LAB (same as before)
The employee is within the AFB
The employee interacts with equipment where conductors or circuit parts are not exposed, but an increased risk of arc flash hazard exists

Table 130.2(C) Approach Boundaries to Energized Electrical Conductors or Circuit Parts for Shock Protection (Revision): The 2012 edition features a renumbered version of this table as Table 130.2(C)(1), and it will specifically apply to alternating current (AC) power systems. A new table, 130.2(C)(2) applies to direct current (DC) power systems.

Section 130.3 Exception No. 1 (Revision): This exception is based on language found in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Std. 1584—Guide for Performing Arc-Flash Hazard Calculations. Exception 1 stated that an arc flash hazard analysis shall not be required on circuits rated 240 volts (V) or less and supplied by one transformer if the transformer is less than 125 kilovolt-amperes. This exception has been deleted. In its place, an informational note will state that an arc flash hazard analysis may not be necessary for some three-phase systems rated less than 240V. It will then reference the IEEE standard for more information.

Section 130.3(A) Arc Flash Boundary (Revision): The 2012 edition will not feature the “four foot rule” in this section, and there will no longer be separate sections for the AFB at voltage levels between 50V and 600V and voltage levels above 600V. The revised language will state that the AFB for systems 50V and greater shall be the distance at which the incident energy is 1.2 calories per square centimeter. Instead of the “four foot rule,” AFB will be located in Table 130.7(C)(9). This is an important one!

Section 130.3(C) Equipment Labeling (Revision): This section provides more guidance on what equipment needs labeling based on language similar to the 2011 NEC. Electrical equipment—such as switchboards, panel boards, industrial control panels, meter socket enclosures and motor control centers—and that are likely to require examination, adjustment, servicing or maintenance while energized, shall be field-marked with a label containing all of the following information:

(1) Only one of the following:

a. Available incident energy

b. Minimum arc rating of clothing

(2) Date of arc flash hazard analysis

(3) Nominal system voltage

(4) Equipment identification

(5) Arc flash boundary

Section 130.7(C)(X) (Hearing Protection) (New): Employees shall wear hearing protection whenever working within the AFB. Previous editions only listed hearing protection in Table 130.7(C)(10) Protective Clothing and Personal Protective Equipment and did not address it specifically. The new language clarifies when hearing protection is required as well as the appropriate requirements for that protection.

Category 2* Deleted (Revision): Category 2 will require a balaclava sock or an arc flash suit hood. There was an inconsistency with Section 130.7(C)(1), which required all parts of the body inside the AFB to be protected. This is an important one!

Section 130.7(C)(13)(a) (Arc Flash Suits) (Revision): Additional language state: “When the incident energy exposure is greater than 12 cal/cm2, a suitably rated arc flash suit hood shall be used.”

Section 130.7(C)(13)(b) (Face Protection) (Revision): The 2012 edition features new language in this section, requiring face shields with a wraparound guarding to protect the face, chin, forehead, ears and neck to be used.

Summary:

The 2012 edition of NFPA 70E established many positive changes and I only covered some of the major ones. To learn about the new standard and how to become a qualified worker take our NFPA 70E class. https://safetylinks.net/index.php/training/safety-courses-for-all-industries/arc-flash.

Tragic Vehicle Swinging Cranes Accidents

In 2009, more than 150 construction workers died due to being struck by vehicles. One of the most deadly hazards is being struck by cranes or crane parts. The following

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