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To best protect your employees, always look for ways of improving established safety procedures. Don’t assume what’s in place is as good as it gets. I am an HSE manager at a chemical plant, and we recently changed two safety protocols for one of the most dangerous environments for workers: confined spaces.
We had a man working in a confined space, and we followed safety procedures requiring someone to be posted at the entry portal to monitor conditions inside the vessel. The man in the vessel came out, saying that he suddenly felt lethargic. The worker at the entry portal checked the monitor and reported there was no issue. The man was sent back in and nearly passed out because the oxygen level had dropped below 19.5 percent.
Though workers had used flanges to blind the vessel, it wasn’t done as closely as possible to the work area. This allowed other workers to unknowingly access valves in between the worker and the blind. They released nitrogen into the vessel to clean it, which caused the oxygen levels to drop dangerously low for the worker inside.
This incident was a close call that could have ended tragically. We assessed our safety plan for confined spaces, and found two ways to improve it:
To ensure your employees are safe on the job, it must be understood by every level of management that safety rules need to be adaptable. As situations arise, it’s important to reassess safety plans and see if there is room for improvement. Having a positive safety culture is an important aspect of reassessing rules. Employees who feel supported by management will be more likely to come forward with valuable input and suggestions. Stay tuned for tips on establishing a strong, positive culture of safety.
Has a safety incident ever left you wondering why such a risk was taken in the first place?
Humans are hard-wired to be risk takers. It’s helped us survive as a species, but on an individual level, especially in a hazardous environment, risk-taking is not helping us.
To combat these instincts, safety professionals have to constantly sell employees on safety, especially in instances when the danger is very real but lies years down the road. It’s not that hard to persuade someone to wear cut-resistant gloves to prevent chopping off a finger. The danger is immediate and easy to recognize, and the solution is simple. It’s harder to persuade people to take additional, inconvenient steps to prevent a problem they can’t see or feel in the moment.
This problem came up for me recently. I was out in the field and saw a man with a very impressive ZZ Top beard about to start welding. Although he had his PPE, his beard prevented the respirator from forming a proper seal. Inhaling welding fumes damages lungs and can cause cancer later in life. The “later in life” aspect diminished the threat in his eyes. There were no immediate repercussions to deter him from working this way.
The alternatives were to shave his beard (that he had clearly been growing for years) or to find someone else to do the work for him. Neither of those options were appealing, so instead he planned to work in a hazardous environment without proper protection because the threat was invisible and easy to ignore.
I told him, “Look, if I let you weld like you are now, you’ll feel no pain. You’ll go home and I’ll probably never see you again. But I’m responsible for your safety. It’s my job to make sure you aren’t exposed to something that can cause you cancer 20 years down the road, so I’m asking you to shave for your health.”
As safety professionals, we run into situations like this all the time because we’re asking people to do things that don’t come naturally. Keeping your employees safe, both in the moment and years down the line, is our number one responsibility. It doesn’t matter if the job takes longer to finish or it’s inconvenient. Safety has to trump convenience in the workplace, even if it challenges our human instincts to take risks.
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