Expending Safety Culture

Speaking on the topic of safety culture, among the first thing that come to mind is safety health committee, employee safety minded, safety campaign etc. Most of us will think about our own organization first because we are responsible for our own workplace safety.

When a contractor come to our facility, we will highlight to the contractor about our safety, health and security rules, and that is the extend of our safety culture to the contractor. How many of us will actually audit the contractor or supplier's safety management level. In the end, we will award the project to the most price competitive contractor.

Imaging a situation for a project procurement, one of the major criteria for contractor selection is the contractor safety grade. Only grade A and B will be considered. Now this will surely put a charge on all contractor or those with low grade to improve their safety level. To make it more thorough, to achieve grade A, the contractor's supplier must be of the same grade. So one drive the other to improve their safety culture. Take example of our Halal industry, one of the important criteria for halal certification is the raw material must be Halal certified. Same thing apply here, no grade A, no business. Now, we are talking money $$...more business opportunity if the company has good safety grade or certification. No employer will mention again "its costly to invest in safety" because it will cost more to lose business opportunity.

Hierarchy Of Control

The phase Hierarchy of control should come familiar with safety practitioner. There may be additional steps in the pyramid but for certain the top will be 'Elimination' and the bottom is 'Personal Protective Equipment or PPE'. Theoretically the best control is elimination of the hazard and the least prefer is providing worker with PPE because this does not eliminate the hazard, it just prevent the hazard from doing more serious harm to the victim.

In real life, it may not always be the case, For example, To eliminate a hazardous process mean you may need to redesign your process flow, create additional less hazardous process even re-arrange your shop floor to create a new flow. This cost involve will be huge. To substitute a hazardous material or chemicals will be require less cost than elimination, eventually you can get something which is cheaper then your existing chemicals in term of material cost or waste treatment cost. But this will require time and effort to research and develop the new replacement chemicals. The employer must be prepare to commit man hours for this to be successful.

So what do you do when your employer is among those 'making profit only' type. Instead of starting from the top of the hierarchy, we have to start from the bottom, that's PPE. Make make sure no fatality or serious injuries will occur. At the same time, start administrative control using method like standard operation procedure, safety precaution sign, limited access area, training and educate the worker, inspection checklist etc. This will create safety awareness in your workplace. So when the awareness catch up, your employer in the process will also learn to respect the safety element. Now you move to the next step, propose low cost engineering control to your employer like install emergency stop bottom, guarding, safety interlock etc. Then you move to higher cost engineering control method like fume hood, automation, conveyor system etc. Very soon you will be in the Isolation control  already.

Safety and health culture does not come overnight. It has to be nurture and grow.

Fire hazard from the sky

A floating object made of paper, bamboo, lid candle or wax. Some call it sky lantern others 'Kun Ming Den' is gaining popularity among the local during mid autumn festival. The lantern is release to the sky carrying wish or prayer from the owner. 

Sky lantern is banned in the US as it pose a fire hazard, as the flight of the lantern is uncontrollable, it basically follow where the wind take it. On air, it pose a risk to flying aircraft. When the lantern landed on the ground, it not just a source of ignition. 

1. lantern landed on the airport runway can mislead the pilot as a landing beacon. 

2. lantern landed on the road may pose danger to motorcyclist

3. lantern landed on petrol station, fuel storage facility, tire storage, tire recycling plan, etc. can be catastrophic

In Malaysia, under section 285 of the Penal cose, those defying the ban can be jailed for six months or fined RM2,000 while under section 5 of the Exlosive Act 1957, those found letting off sky lantern could face jail term up to five years or fined RM10,000. Unfortunately, i still see lantern floating around airport area each year.  

Today come across this news from Sarawak Tribune titled: 'Owner loses RM5 million after factory destroyed by fire'. The news mentioned the fire start at 2.20pm. when the owner heard his worker shouting that the factory caught fire. The owner try to put out the fire using a fire extinguisher but to no avail. The fire spread to the rest of the premise.

                                                                             photo taken from Sarawak tribune.

Beside the owner with his fire extinguisher, where are the rest of the workers? Running for cover or there is only one fire extinguisher available at that time. The number of fire extinguisher and their location in the factory need to be plan and maintained properly. The worker has to be trained on how to correctly use a fire extinguisher. For a factory like this, it should has it own ERT, emergency response team especially a fire fighting team. The members selected from different section of the factory. It doesn't cost much to train your worker on fire fighting as compare to install smoke detector and fire sprinkler system.

It might cost the owner to spend 1-2K a year to maintain the system. A few hundred to train his worker. But running the factory for 13 years without incident = priceless. In this case = RM5 million.

Conclusion: IF YOU THING SAFETY IS EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN, TRY AN ACCIDENT.

HIRARC Risk Assessment

HIRARC, hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control. Its a common name well known in the safety and health field. What is risk? Risk = likelihood x severity. Likelihood is the chances that an accident would occur. Severity is how serious the effect of the accident to the victim. If both are high, the risk will be high. Below is the guideline from DOSH for risk matrix.

	Severity (S)
Likelihood (L)	1	2	3	4	5
5	5	10	15	20	25
4	4	8	12	16	20
3	3	6	9	12	15
2	2	4	6	8	10
1	1	2	3	4	5

The green zone is consider low risk, the yellow is medium and the red is high risk. If you risk assessment put the risk at high. You better stop the work or process until you find a way to control the risk.

LIKELIHOOD	Description	Rating
Most likely	The most likely results of the hazard / event being realized	5
Possible	Has a good chance of occurring and it not unusual	4
Conceivable	Might be occur at sometime in future	3
Remote	Has not known to occur after many years	2
Inconceivable	Is practically impossible and has never occurred	1
Severity	Description	Rating
Catastrophic	Numerous fatalities, irrecoverable property damage and productivity	5
Fatal	Approximately one single fatality major property damage if hazard is realized	4
Serious	Non-fatal injury, permanent disability	3
Minor	Disabling but not permanent injury	2
Negligible	Minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, first aid type injury	1

One of the common mistake that some people make when assessing the risk is they don't take into account the current control measures and go straight into assessing the risk as there is no control measure in place. The is not right.

For example: for a worker operating a boiler. The likelihood an accident would occur is put 3 or 4. The severity is put 4 or 5. Because we think the boiler is very dangerous and could explode and when it does, there will be fatalities. But when you look into the current control measures like almost all boiler has to be inspected every 15 months by DOSH inspector and service by authorized boiler serving company. Not to mention the monthly maintenance by the owner. All this has reduce the likelihood and severity to 1 or 2 as accident could be slip or fall at the boiler area.

Always take into account the existing control measure when doing your hirarc.

Cold Room Storage Safety

Cold room, freezer room or blast chiller are among the name given for this refrigeration storage space. It very common among the food industry for storage of frozen food or raw material which require lower then ambient temperature of storage condition. What offend being overlook for cold room is the safety hazard it present. To maintain the cold temperature, air flow from outside is restricted so the cold room is build air tight. The insulation is so good that it is almost sound proved. Which mean that if you get trap inside a cold room, you cry for help wouldn't be heard form inside and you will soon suffocate and pass out due to lack of oxygen or intoxicated by toxic fume trapped inside.

Among the safety control that are recommended for cold room are 1. anti freeze door nope should be install on the inside of the room, to enable the entrant person to open the door from within in case the door is accidentally close. 2. A tool to force open the door or create an opening on the wall. It can a crow bar or an axe in case the inner door nope fail. 3. A third option is to install a alarm outside the cold room with the panic bottom on the inside, the downside of this is if your cold room is not humidity control, it can get very moist and it will damage the circuit for the panic bottom causing it to fail. 4. Establish a buddy system, where two workers are working together with one entering the cold room while the other stay outside. The outside stand by person should only left when the 'buddy' exit the cold room. In some case, cold room could be treated like confine space entry.