About 6 percent of workers are involved in maintenance activities on a daily basis, where they are exposed to a wide variety of hazards. Figures from EUROSTAT indicate that around 10 to 15 percent of all fatal accidents are related to maintenance.

So a one-day conference called “Maintenance: Do It Safely,” sponsored by EU-OSHA and the Belgian EU Presidency last month was particularly valuable. The goal was to show how safe maintenance could save lives. This coincided with the release of EU-OSHA’s report, “Safe maintenance in practice: outlining key strategies businesses should adopt to prevent maintenance risks.”

The conference noted that maintenance is not only necessary to ensure the reliability of physical structures and productivity, but also is important to safer and healthier working conditions. “While maintenance is essential to keep equipment, machines and the work environment safe and reliable and prevent harm, the maintenance work itself is a high-risk activity,” the conference said.

The report details how safety and health risks associated with maintenance can be successfully managed. Good occupational safety and health management practices are at the heart of reliable and safe maintenance. Worthy of note is the recognition and inclusion of Prevention through Design, a NIOSH initiative.

Normal safeguards not always available

Awareness, skills, training, procedures and PPE become more important during maintenance work, because normal safeguards no longer provide protection. Unplanned/unscheduled breakdowns require maintenance to get back into production. Such situations are inherently higher risk when normal safeguards must be bypassed, for example:

• Guards must be removed
• Two hand controls do not provide protection
• Power may be required for diagnostic work and trouble shooting

These hazards and hazardous situations cannot be identified by analyzing lost time or recordable injury cases resulting from different exposures. If your company is primarily “focused on the numbers,” you may be overlooking some of the highest risk situations facing your workers – maintenance work. Two other factors inhibit efforts to deal with maintenance related injuries and fatalities:

• Research has shown that these high-severity incidents have low probability. Unless you have a database of near miss incidents for maintenance work, you will not have past history to analyze. Again, the exposures in maintenance work are different from those in your traditional injury illness database.

• There may be hundreds (even thousands) of unplanned maintenance tasks performed each year in small and medium enterprises. Unplanned maintenance typically involves many more tasks than planned maintenance and may pose greater risk because the risks have not been analyzed.

These issues could explain why good companies have an employee fatality when their injury statistics have been trending downwards for years. CEOs and others ask themselves, “What did we miss?” Maintenance cases are typically infrequent but often high severity. The maintenance recordable cases will be different exposures than those that result in a death. Near miss reporting could provide a history – but few have it.

Elements of a prevention initiative

Make sure that your injury prevention initiatives include:

• A process for proactively identifying high-risk maintenance work:

–Talk to the workers and engage them in identifying the highest risk jobs.
–Use task-based risk assessment to assure that proper protection is provided.
–Observation

• Strong supervision
• Procedures
• Responsibility and accountability

If you have any questions, FDRsafety can help or feel free to contact me at mtaubitz@fdrsafety.com.

Those were the findings at a recent meeting focused on The Role of Leadership in Preventing Chemical Accidents sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Project on Corporate Leadership.

The preliminary report from the two-day workshop in Italy finds a close link between:

a) Safety leadership – the activities and behaviors of senior management with regard to safety and in particular to process safety.

b) Safety performance – the degree of success with which the company or organization is achieving its goals with regard to safety. Safety performance can be measured using Safety Performance Indicators (SPI), however it is necessary to be aware that SPI are a tool for directing the decision-making processes of management. They are not an absolute measure of safety and are not a goal in their own right. They are also not the only measure of the performance of the Safety Management System.

c) Safety Management Systems (SMS) – the structure of policies, regulations, procedures and processes which are designed to maintain and improve the level of safety within an organization.

d) Safety culture – The set of values attitudes and behaviors which characterize the operations of an organization with respect to safety”

Observations and comments:

a) It is long recognized that leaders are responsible. Let us make sure the often-heard cry from safety professionals of “We need more support” is never again uttered. Instead, let us make sure we say to CEOs, “You lead and we will support you.”

b) Excellent finding. For those who believe that focusing on recordable injuries will magically reduce risk of low probability – high severity events, please pay particular note of this. Having perfect JSAs for production workers does not address the real world risks of skilled trades or maintenance workers – or the potential for catastrophic events.

c) Safety management systems are the CEO’s tool. ANSI/AIHA Z10 is uniquely structured to encourage integration of safety with existing management systems. I am proud to be representing FDRsafety in the update of Z10, which is ongoing at this time.

d) Safety Culture is really a misnomer. There is only organizational culture. Safety must be a value within that culture such that safety is never compromised. ‘Safety culture’ suggests that there is also a ‘quality culture,’ ‘production culture’ etc., which establishes non-value added silos and competition.

Let us take a lead role in helping CEOs have a safer, more productive organization.

At the business level, we buy machinery, equipment and tooling that list conformance to appropriate standards. ANSI B11 (general industry machine safety standards), API (American Petroleum Institute), NFPA, ASTM and UL are only some of the dozens of standards developing organizations in world of industrial safety. We also have standards for procedural things like lockout (ANSI Z244.1) and management system standards (ANSI / AIHA Z10).

As a matter of information that is sometimes a point of confusion, ANSI (American National Standards Institute) does not develop standards. Instead, ANSI accredits over 200 standards developing organizations in the United States and administers the consensus process of development to ensure balance, openness and due process.

In the global arena, we find groups like ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) that are familiar to many. Less familiar is the fact that far more international standards are developed by organizations such as ASTM International and IEEE. The European Union has CEN standards that are roughly equivalent to ANSI standards in the US.

Voluntary safety standards are a complex and confusing world, and are akin to peeling an onion – there is always another layer – and sometimes you just want to cry. All of us benefit from the untold hours spent by thousands of volunteers who devote time and energy to develop the requirements that will protect the public and employees.

This is the first of what will be a series of blog posts to help HSE pros gain a better understanding by “eating this elephant” one bite at a time. For now, the answer to the questions of “What’s in it for me?” or “Why should I care?” is this:

Without voluntary safety standards:

• Companies would be dealing with a huge number of hazards that should have been addressed in the design phase of products or services.
• HSE pros would have to address increased residual risk because hazards were not eliminated and feasible engineering controls were not used. Achieving acceptable risk would require increased warnings, training, administrative controls and PPE.

Voluntary standards make the world a safer place.

OSHA recently decided to maintain its mandatory permissible exposure limits (PELs), rather than switch to the TLVs, designed by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists.

Critics of the TLVs have contended that they were scientifically invalid and developed in a way that did not allow sufficient outside input.

For a fuller briefing on the issue, read this article by the Patton Boggs law firm.