Hidden in the stats: The dangers of maintenance work

Thorough recordkeeping is essential to a strong safety program, but even companies that keep good records may be missing something in their numbers: the high risk presented by maintenance activities.

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, feel free to contact me at mtaubitz@fdrsafety.com.