July/August 2003
By Mike Mattia
I received a call recently from an ReMA member. He’d been using our various Working Safe & Smart videos over the past several years to successfully train his employees. During a recent training session, he showed the videos on balers, shears, and conveyors, each of which includes graphic photos of horrific accidents in scrap recycling facilities. After viewing them consecutively, he called and asked me if researching and editing these tragic accidents upset me.
His question caught me off guard. In my 30-plus years in safety, I’ve seen human bodies mangled in many horrible ways. During my early years in fire/rescue, I learned not to be affected by what I saw so I could effectively provide emergency care to accident victims. This ability to not be shocked by graphic scenes carried over into safety management. It’s what enables me to learn from these accidents and teach the lessons to others. So I explained to the ReMA member that while I can remain calm when reviewing what happened to a worker, it’s why the accident happened that continues to upset me.
In Scrap’s September/October 2002 issue, I reviewed the 15 essential elements of an effective safety program. One of them is the importance of safe access. Safe access means that there are physical guards and protocols in place to prevent employees from coming into direct contact with hazards. Most of the terrible accidents I’ve investigated were the result of an employee walking, climbing, crawling, or falling into a hazardous environment. In most cases, there was no guard or barrier in place or the existing guard or barrier was ineffective, and there were no protocols to warn and stop an employee from getting close to the hazard. Even more upsetting was the number of times the injured or killed employee had entered the hazardous environment before the accident occurred.
I recall visiting one facility while researching information for the baler video. I was there on a day the company was having a blood drive. I recall talking with one employee who was nervously waiting his turn to donate blood. He very much wanted to participate in the drive but was deathly scared of needles. When he learned of the purpose of my visit, he told me that he had just finished clearing a jam in a baler. He hadn’t shut off the baler, much less locked it out, when he climbed into the feed chute to clear the jammed material. When I asked him how he could calmly endanger himself that way yet be so worried about donating blood, he replied, “I’ve cleared the baler that way many times without a problem, but needles hurt every time.”
Experience breeds complacency, in other words. Every time a worker climbs into a baler or guillotine shear or reaches under a moving conveyor without getting hurt, they’re reinforced to do it again and again. Unfortunately, the chance to learn from experience what not to do often doesn’t exist. That’s because most workers don’t survive these accidents, and the few that do survive can’t return to work with only one arm or half a body.
So, what is safe access? First and foremost, it is lockout. That means shutting off and locking out the source of power before reaching or climbing into any dangerous area of a machine. It also means blocking or bracing anything that could roll, drop, move, or otherwise hit a worker. Safe access also includes signs that warn against entry into a hazardous area. And, finally, it is training workers on all of the above.
Yet safe access may need to go further. As one scrap plant manager once told me, “We need to make safe access foolproof because there’ll always be at least one fool who tries to get around it.” This could mean installing a switch on any access hatch leading to a hazardous area. This switch would cut off the power if the hatch is opened. Most baler accidents occurred because the only way to clear an infeed jam was to climb up the conveyor and stand on an incline while trying to clear the problem. In contrast, installing a ladder and platform to give workers easy and safe access to the infeed provides a foolproof way to protect them if they forget to lockout the machine. Lockout should always be used in every situation. Yet if you also install or provide some foolproof concepts, then you just might protect the fool who doesn’t lock it out. •
—Mike Mattia, director of risk management for ISRI
I received a call recently from an ReMA member. He’d been using our various Working Safe & Smart videos over the past several years to successfully train his employees. During a recent training session, he showed the videos on balers, shears, and conveyors, each of which includes graphic photos of horrific accidents in scrap recycling facilities. After viewing them consecutively, he called and asked me if researching and editing these tragic accidents upset me.