Operators of hydraulic excavators and backhoe loaders and those workers who labor nearby are often at serious risk of injury from these machines. Injuries and deaths can be prevented, of course, by creating a proper training regimen for operators and other workers, by the proper use of personal protective equipment, and by following proper installation and maintenance procedures.

Backed by several studies, the two most common causes of injury when working on or around hydraulic excavators and backhoe loaders are predictable. The first is being struck by the moving machine, swinging booms, or other machine components, and the second is being struck by quick-disconnect excavator buckets that unexpectedly detach from the excavator stick. Among other causes of injuries and fatalities are rollovers, electrocutions, and slides into trenches after cave-ins.

There are quite a few relatively simple steps that everyone can take to protect workers from injury while working with these machines, starting with the site set-up.

As the site is being prepared for work, contact local utilities for precise locations of underground and overhead power lines, and make sure you closely follow regulations regarding minimum clearance. Pay special attention to steep grades, and do not permit machines to be operated on grades steeper than those allowed by manufacturer specifications. Mark trenches and other excavations clearly, and instruct operators to maintain sufficient clearance from them, as well. Also, all safety programs should be based on the conditions at the site, and continually evaluated and revised based on changes in those conditions.

Operators should be highly trained in the proper use of the equipment they are assigned to operate, and everyone should make sure they follow manufacturers’ specifications and recommendations. All machine controls should be clearly identified and labeled, and be sure that all manufacturers’ safety features are working. Operators should securely latch attachments such as quick-disconnect buckets before work begins, and always follow the manufacturer’s instructions for using positive locks on quick-disconnect equipment. They should also be trained to conduct visual and operational checks on all machine systems and operating controls before starting the machine. When lifting materials with the machines, they should be trained to never exceed load capacities. And all operators should be instructed to lower the boom to a safe position with the bucket on the ground and turn off the machine before stepping off for any reason.

Other site workers should be fully trained to avoid unsafe conditions and to follow required safe work practices that apply to their work environments. This includes making all workers aware of the established swing areas and blind spots of the machines before work begins. Keep workers who are on foot outside these areas by marking them clearly with rope, tape, or other barriers, and use spotters or signal persons around operating equipment when necessary. And of course, all workers within the site should use and maintain personal protective equipment at all times. And do we have to say, never permit workers to ride in or work from excavator or backhoe loader buckets.

These are huge, and potentially dangerous machines, but keeping everyone safe around them just takes some common sense and of course, some comprehensive training, to keep everyone safe around them.

One worker was rushed to the hospital, two others were treated for minor injuries at the scene, and 25 other workers were evacuated after an explosion at a Calgary warehouse last week.

According to a City of Calgary press release, at approximately 3:20 pm, the Calgary Fire Department responded to a report of an explosion at the Foothills Industrial Park, in a warehouse occupied by Snap-on Inc. A worker was moving a 170-litre, 1.5-metre high drum using a pallet jack. The drum contained small butane torches which hazardous waste recycling firm Safety-Kleen was collecting, mostly from Snap-on customer returns, in order to bring them to another company for disposal.

The blast apparently occurred after the pallet jack hit an obstruction, which jarred the drum’s contents, and created a frictional spark that set off the torches inside the container. Because several other nearby drums also contained torches, the company called in the Calgary Police bomb squad to defuse the situation. According to the Calgary Fire Department, the situation was contained by about 8:00 that evening.

The pallet jack operator was taken to the hospital for injuries from the explosion, but was released four days later, and is expected to recover. Because of the size of the warehouse, there was little damage done to it.

Alberta Employment and Immigration inspectors issued a stop-work order following the incident, and both Safety-Kleen and Snap-on are conducting investigations, and will report their preliminary findings to investigators soon.

Workers at Fraser River Pile and Dredge were offered group counseling Friday after a deckhand was crushed by a hydraulic counterweight while painting a company-owned cutter-section dredge last week.

Aaron Sigmund, 38, was working the afternoon shift at the entrance to Surrey Fraser Docks when the incident occurred just before 7:30 p.m. Sigmund, a White Rock resident with a young son, had worked at Fraser River Pile and Dredge for a couple of years. He was doing some maintenance painting on the vessel when he somehow became trapped by a counterweight attached to a suction pipe and value unit.

Fraser River Pile and Dredge has been in operation for 98 years, and has 300 hourly employees. The company, Transport Canada and WorkSafeBC are investigating the incident. WorkSafeBC will specifically investigate what communication was going on between the worker and vessel operators, as it seems to be unknown how he got into that position.

Other workers on the barge and paramedics attempted first aid but couldn’t revive him. The company has provided group counseling to the nine other workers on the cutter-suction dredge who were working with Sigmund at the time of the accident, as well as members of the relief crew. The company noted that dredging is an inherently dangerous job and that they take safety very seriously.

Even in the safest work environments, stuff happens and people occasionally get hurt. Let’s face it; you’re a human, working around very heavy equipment with other humans. Therefore, a vital component of any workplace safety structure must be first aid. Not only is a comprehensive first aid regimen the right thing to do; there are specific regulations with regard to first aid, as well.

As required by law most places, every workplace must have at least one person present at all times with a valid first aid certificate. The type of first aid certificate needed depends on the type of worksite and the number of employees. You can find out what’s required by checking the First Aid Regulations, or you may contact the Occupational Health and Safety Division of the Department of Labour. Those regulations will also tell you just what supplies are needed in the first aid kit that is required at every worksite. Plus, if your business is not an office and there are more than 100 workers, you will also have to provide a first aid room at the worksite.

These first aid supplies must be kept in a spot at the worksite where they will remain clean and dry and be accessible to your workers at all times. All workers should know where to find the supplies when needed, and how to contact the first aid attendant at the worksite. The first aid attendant should also regularly check supplies, to make certain that they are not expired or used up.

On those hopefully rare occasions when an injured worker must be safely and quickly transported to a hospital, the employer is also responsible for that, as well. And if the injured person may need help on the way, someone besides the driver must go with them. If it would take more than 30 minutes to transport an injured worker to hospital or emergency care facility, your workplace is considered to be in a remote location, and you are required to have a plan to get injured workers out of that remote location, and to communicate with workers at the worksite. Your plan must also list the first aid supplies available at the remote worksite, and specify the number of first aid attendants required, and their qualifications. Note that first aid attendants as remote locations are required to have a higher level of first aid training.

Safety training is important, of course, but just as important is a detailed first aid plan, and personnel ho are trained to carry out its requirements. Regulations require a lot more than bandages and aspirin, and it’s a good idea to know what’s required.

I remember in my old shop class, we had a rack of safety goggles hanging up on wooden pegs on a board by the table saw. At the start of the class, there was always a race to the board to grab the best goggles. We had a few newer ones in good condition, the plastic was clear, the elastic bands were nice and snug, and there was no chance of them slipping and sliding all over your face, and the rest were uh… Covered in scratches, yellow and cloudy with age, and with straps that barely held the goggles on your face, much less in one spot.

Luckily, I never witnessed anyone “poking an eye out” as a result of these shoddy old safety goggles, but I have to say, that’s probably not how I’d run a shop class. The oldest goggles, you could barely see through them in the first place, and it wasn’t uncommon to see other students propping them up on their foreheads so they could actually see what they were doing.

I don’t know if the money wasn’t in the school’s budget to replace those old goggles, or if they just never got around to it, but either way, a few of the smarter kids in the class actually started bringing their own safety goggles from home.

Something I recommend a lot of workers do is simply provide their own hard hat, goggles, steel toe boots, gloves, whatever safety equipment they need, even if their employer usually provides them. I mean, this is your head on the line, literally.

Besides just making sure that your equipment is up to date, sturdy, and fits you well, there are a few other reasons to pack your own safety equipment and keep it up to date…

It’s common practice on construction sites, in power plants, etcetera, to keep a stock of “loaner” goggles and hats for anyone who forgets to bring their own. One construction site I visited actually ordered hot pink hardhats to easily mark the jokers who forgot to bring their own. Needless to say, after a week or so of that, they didn’t wind up having to loan many more of them out. That was probably the only time I ever saw construction workers whistling and cat calling at their fellow handymen.

I was just reading some news reports about legal cases where people had injured themselves with defective equipment (hey, you have to read stuff like this if you write a blog about safety), and the real tragedy about all of them is that these cases are often long and drawn out, and the plaintiff doesn’t always win.

The problem is that liability isn’t always so cut and dry in these cases. You say the drill bit just plain snapped off, the company says they didn’t recommend it for that kind of wood. You say a power saw exploded (this kind of malfunction is more common than you think), they say you didn’t run a proper safety check.

The companies who put out cheap, shoddy products do eventually get their comeuppance, but they don’t take it lying down. A company is going to do everything it can to dodge a lawsuit.

So if you use a lot of construction equipment, power tools, or anything else that can seriously hurt you if it’s not up to par, what can you do to protect yourself? If you can find a good lawyer in the first place, the company would rather spend a million bucks fighting the case than a few thousand to pay for your stitches, because being found to have knowingly put out a bad product, that hits them where it really hurts; not their wallet, but their reputation.

Just look at what happened to Firestone after all those tires exploded. A product recall and bad press aren’t too high up on any CEO’s list of ways to have a good time, which is exactly why they’re always more willing to settle out of court than fight and, possibly, lose a case.

So what you really want to do is simply prevent these mishaps as well as you can. It’s so hard to get money out of a power tool company that there’s actually a field of law devoted entirely to amputation. There are two things you can do to prevent injury, even in the event of a shoddy product…

Do your research

Check out as many customer reviews as you can and look for any comments on how safe the product really is.

Practice your regular safety routine

Check a drill bit for any cracks or imperfections before inserting it, wear your goggles and hard hat, and so on. It won’t prevent every accident, but if you get hurt while not following the proper safety code, that’s going to hurt your case.

This is worth talking about because, if you work in an industrial environment (and you like your skull just the way it is), you wear a hard hat, and the hard hat actually has some neat history behind it. With that in mind, I figured a Brief History of the Hard Hat might make for an interesting read. Consider it a little known piece of job safety trivia you can use to impress people with the next time you’re at a party with nothing to say.

Here’s something not everybody knows; the famous German author Franz Kafka (he wrote “Metamorphosis”, the one about the guy who gets turned into a bug) actually began his professional life as an insurance officer. While he didn’t much care for the ten hour workdays, which interfered with his writing, he managed to make a name for himself in the field, nonetheless.

While working at the insurance offices, he noticed that most worker’s claims involved head injury from falling objects. So, he invented the hard hat (and saved his insurance company a lot of money).

These first models weren’t quite as we know them today, of course. The first hard hats were actually made of leather, until E.D. Bullard, owner of a California mining equipment company, took a look at his son’s helmet he had brought home from WWI. In 1919, Bullard came up with the so called “Hard-Boiled Hat”. This was made of little more than steamed canvas and glue, but served as a lightweight, strong shell. Shortly after, Bullard was commissioned by the US Navy to create a protective cap for shipyard workers, and from there, the use of hard hats just kept spreading.

The first construction site usage of the hard hat was in 1933, on the construction of none other than the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. From thereon, we’ve seen aluminum hard hats in 1938, fiberglass, in the 1940′s, and finally thermoplastics hard hats, starting in the 1950′s.

It’s kind of funny to think, though, that one of the most iconic symbols of tough guys working hard was invented by a skinny German author who hated his job.

Ritesco Enterprises pleaded guilty and was fined $120,000 on October 22, 2008, in the Ontario Court of Justice, as a result of the injury of a worker at a residential townhouse construction project. On August 9, 2006, a company employee was working on exterior siding from a ladder, and the ladder slid left and the worker fell to the ground, sustaining serious and lasting injuries, including permanent paralysis.

Justice of the Peace John A. Balkwill levied the fine on Ritesco for failing, as an employer, to ensure that an appropriate scaffold was used for the work, as required by section 125(1) of Ontario Regulation 213/91 and section 25(1)(c) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Section 125(1) reads as follows:

125. (1) A scaffold which meets the requirements of sections 126, 128, 129, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 and 142 shall be provided for workers where work cannot be done on or from the ground or from a building or other permanent structure without hazard to the workers. O. Reg. 213/91, s. 125 (1).

Essentially, the company’s negligence was in either failing to provide their employee with the wrong equipment for the job at hand, or for not training supervisors to use common sense when supervising a job site. Is it possible to apply or repair siding to a house from a ladder safely? My guess is, at best, it would be quite awkward, and awkward rarely results in a safe work environment.

Companies have a responsibility to their employees to follow regulations, which exist for a reason. If companies want to avoid heavy fines for such accidents, they should train supervisory personnel properly, to be absolutely sure all employees at a job site are properly trained and equipped. Properly trained personnel would likely never try to apply siding to a townhouse using a ladder, nor should they.

A new report from the Conference Board of Canada, entitled All Signs Point to Yes: Literacy’s Impact on Workplace Health and Safety, suggests that employers would do well to spend a little more to develop workers’ literacy and basic skills, to augment their safety training.

This sort of suggestion would seem to be obvious, yet the study points out that, while Canadian employers spend 10 percent of their training budget on Occupational Health & Safety training, they only spend two percent to actually upgrade workers’ literacy and basic skills. According to the report, “there is an inverse relationship between investment in literacy skills and industries requiring a high level of health and safety. … The lack of investment, coupled with the relatively low levels of literacy in these industries, increases the risk of safety incidents and injuries.”

In order for workers to be safe, it’s simply not enough to teach them how to react to dangerous situations when they occur. They must also be able to read and understand such basic documents as machine operating instructions, safety precautions, and even policies on workplace health and safety. Not only that, they must be capable of leaving warnings for workers on later shifts, regarding a damaged or unsafe machine, which means, on some level, they are putting other workers at risk, as well. And since most people don’t tend to broadcast their inability to read and write well, it is important for supervisors to observe, test for and recognize deficiencies in this area, for the safety of everyone involved.

In case you think this is just a small problem, consider this; according to the study, 42 percent of Canadians have literacy skills at levels too low to perform most jobs well. Additionally, Statistics Canada found that between 48 and 60 percent of skilled craft workers, machine operators and agriculture and primary workers have literacy levels below what they refer to as “Level 3,” which they officially define as the “minimum for coping with the demands of everyday work.”

Some industries and sectors seem to be trying to raise literacy levels, and what they do could serve as a guide for others.

The Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council (CTHRC), for example, has created a Test of Workplace Essential Skills (TOWES), which is designed to assess a worker’s ability to read documents, complete forms and work with numbers. Likewise, the Wood Manufacturing Council (WMC), has a voluntary certificate program, called WoodLINKS, which teaches basic literacy skills to high school students preparing to enter into a career in the wood manufacturing sector. The program consists of various stages, with student comprehension assessed at each step.

If so many Canadians are unable to read an operating manual properly, or write out instructions for a piece of machinery, imagine the impact on all workers, as a whole. It’s not just the sub-literate workers who are endangered, but their co-workers, as well. The information contained in this report is a must-see.

Whenever I teach any drivers course we always end up talking about seatbelts, and in almost every course I teach there is one guy/girl in the class that stands up and says “if my Uncle had been wearing a seatbelt he would be dead today”! Now in the millions of collisions that happen in todays vehicles only a tiny tiny percentage the driver would have been saved by not wearing a belt. I am not will to risk what could happen in less then a second by not wearing one.

When the person tells me that they don’t wear one, I usually use them as an example and tell them to come to the front of the class and tell them to put their hands in their pockets and run as fast as they can into the wall. Now the usual response is …”no way…thats stupid”! And they are right…that is stupid…. but a collision follows the basic rules of

physics.

Rule #1:

An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force

With the same speed and in the same direction,

Until it is stopped by something

It is the law of motion…so that means that if you are traveling at 100 kms per hour (the speed limit) and your vehicle is stopped by something (ie: a collision) your body will continue at the same speed…

The next part of this will be a little graphic:

1. At one-tenth of a second, the front bumper and grillwork collapse, the front tire wheelwells begin to wrap around the solid object.

2. The driver’s instinct is to stretch out his/her legs to brace for impact but they break at the knee joints.

3. The hood Crumples, rises, and smashes into the windshield.

4. The grillwork disintegrates and the rear wheels lift on the ground

5. The driver is sprung upright from the seat, his or her broken knees pressed against the dash

6. The steering wheel bending in the grip

7. The front of the vehicle is destroyed and motionless but the rear is still traveling forward at 100 kms per hour

8. Jagged steel punctures the drivers lungs and arteries

9. Your body has stopped moving on the outside but organs are still moving on the inside

10. Your heart is a strong pump but how will it do travelling at 100 km per hour and hitting your rib cage?

All because you wouldn’t wear a seatbelt!

You decide…is it worth it?

If all this could happen in 1 second…. wouldn’t it be worth it to teach your staff how to save that one second?

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