When a Professional Engineer conducts a Pre-Start Health and Safety Review he or she will make recommendations. This can profoundly affect the ultimate operational efficiency of the machine and therefore indirectly the factory. This is especially true when the Engineer conducting the Pre-Start Health and Safety Review finds that there are compliance issues to [...]
Why is machine guarding so important for employee safety? This is because most industrial establishments have many pieces of equipment that have hazardous motions. We must protect these hazardous motions from the reach of workers with the help of machine guarding in Ontario. So why not just guard everything? Cover it up! If we cover [...]
Maintenance is a high-risk activity which often requires working alongside a running process and in close contact with machinery. During normal production operations, automation typically diminishes the likelihood of human error that can lead to accidents and thereby improve health and safety in the workplace. However, in maintenance activities, contrary to normal operation, direct [...]
Procedures are not enough to prevent injuries or accidents in the workplace. The best way to improve health and safety is to properly engage engineer safety into production machinery and processes. According to a new study from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, more than eight out of 10 workers [...]
In the year 2016, there were 436,851 claims for Ontario's Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) benefits in all sectors, resulting from injuries and accidents in the workplace. The direct cost to WSIB for each lost-time injury (LTI) in 2017 was $24,300. The indirect cost of each lost-time injury in 2017 -- including re-hiring, [...]
Much more complex machine, that needs to keep running, are notoriously difficult to effectively guard by using fixed guarding or continuously using lockout/tag out methods because the operator must frequently interact with the equipment. The CSA Z-432 Machine Guarding standard does allow for exceptions to locking out equipment if it is integral to the [...]
In North America, there are dozens of industrial explosions every year. Many workers are tragically injured or killed. Would you believe, a full quarter of these explosions occurred at food industry facilities, including sugar plants (Canadian industrial explosion figures run at about 10% of those in the U.S.?) Combustible Dust is not a new [...]
Functional Safety Functional safety is the detection of a potentially dangerous condition resulting in the activation of a protective or corrective device or mechanism to prevent hazardous events arising or providing mitigation to reduce the consequence of the hazardous event. Functional safety relies on active system, here is an example: • The activation of [...]
Stage 1- Identify any existing equipment or processes that involve machine guarding, automation, flammable liquids, hazardous substances, dust collection, racking & stacking, potentially explosive processes and molten metal that have not had a Pre-Start Health and Safety Review conducted in the past. Stage 2-Select a Safety Engineering firm partner to ensure that your existing [...]
