Increasing Safety Awareness in Maintenance

The most important thing is to identify hazards, and hazards must be identified before you can analyze them.

Unplanned or unscheduled maintenance can cause serious injury to plant floor workers. When operators are rushed or attempting to minimize downtime, the results can have negative consequences. Plant management must have a task-based risk assessment system in place for unscheduled maintenance, according to Fred Hayes, PMMI’s risk assessment expert, and it must become part of the plant’s culture.

Every litigation case Hayes has worked on that involved a severe injury or death was by machine movement that was either unplanned or unexpected. “I had one case where an operator started a machine when another operator was clearly in it,” states Hayes. “To the person who went through a three-step startup process, it wasn’t unplanned. But to the person that was reaching into the machine clearing the jam, it was a totally unplanned and unexpected machine movement. When things move unexpectedly, people get hurt. That’s the bottom line.”

In this interview, Hayes discusses acceptable risk and the risk assessment process. 

[Editor’s note: This article is geared toward safety in food plants, but the lessons on hazards and safety in maintenance—while protecting product safety as well—are important in preventing severe injuries in manufacturing operations of all types.]

PFW: Please define the basic safety terms used in a food plant environment.

Hayes: A target is something that we want to protect. A hazard is something that poses a threat of harm. Recognizing hazards is extremely important because, if you don’t identify the hazard, you can’t analyze it. A mishap or an accident is where some kind of a loss is incurred. A near miss is where there’s an incident, but there are no losses incurred. Reasonably foreseeable misuse is something that needs to be considered. It’s the kind of misuse that you would get from normal human expectations of what people do sometimes. However, it is not included as a deliberate abuse.

PFW: What should be protected in food plant environments?

Hayes: We want to protect people from injury, illness and health issues. When an employee comes to work, we expect them to go home whole. That’s fundamental. There are lots of things on equipment that protects the equipment from itself. We also want to protect product. When it comes to hygiene, food safety is extremely important. Productivity is critical. There’s a lot of equipment technology in terms of safety systems that can enhance productivity. It’s important to be able to make value judgements on those. Obviously, we also want to protect the environment.

PFW: How can hazards be identified?

Hayes: After a machine is installed, it’s going to run, be maintained and cleaned and set up for line changeover. It’s important to recognize that there are different hazards associated with each one of these tasks. This is the fundamental of the iterative process of risk assessment, as defined in ISO Guide 51, and it is included in ANSI/PMMI B155.1-2016 Standard for Processing and Packaging Machinery. The most important thing is to identify the hazards, and they must be identified before you can analyze them. 

There are lots of ways to look at hazards. There are certain consensus standards on machinery that identify certain hazards associated with different machines. There are mechanical hazards, such as pinch points, run-in points, created by gears and chains. There are energy hazards, and stored energy created by an elevator on a palletizer. Then we have abnormal events, such as losing all plant power. 

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