Visual communication is essential for safety at any workplace. This is especially true for construction sites. This type of environment often has a variety of different activities going on throughout the area, which can make it very dangerous if people are not careful. Alerting people to what types of hazards exist in which areas is…
PPE includes goggles that prevent debris from entering the eye, hard hats that protect workers from falling objects, rubber gloves resistant to electric currents, and any other type of equipment or garment designed to be worn for protection. When other safety measures fail and a worker comes in contact with a hazard, PPE will be…
Multiple methods exist for helping you determine the content of arc flash labels. Some companies choose to use software to calculate incident energy, some consult the calculations in the appendices of the NFPA 70E, some refer to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) guide—IEEE 1584-2002: Guide for Performing Arc Flash Calculations—and others hire…
A compliant GHS label has all six required components: contact information, product identifier, a signal word, hazard statement(s), precautionary statement(s), and hazard pictogram(s). Pictograms graphically represent a chemical’s hazards. The GHS pictograms used for packaging labels are built out of two elements: a red diamond and a black image. The space between these two elements…
Labeling the contents of pipes in a facility is essential to safety and can help you keep track of what’s in each pipe and where it’s going. Pipe marking is commonly done through auditing the pipes in the workplace and placing an order in a catalog or online for the labels you need. That can…
The cornerstone of any good safety program is training, and the same is true for powered industrial vehicle (forklift) safety. Any person who operates a forklift is required by OSHA to take a training program set up by his or her employer. It is up to the employer to ensure that this training includes general…
Falls are the number one cause of fatal accidents in construction, with these deaths accounting for 36.9 percent of construction fatalities in 2013. Many of these deaths occur in residential construction, and beginning in 2010, OSHA began enforcing its fall protection standard for all residential construction sites, not just commercial construction sites (see 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(13)). To…
When looking at workplace safety on construction sites, most people focus on things like fall protection and avoiding objects being dropped from above. While these are certainly important hazards, they are not the only ones. On many construction job sites, one of the biggest types of hazards is actually breathing. This is because there is…
The hazards of lead are well known, so people may assume exposures to this dangerous metal have been reduced. To a certain extent to this true; lead levels in the general population have decreased since the 1970s. In some workplaces, though, lead continues to be a serious problem. The Seattle Times recently published a series…
Confined spaces in the workplace are common, and they may even be more common than you think. For example, sewers, storage bins and tanks can all be confined spaces, but in many cases so are silos and open pits. Some confined spaces may not pose great harm, but others can be very dangerous to anyone…