It is the year 2018 – OSHA promulgated its Control of Hazardous Energy standard (1910.147) in 1989. That means we should have been practicing LOTO for nearly 29 years, and yet we continue to see unreal failures related to workers performing servicing and maintenance without “locking it out.” This week’s Incident Alerts contained an incident that takes sadness to a new level… the worker inside the machine (a shredder) yelled out to his co-workers to turn it on while he was still inside the machine. The co-worker(s) did so and walked away, of course not realizing their co-worker was inside the machine. A couple of hours later, the co-workers were missing him and began to look for him. They remembered he was last seen working on the shredder and found his body in the landfill after passing through it! This is just NOT supposed to happen in an industrial nation with minimum safety standards (i.e., OSHA)! Here is the incident news account…
LOTO FATALITY Landfill Employee’s Death In Shredder Appears Accidental (Sheriff’s deputies are continuing to investigate the gruesome death of a 46-year-old employee at a privately owned landfill – shortly after 10 a.m. a worker went to clear a jammed trash-shredding machine – after he repaired the machine, HE CALLED OUT TO HIS CO-WORKERS TO RE-START IT – a couple of hours went by before the employees realized they hadn’t seen their co-worker since he left to repair the machine – they began searching through the shredded debris that had been deposited in the landfill and discovered his remains)
And this week, we also saw CALOSHA issue some PRCS citations after an auger accident resulted in a worker losing both his legs. In this accident, one of the workers re-entered the 20-inch square opening after the cleaning was done to retrieve a work light from inside the confined space when a maintenance worker 45 feet away from energized the equipment to perform a test. The moving auger screw pulled the worker into the screw conveyor. CLICK HERE to see this case.