Last month, I wrote Before we can achieve a ZES, we must first define and quantify what precisely a form of “hazardous energy” is, and this week, I posted the MSHA accident investigation report where water in an abandoned chilled water system 1600′ underground was opened and the water, pressurized by the head pressure alone, was enough to knock a miner out of the aerial lift causing a fatal fall. Both of these articles and a question asked in our Facebook group regarding hot oil temps and hazards have again caused me to ask…
When does a fluid become a hazard? Far too many facilities have not crossed this line in their maturity of PPE Hazard Assessment and Lockout/Tagout.
I hope these articles and the SAFTENG social media group discussions will cause many to question. Without asking the question and then QUANTIFYING the HAZARD, we leave a lot of workers exposed to potentially a serious hazard.
And although the high temps of fluids get most of the attention, the low temps (e.g., cryogenic liquids) also pose serious hazards).
And when you think you have the right temp for defining a hazard at your facility, do the following:
Go outside to one of your Eyewash/Safety Showers fill a 5-gallon bucket with the water from this safety device and measure the temp of the water! This will help us to understand why the newest ANSI standard requires the water in these emergency systems to be temperature-controlled.
So we need to be sure we are not talking out of both sides of our mouths by establishing limits that are not actual “hazards”, as well as ensure our emergency devices are not exposing workers to an actual hazard (e.g., as we know no one will arrive at an EW/SS and wait until the water is at a safe temp before using the device).
Another example I like to use is “handwashing” using hot water. Granted, the FDA just lowered their minimum handwashing temp from 100F to 85F this year; it was 100F-115F for decades. So this range gives us some perspective; granted it is for our hands which are much more capable of handling hotter fluids than, say a more private and more sensitive area of the human body.
Water at the standard temp of 68F and 14.7 psi is usually not considered hazardous (don’t forget about pH!), but as the temp of the water increases, so does the hazard it poses. At some temperature, we need to declare it is a hazard-based solely on its temperature. This will play a role in our Hazard Analyses for things such as PPE Hazard Assessments, LOTO risk assessments, Line Breaking hazard assessments, managing our water temps in our EW/SSs, etc. But it ALL BEGINS with QUANITFYING this hazard.