Al,
I have hesitated to go into detail until I had completly evaluated the incident and had all necessary reports filled out.
What happened in short: Man in sandblast booth removes last section of grating that covers the auger so that the built up media at the end of the booth would be easier to dispose of. Leaves for break. After break he switches with another employee (they are both sandblasters but one preps and the other sandblasts and they trade off) this employee suits up, goes in and shuts the door. Works his way down the two pieces he has and at the end steps where there should be a cover, slides down the sloped side, which is about hip high or so, and into the auger. This auger is about a 7" diameter auger with a 3" shaft. By the grace of God, the auger blade came down right on top of his steel toe and siezed, yes siezed. He was very scared at this point and had to struggle to get his foot out of his boot while also keeping the rest of himself out of the auger in case it let loose. Did I mention we are in TX and it is kind of warm down here. He made it to the door, with a twisted ankle and slight heat exaustion and scared. Nobody had a clue there was a problem until he fell through the exit door.
I now am implimenting a work procedure that will eliminate this issue for the rare instances such as heat stroke, or heart attack, and other unforeseen events, as well as introduced a new set of safety and maintnance procedures for this area. NO MORE grates left off-EVER.
Also, when the maintnance man came to remove the boot, he shut the power off. I asked him as he jumped down in if he had locked and tagged out the breaker. He looked right at me and said, si si.
I go check, and this man that I just two weeks ago bought all the equipment for LOTO for, as well as a Spanish/English training program for, given the training class to including the tests, HAD NOT LOCKED AND TAGGED THE EQUIPMENT OUT. Sorry to yell, but I was a little exited by this point. I retrained all of our authorized employees for LOTO again this morning. .
If you do not use it, it will not help!!
John
John, at the auto frame plant there was a rule [I don't know if by OSHA or the company] that no one worked alone in a building, simply because there would be no one to get help if something happened. We often worked overtime beyond the end of the shift, if it was a one man job they kept the store room clerk or a crane operator as the second person.
Dave,
This is what we are implimenting for the time being, until better measures can be identified and put in to place.
I worked in a bus manufacturing plant that was the same way.
I gained a healthy respect for that procedure as well as not operating equipment that you have not been properly trained to operate.
In there on a Sunday with the steel crew and I went to bend a piece of metal on the brake. Now I had been shown how to use this machine with 1/4" dies only. I had not been shown how to change them out. This piece was 1/2" and I "thought I new what I was doing" and proceeded to change out to what I "thought" was the 1/2" dies.
Everything was going smooth at this point and confidence is high. I positioned the piece hit the foot pedal to grip it, and move my arm up and placed my hand on the face of the machine as i usually do, pedal down, BAMM!!! ZING! Ding... ding... ding... crash.
I looked down just as it when between my belly and my right arm (I know this only because I saw it as a blur) and shot across the shop floor between two buses and hit the wall approximatly 50' from where I was standing.
3/8" dies, busted and a 13" piece off of the bottom die abot 2 1/2" inches thick in the middle and tapering off at both ends, sharp.
Six inches in one direction or the other would have resulted in me without a right arm from the elbow down, or laying there in a pile of my own guts. Also this brake was located in another department across the facility from where my guys were, no one would have had a clue if I would have bled out right there in front of that brake.
Scared the CRAP out of me and I stood there after immediatly shutting down the machine, and just pondered what had just occured.
Never again will I operate, or allow an employee to operate ANY equipment that they have not been trained correctly to use.
And no one works in the facility alone. Not even security.
Of course it is not this way with every company, but most of the larger facility's will have somthing like this in place.
John
I understand your concern.
I had a one man grit blasting operation in my facility where all the pressure vessels were blasted before being painted. Both the blast booth and the enclosed paint booths were one man operations and both men were out of sight when they were working.
We had an incident where one of the vessels fell over on the grit blaster. There was no way of knowing the man was in distress. I was fortunate from the standpoint that the accident happened before I was hired as the fabrication manager, so I was tasked with devising a plan to ensure the same thing couldn't happen again.
In short, the vessels had to be secured with at least two bolts to a steel skid to prevent toppling and a deadman switch was installed on the blast nozzle so that if the hose was dropped it would shut down the system and a flashing red beacon was activated. If the hose was hung on the "hook", no alarms were sounded. We also had a system that activated a yellow beacon whenever the doors to the booth were closed. Every 10 minutes or so a coworker would look through the port to see that everything was alright. A perfect system, no, but better than no system.
For the issues of heat stroke and heat exhaustion, we purchased a venturi apparatus that was installed in the positive breathing air line. It blew cool to cold air into the grit blaster's suit to keep him cool. It worked too good. He used to suit up and go into the blast booth to keep cool on the hot summer days even when there was no blasting to be done.
I would think that with all the radio activated devices available today, you could hook up a "kill" switch that could be carried on the blaster's person and activated if any mishap took place, i.e., he stumbled and falls, etc. The kill switch could shut the system down and activate a beacon to notify shop personnel something was amiss.
Best regards - Al
Al,
Thanks for the great input, these sound like easily acheivable safety measures for us. Will it be cheap? No. But way less expensive than a dead body.
I hate digging graves in the dead of night. LOL :-)
John
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