Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:14 — 9.0MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Marty here with Warehouse and Operations as a Career! We appreciate you listening in with us today. Be sure to Subscribe to us on iTunes, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or your favorite Pod Catcher, it’s free and you won’t have to catch a Facebook post to grab every episode. It’ll notify you of a new show and you’ll never miss one! Speaking of Facebook, you can check our feeds there and on twitter using @whseandops, we continue the conversation on both each week and use them for articles and such that we run across every now and then. Enough of all that lets talk Op’s for a few minutes now!
A good friend sent me an article from CNN.com and said we had to talk about it on a WAOC episode! You know, what we do in our industry, warehousing and transportation can be so dangerous if we’re not properly trained or don’t think about our Safety at all times. Many of the tasks are repetitious, we do them day in and day out every day and every week. When handling freight, even one wrong lift or just twisting wrong can ruin our backs. Using even the manual pallet jacks can be dangerous. And through our Powered Industrial Truck training we know how dangerous our equipment can be. Transportation and Driving, now that’s a whole other story, on the road with 30k to 80K pounds under us. It takes training, focus and being aware of our surroundings at all times to remain safe. The CNN story was https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/23/uk/farmer-killed-forklift-dog-gbr-scli/index.html
about a 70 year old man, we’d have to assume he was very experienced with operating the lift on his farm. It happened in the UK, in a small farming town in western England. He had his Jack Russel dog with him that day, it sounded like they always rode together when he was working out in the fields. The coroner believed the gentleman left the operators compartment, placed the unit in neutral to open a closed gate, walked in front of the lift and the load to open the gate and his dog inadvertently hit the forward lever which geared the lift, crushing his owner between the gate and load. Something as simple as setting the parking brake may have saved his life. As we’ve learned from our PIT training, never to get out of the seat without setting the brake and turning off our units! A split second choice can change our lives, and the lives of our loved ones.
I went on-line looking for some good data on equipment accidents, and to be honest found way too many incidents, so many accidents can be avoided, we just have to stay focused on our jobs and try not to let all the distractions, well distract us.
https://www.lantech.com/blog/pallet-jack-safety-fails-a-serious-problem?region=1
Has a good article on pallet jack safety fail’s, a few links to video’s showing us what not to do and how dangerous those choices can be. They state that between 2002 and 2016 OSHA reported 56 major injuries occurred involving pallet jacks. These included 25 fractures, four fatalities and 8 amputations. Common sense should tell us to never place our feet under or near a load and to watch for pinch points on our fingers when handling the controls. This article does a good job of pointing out that we are our own worst enemy regarding pallet jack usage, the fun and games are always a blast until someone gets hurt right?
As embarrassed as I am to say it, I actually broke my left arm once operating a tugger. Not following the preferred work method, I swung my foot around the back of the tovair to unhook a buggy latch and my shoe lace got hung up on the buggy release pulling me off the machine with me landing on my arm and face. A hard lesson learned to say the least.
https://ohsonline.com/Articles/2013/09/01/Death-by-Forklift-is-Really-the-PITs.aspx tells us that there are roughly 85 forklift fatalities and 34,900 serious injuries each year, with 42% of the forklift fatalities from the operators being crushed by a tipping vehicle as reported by OSHA. I’ll include this articles URL with todays show notes, as I will all of todays research materials, but you should definitely check this one out, I found it really interesting. It speaks about an owner of a machinery and training school’s own fatality while producing a forklift training video. The investigation found the incident to be driver error, driving to fast over rough terrain and not using the seat belt.
As Equipment Operators we all know about the OSHA Standard 29CFR1910.178 and how it came about and its importance and I’m sure, or hope, every country has their own agency and regulation for the proper training of operators. If your operating any type of machine or a piece of powered Industrial Equipment and have not had any formal training on it I encourage you to ask your immediate supervisor about it. Please remember to never get on, touch, shoot, even stand next to a piece of equipment if you haven’t been trained and certified on it. It’s just not worth the dangers to yourself or others. And here in the States it’s the law and that law can carry some quite hefty penalties too, as it should!
Anyway, I strayed again, so I found this really neat page on OSHA.gov, it’s a search page where you can type in information your looking for on reported accidents. https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.html
I found a pre-entered report on “walk-behind forklift” that brought up 118 incidents, it’ll give you descriptions and even a detail tab for each one. https://www.osha.gov/pls/imis/accidentsearch.search?sic=&sicgroup=&naics=&acc_description=&acc_abstract=&acc_keyword=%22Walk-Behind%20Forklift%22&inspnr=&fatal=&officetype=&office=&startmonth=&startday=&startyear=&endmonth=&endday=&endyear=&keyword_list=on&p_start=&p_finish=0&p_sort=event_date&p_desc=ASC&p_direction=Next&p_show=20 A few of the listed incidents were:
Employees leg fractured when pallet jack strikes rack
Employee injured when caught between forklift and truck
Employee injured in fall when pallet jack moves
Employees thumb amputated when caught under switchboard
Employees hand amputated when caught by crossbar
Employees ankle fractured when run over by pallet jack
Employees foot crushed in pallet rider accident
Employees foot fractured between power jack and guardrail
All these are just horrible accidents, and so preventable. As operators its our responsibility, our jobs, to be focused on our tasks and to be aware of our surroundings at all times isn’t it?
Anyway, all this information is available and searchable, it’s all reported by our employers on their OSHA 300 logs each year. I probably should have reached out to our WAOC friend Joe, I bet he could give us the short version on 300 logs but I found a little info at https://www.industrysafe.com/blog/osha-recordkeeping/what-is-an-osha-300a
It’s pretty informative, I’ve included their link too, so you can check it out. It tells us The OSHA 300A log is an annual summary of all OSHA recordable incidents at each business location. The OSHA 300A log of the previous year’s incidents must be posted for employees to view at each jobsite from February 1 to April 30.
I found some more info at https://www.safetyservicescompany.com/topic/osha/fill-osha-injury-reporting-forms-300-300a-301/ it’s really informative as well.
Simply put the form 300 is a report of work-related injuries and illnesses. It’s very comprehensive and should list everything according to the published guidelines.
Part of the process is filling out the form 301, injury and illness incident report within 7 calendar days of the occurrence. This information is then used to fill out and file the 300 logs.
We talked about the importance of our Supervisors accident or incident investigation reporting, how important that witness statements, a statement from the employee and a Supervisors report are to our HR departments several times. This information is used to help compile these reports and logs.
The bottom line is we, as employees, need to be careful, focused, and use our training at all times. We’re responsible for following all the safety practices and procedures of our employers and the OSHA standards. They were written for our protections and they will help keep us safe. We just need to be following them!
Please don’t take all this as sounding negative towards being an equipment operator. These positions are all great careers, I’ve been tasked with everyone of them and loved the positions. All I’m saying is to remember that they can be dangerous, we need to stay sharp and focused on them. It’s a job, our jobs and Safety is our first task at hand. I guess you could say Equipment doesn’t hurt people, people do!
Well there’s a little information on where we can learn a little about the history and stats on accidents in our industry. If you have any questions, comments or topics you’d like us to look into for you just shoot us an email to host@warehouseandoperationsasacareer.com, I’d love to get back to you with an answer!
Thanks again for listening in, have a prosperous and Safe week ahead. Please think safe, be safe and work safe, we have others waiting at home for our safe return each day!