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Tag Archive: injury investigation

Heat Exchanger Failures Will Shut Your Process Down
February 26, 2021 11:11 am Leave a Comment
Heat exchangers, as the name implies, are used to bring a process stream to a desired temperature. They can heat or cool either gases or liquids. They are fairly intricate in their construction, therefore not the cheapest piece of equipment to purchase. For that reason, facilities don’t keep “spare” exchangers lying around, so when they fail catastrophically, the entire manufacturing process goes down with them… and stays down until they are fixed or replaced. Ow!

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Residential Structure Fires
January 25, 2021 2:05 pm Leave a Comment
The winter season is well underway in the United States, with the Christmas and New Years holidays behind us and the depths of cold weather here for the duration. With winter, many people spend more hours indoors as compared to the summer when outdoor activities ramp up. With more time spent indoors, it is somewhat intuitive that the use of electricity would increase as well.

Electricity is one of the most influential utilities in our daily life. Much of what modern societies rely on to get through a normal day requires electricity. Have you ever been in a slight panic looking for an electric outlet when your cell phone is below 10% charge? Or how many times do we all attempt to turn on a light switch when we enter a room during a known power outage from sheer habit? Even our personal transportation which has relied on gasoline for roughly 100 years is shifting toward electric automobiles. (more…)
P&ID’s, If You Please – Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams Explained
November 17, 2020 4:26 pm Leave a Comment
When investigating an industrial incident, one piece of information I always ask for is the relevant P&ID’s for the process. P&ID stands for Piping and Instrumentation Diagram and is defined as “A schematic diagram of the relationship between instruments, controllers, piping, and system equipment.” A set of P&ID’s for an entire facility allows you to trace the entire manufacturing process from raw material unloading to finished product loadout, including utilities like steam, water, fuel, and air. That’s great information to have, but isn’t especially useful (more…)
The Role of Interlocking Guards in Injury Prevention
November 16, 2020 2:48 pm Leave a Comment
In the three-part series on the CE mark, we scratched the surface of some of the requirements an equipment manufacturer must meet in order to earn this designation. Part three of the series dealt with some of the requirements for the design of a guard. One of the items for consideration with the design of a guard is the frequency that someone will need to access the area protected by the guard. If access is needed on a routine basis, often defined as more than once per shift, the guard needs to be designed to be movable instead of fixed. Movable is defined as able to be opened without the use of tools. Otherwise the frustration and time requirements of obtaining tools and removing a fixed guard will often lead to the guard being discarded. (more…)
The Paths of Chemical Exposure
October 6, 2020 9:51 am Leave a Comment
The Safety Hierarchy states that hazards should be mitigated first by engineering controls, secondly by guarding, and lastly by warning/training. When the first two, engineering controls and guards, fail in a manufacturing setting, a chemical release could occur. A forensic chemical engineer can help determine the root cause of that failure. (more…)
What’s Behind That CE Mark Part Three, Machine Guard Requirements
September 1, 2020 10:16 am Leave a Comment
In the first blog in this series, we discussed the story behind the CE mark, the Machinery Directive, and the associated requirements regarding the design, production, and sale of machinery bearing the mark. The second blog discussed a cornerstone of safer machine design, the risk assessment. This installment will discuss another crucial piece of the safety puzzle, machine guard design. (more…)
The CE Mark and What Should It Mean to You? Part Two
July 20, 2020 2:58 pm Leave a Comment
In the previous blog (Part One) we discussed the backstory behind the two stylized letters CE and what it means to the design of machinery bearing the mark. We outlined some of the requirements of the “Machinery Directive” (MD) which include what are known as “Essential Health and Safety Requirements.” The Essential Health and Safety Requirements incorporate an iterative risk reduction process during design that takes into account (more…)
Water in the Light Fixtures??? How HVAC Defects Appear in Strange Places
January 30, 2020 8:56 am Leave a Comment
One of my more interesting calls and subsequent forensic investigations was regarding water accumulating inside of 2X4 fluorescent light fixtures in a suspended ceiling of a secondary school in South Carolina.

The client called and indicated that the metal chassis of the lights were sweating and generating enough water to accumulate on the diffuser lens of the lights. Obviously, an on-site investigation was in order! (more…)
Case Study: Fatality Servicing Unsupported Excavator Boom
April 22, 2019 2:27 pm Leave a Comment
A mini-excavator at a job site developed a leak at a hydraulic fitting at the base of the cylinder that raises and lowers the boom. A subcontractor foreman at the site raised the boom to search for the leak. The foreman found and attempted to tighten the leaking fitting. When he did, the fitting separated from the base of the cylinder, releasing the hydraulic pressure that held the boom aloft. The boom fell and the bucket struck a nearby superintendent for the general contractor.

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Why investigators should have “Scaled Diagrams” of scenes?
March 15, 2019 11:07 am Leave a Comment
When it comes to diagramming a crash scene, there are several methods to accomplish the task. Forensic Mapping, (locating, positioning, and documenting the evidence of a collision scene to scale) is essential to having the answers to the questions “Who, What, Where, When, and Why?”. Photographs do a great job showing what the investigators saw post collision; yet they lack scale and the ability to describe pre-collision movement. Having a computer aided diagram (CAD) of the collision scene goes much further than the pictures can; here is why.

A scale diagram gives the full overview of a collision scene from either a 2D or 3D point of view. Being able to see how things lined up, how they came together and how they parted helps explain the events within a crash. When a scene can be viewed from top down or any angle, that helps relay the facts. The investigator, judge, or jury will get (more…)

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