I spent a decade of my career in the design engineering sphere. I loved my experiences there, and working in design has given me an understanding of how structures and their various elements are dreamed, designed, and constructed- how they ought to work as well as what can go wrong. Design is fun and can be complicated, and it does not need to be a big scary mystery. Let’s have a peek behind the curtain! (more…)
I love spending time at the beach. Just this last weekend I drove by four fellows on extension ladders trimming palm trees with chainsaws on the side of the street.
Image of a worker performing ad hoc tree work without appropriate safety considerations. Of particular concern, his ladder is at an acute angle that puts undue strain on the frame and the worker has no secondary restraints to prevent him from falling off the ladder. Ladder falls are the most common injuries in the arboricultural industry.
Of course, anyone who knows me knows that one thing I like almost as much as the beach is talking about ANSI, OSHA and (more…)
Eating and drinking establishments see an average of 7,410 structure fires per year based on a 2017 report published by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). The report analyzed available data from the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) and the NFPA’s annual fire department survey for the years 2010-2014.
That is always good advice to follow if you are a forklift driver! Operating a forklift can be a dangerous occupation. There are approximately 1 million forklifts (powered industrial trucks) in the US workplace today, and it is estimated that just over 10% of those are involved in some type of accident every year. Forklift accidents result in dozens of deaths and thousands of non-fatal injuries annually. About one out of every four of those accidents involves a tipping or overturning forklift, making this the most common type of industrial truck accident. (more…)
Across industry and construction sites, there are times when employees of different employers are working side by side, or at least on the same site at the same time. Some industry examples are when chemical plants have contractors on-site for routine maintenance or during process shutdowns for major overhauls or repairs. OSHA refers to these as multi-employer worksites. In December of 1999, they revised their citation policy which allows for more than one employer at a worksite to be cited for conditions that violate OSHA standards. (more…)
Please join us in welcoming Human Factors Expert Ellen Szubski, Ph.D, to the WARREN family!
Ellen’s Areas of Expertise Include:
LIVE WEBINAR: “Property Claims Issues at Manufacturing Facilities” | Presented by WARREN’s President and Senior Consulting Engineer, Jennifer Morningstar, P.E., CFEI.
COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES
The learning objectives of this course are to provide the attendees with information on the four major facets of property claims that are commonplace in manufacturing facilities.
They are:
Each facet will be explored and exemplified by at least one case study.
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 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…)
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…)
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