Practical EHS Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Motorized forklifts are an essential tool for unloading and loading trucks and otherwise moving heavy inventory. But forklifts—also called powered industrial trucks—can be highly hazardous for a wide range of reasons. National Forklift Safety Day, an observance sponsored by the Industrial Truck Association, took place this week.
Recently, one of our subscribers asked the following question: For pedestrian safety, how wide does a designated protected employee travel path need to be? What type of stationary protective guards are acceptable to prevent forklifts from hitting pedestrians?
Most hazardous chemicals arrive in the workplace with personalized calling cards: the labels and safety data sheets (SDSs) required by law to accompany them. Unfortunately, not all chemicals are so accommodating. Some may slip into the workplace unannounced, unnoticed, and unrecognized. Beware of these chemical hazards that may have crept in under your nose! Exhaust […]
Training is a substantial investment of time and resources. So, naturally, you’ll want to make sure that your training is effective at what you want it to accomplish. Which is … what, exactly? In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your training, the first thing you’ll have to ask yourself is, What exactly would “effective” […]
Forklift Safety When used properly, forklifts can help workers accomplish tasks more efficiently and safely, but when unsafely operated, potentially catastrophic incidents can outweigh their benefits. Safety managers have an additional hurdle to overcome to ensure forklift safety: forklift operators and nearby pedestrians may be distracted by their cell phones or other mobile devices, and […]
At a storage system manufacturing facility in Georgia, two workers suffered finger amputations in two separate incidents within a 3-month period beginning in November 2014. Yesterday, we looked at the first incident; today, we’ll look at the second incident, in which a worker was standing up a fabricated metal rack. The 353-pound rack tipped over […]
Is your refrigerator connected to the Internet yet? What about your car, your thermostat, or your garage door opener? What about your workplace? Are your punch presses and dough mixers and forklifts connected to the cloud? And if they are, are you using it to make your workplace safer? Here’s how the Internet of Things […]
June 24, 2015, was a muggy Wednesday night in north Alabama. At the Federal Mogul manufacturing facility in Athens, 25-year-old Allen Michael Brown was outside the plant, trying to secure an empty barrel when he walked in front of a forklift. Brown was run over and killed by the forklift. Any time you have heavy […]
Manuel Aquino, 70 years old, had worked for Art’s Equipment Rental in Sharonville, Ohio, for 13 years. His job duties included keeping the equipment clean, so on March 3, Aquino was pressure-washing a front-end loader in his employer’s yard. Something went wrong, and Aquino was crushed between the bucket on the loader and the body […]