evatech
Safety Management Services
Nelson, New Zealand
do signs prevent accidents & fires?
By Bruce Evans, Evatech, Nelson.
I have just heard on the television news that warning signage would not have prevented some dogs dying after drinking from Canterbury rivers this hot summer due to their exposure to a fast working toxic algal bloom prompted by low water levels and hot water temperatures.
Speaking of warning signs and hot temperatures we have just returned 'singed' from a very hot and dry Victoria.
Silly us trying to do some tourist things in rural Victoria immediately after the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne.
How does one try and comprehend the insanity that drove people into starting some of those fires deliberately?
The signage about total fire bans we saw erected everywhere in Victoria certainly didn't prevent the arsonists' acts of stupidity, or as some have said, acts of mass murder.
One can only imagine what the extremely hard working Aussie firemen would want to see happen to any convicted arsonist.
This article is prompted by these stories of brave firemen and signage because there is a link between good signage and effective hazard management, particularly when it comes to fire and its effects.
The New Zealand Fire Service has reported on the effects of the Tamahere Icepak fire as noted in the last issue.
Following the explosion and the tragic death of a fireman, the Fire Service identified nine key factors, any one of which could have avoided the risks to the responding firefighters.
Prior notification to the local Fire Brigade and the erection of warning signs at the premises were two of the nine prevention factors missing from that incident.
Another key finding was that the HSNO regulations applied fully to this Tamahere situation.
HAZCHEM signage first developed by the London Fire Service as a first response signal for emergency services is used widely in Victoria.
But it has not been utilised to the same extent in NZ as witnessed by the Tamahere incident.
Our HSNO legislation is now prompting an increase in HAZCHEM signage useage, so do your local fire volunteers a big favour and get some signs up with advice from your HSNO Test Certifier.
Tie in your evacuation scheme, emergency response procedure and site plan with your signage and make yourself known to the local Fire Brigade if you haven't already.
You will probably find that some of your clients or even your own staff are members of the local volunteer brigade.
Make sure that there are no surprises awaiting firemen turning out at 2 am to your premises because of a 111 call.
Just one of the surprises thinly stretched emergency services don't like to find is that the pile of 200 litre drums stacked against the wall of your store is in fact empty.
Your firemen may well be like their Tamahere colleagues and have no prior notification, no site plan nor signage to work from, and thus conclude the large pile of drums could be full of flammable liquid.
They might be able to see Dangerous Goods labels in the poor light conditions and could well waste precious time and resources on a pile of empties which could easily be shown on the site plan and sign-posted as an empty or recycle zone.
It is amazing how often the pile of empties occurs and the normal response is 'everybody knows they are empty'. Yeah right!
At 2 am and making an emergency call out to a site no-one has visited before, somehow I don't think so.
For your customers, ERMA and the Department of Labour have provided farmers with an excellent series of fact sheets. Number 2 is titled Signage for agrichemical stores.
The following website contains the detail:
http://www.ermanz.govt.nz/resources/publications/pdfs/ER-FB-02-1.pdf
Farmers are often surprised at how low the volumes are that trigger a requirement for emergency signage such as the example provided by ERMA for on farm storage:
Volumes of just 100 litres of some products can be enough to trigger signage like this.
I started this column by posing the question, do signs prevent accidents and fires? The answer, as far as I am concerned, is no - signage will not prevent disastrous incidents like the Victorian bush fires.
But the right signs in the right place will help will help prepare our emergency services for the hazardous substances they have to deal with and the consequences of these substances when an incident does occur.