evatech
Safety Management Services
Nelson, New Zealand
HSNO-Issue 80 Mar-Apr 2010
Safety first or sixth? By Bruce Evans, Evatech Ltd, Nelson. I finished the last column of 2009 wishing for a change in workplace practices and hoping Father Christmas would help bring positive change over the summer break. Wishing for a positive teamwork approach to hazard management and safety issues sounds a bit like pushing ‘sh** up hill’, as well as a broken record. But with the editor’s encouragement to keep trying, I start on the ‘safe’ up hill slope again in 2010 simply because we must. Attitudinal change is the hardest thing to influence when you look at the results of a recent UK survey of the things that annoy office workers the most. The international press agency Reuters reports that the sixth most annoying thing among office irritations…" is far too much health and safety stuff in the workplace", surpassed only by grumpy colleagues, slow computers, office gossip, jargon and telephones as reasons why stress levels increase in the office. A similar survey in NZ would surely uncover a similar message. "Why do we need all this safety stuff?" …. "HR has a safety manager somewhere, leave it to them, I’m too busy." An Invercargill women isn’t going to leave safety campaigning to somebody else; she plans to start her own safety campaign amongst schools and elsewhere after a near-fatal explosion left her 16 year old son and a friend with second degree burns after "huffing" aerosols. Like some Blenheim youths earlier, who had a similar explosion after huffing LPG in a car, the Southland boys blew the doors off the car they were in and buckled the garage door. Emergency services said a match sparked the explosion or lighter and butane canisters had been found in the car. The mother had a different version where the boys had been sniffing air freshener and the explosion was triggered when one of the boys opened his cell phone. Yes, cell phones can generate enough energy to start a fire. Shades of the Icepack fire at Tamahere where a fireman died as a result of propane gas exploding as the Fire Service arrived to deal with an emergency where no warning signs had been erected. Does it matter how the explosion took place, cell phone or electrical fault? Good luck to Mrs Ramsay as she tries to shake people into action to prevent what she calls modern day glue sniffing and what the Invercargill Police called a "stupidity" issue. Whilst on stupid acts it’s time for me to fess up and explain that even safety consultants can cause significant problems by taking short cuts and not completing basic jobs properly. My wife’s prize roses were being groomed for our daughter’s wedding and I was in charge of the spray program. Likewise the weeds, which also had to be dealt to prior to the wedding. I have my favourite knapsack with a wide range of nozzle and pressure considerations as would befit a Growsafe trainer who teaches this sort of thing. I do not normally use two separate sprayers one for weeds and one for bugs and fungus as I should because I’m stingy and am usually fastidious about washing out and rinsing the single sprayer between weedkillers and fungicides. Or at least I thought I was careful until you add in a time constraint and a need to do both jobs on the same day. Normally I would spray fungicide first and weedkiller second but for some reason it was the other way round on the fateful day. Blaming time pressures, and a need to be elsewhere, the weedkiller solution was not rinsed through the spray lance and of course it was those prize roses in prime position that got the first black spot spray enhanced with weedkiller. Divorce proceedings are still being threatened for any repeat spray incidents. A second case of safety coming second also affected our wedding plans. With the house full of guests we had persistent problems with light bulbs blowing in a seldom-used bedroom. Thank goodness for fuses and trip switches on the fuse board or we may well have had a serious fire. We had taken up the Government’s kind offers last winter to install some subsidised insulation in the ceiling. But the new insulation had been laid right over the top of down lights in some rooms. The heat trapped by the insulation literally fused the wires together, thus the trip switch kicked in and new bulbs kept blowing. The electrician advised that we get the installers in smartly to see the problem and investigate any other potential issues. We can now report that our case was investigated smartly both by the installer and the EcoSmart Assessor. Our case being part of a wider investigation where the Energy, Efficiency and Conservation Authority [EECA] have audited the first 30,000 houses retro-insulated under the Government scheme. They have found 570 failed the audit through poor workmanship and that 17 cases of a fire risk existed where insulation had been improperly installed. We are told that most of the problem cases including ours were insulated early in the scheme before any pre and post installation checklists were established.
It and similar explosions are preventable or at least that’s what all the "too much health and safety stuff" tries to convey to those who want to listen.
So, yes, more health and safety audit trails are necessary, the kind of stuff that annoyed the UK office workers. What do Kiwi workers think, is there too much OSH stuff at work?