evatech

Safety Management Services
Nelson, New Zealand

HSNO-Issue 78 Nov-Dec ’09

Will HSNO’s first prosecution bring about workplace changes?

By Bruce Evans, Evatech Ltd, Nelson.

Just after our article on compliance was published, the Dunedin Courts handed down the first ever prosecution under the 1996 HSNO Act.

Lieun Duong, the owner of a Dunedin manicure operation, was fined $25,000 plus $7,000 in costs, with a decision on solicitor’s fees pending.

She had admitted four HSNO charges including storing flammable liquids at a site with no Location Test Certificate and not having an Approved Handler qualified person handling the products.

Will this first costly prosecution influence the pace and effectiveness of hazardous substance management? Will we see any significant improvement or behavioral change because somebody else has been stung in the back pocket?

A study also originating in Dunedin and published about the same time suggests that for farmers anyway there is general resistance to the idea of health and safety enforcement or regulation.

The study on effective occupational health in agriculture published by Otago University found entrenched barriers to improved safety behavior, including stereotypes of rugged independent farmers struggling with time management and economic pressures.

Half of the farmers surveyed said they frequently used hazardous chemicals but admitted the use of PPE such as gloves and masks was low. Most had not received any formal training but 40 per cent had attended the Farmsafe and Growsafe courses prompted by the HSNO Acts requirement for Approved Handler certification.

It is not just the farming industry that struggles with entrenched behaviour in the workforce. My observations in recent times at manufacturing and chemical distribution sites leave me bewildered about workplace safety generally. More on these later.

ERMA also must be wondering how to influence behavior in small and medium sized industry, as it has just produced simple, step-by-step guides to safe chemical handling in workplaces. This excellent series is titled ‘Chemical Safety in the Workplace’ and gives a series of checklists to be used in different workplaces. Use the publications tab on the ERMA website to download your copy: htttp://www.ermanz.govt.nz/resources

My activities as a ERMA Test Certifier bring me face to face with life at the chemical handling ‘coal-face’ where some recent experiences need sharing with a wider audience in the hope that perhaps this will expose entrenched behavior and prevent further bad practice.

A food storage warehousing operation uses a third party contractor to handle and store on-site chemicals used in water treatment and LPG storage etc.

The contractor also supplies its own branded chemical as part of the water treatment and boiler maintenance contract.

This contractor was asked to undertake a major cleanup of left over empty chemical drums, part drums etc, as part of the first stage of a HSNO Location Certificate.
There were two different brands of Class 5 oxidisers stored alongside lubricants and all sorts of incompatible products stored near ignition points in a most hazardous and untidy fashion.

The contractor did a good job in clearing away most of the empties but still left more open packs than was necessary. He cleared away his brand of Class 5 but left behind an opposition’s pack of Class 5 because it had lost its yellow Class 5 identification label.

Although he was contracted to service that area the ‘other’ old pack of opposition brand oxidiser was not seen as his problem.

A look at the SDS for that product would have confirmed its Class 5 status and incompatibility problems. The owner of the food storage operation had blind faith in the contractor but only long-range control of him and said the incompatible product was the contractor’s problem. Yeah right.
Neither party could see the potential threat - after all it was just an old pack they used to use before the new contractor started. The fact that the Class 5 had been stored un-safely for years somehow made it okay and the fact that the warning label had disappeared also made it okay for it to be there.

At a different distribution site, Class 5 was implicated again in another case of different parties from the same organisation operating in silos of silence from each other.

One group was told to stick new Class 5 labels on a product that had not carried DG Class labels before. Apparently neither the product nor trade name had changed, but its Class 5 status had not been realized prior.

So group one, operating for a technical part of the organisation, labelled the stock. But nobody in operations or logistics was told of the change or of any need to consider a different location for the product in question.

I wonder how long the freshly labeled Class 5 product would have been stored incorrectly before their internal systems caught up with the change. Poor teamwork evident there.

Similarly another company hired a researcher who used Class 4.3 zinc phosphide for contract trial work. Left-over product was then dumped into a storage container chock full of incompatible substances.

Class 4.3 is ‘dangerous when wet’ and reacts to quite a few liquids including water.

The company which hired the researcher obviously had no immediate control over this person, but then none of its staff questioned the disposal of the product because this was seen as the researcher’s problem! Yeah right, again.

The common theme in these examples seems to be "I’m all right Jack, it’s the other guy who has the problem not me," and "identifying hazard by class is somebody else’s task, not mine."

Changing workplace practices into a teamwork approach to achieve effective hazard analysis and management is going to take some time yet.

Perhaps Father Christmas will fix it for us. Have a safe and happy summer break.