Workplace safety is essential for protecting employees and ensuring smooth operations. This section covers a wide range of safety topics, including hazards, risk management, and preventive measures. Learn how to identify risks, follow safety procedures, and maintain a safe and compliant work environment.
Two specialty chemicals establishments sit four miles apart on the coastal corridor where I run process-safety assurance. One holds around 280 tonnes of a flammable liquid plus two named toxic intermediates above their lower thresholds; the other holds nearly double that inventory, including an acutely toxic intermediate that tips it above the upper threshold. On … Read more
TL;DR Regulation 8 of the Control of Major Accident Hazards Regulations 2015 does not offer a polite suggestion. It states that the operator of an upper-tier establishment must prepare a safety report and must not construct, operate, or significantly modify that establishment until the Competent Authority has communicated its conclusions on it. Two winters ago … Read more
The study wasn’t about drunk drivers. It was about night-shift workers heading home after a normal shift — no alcohol, no drugs, no medications. After a night of sleep, the near-crash rate across their test drives was zero. After a night shift, 37.5% of those drives produced a near-crash event, and every single one of … Read more
TL;DR Lone working on night shifts is a compound hazard: fatigue lowers hazard detection, isolation delays rescue, and low-witness conditions amplify violence exposure. Safe operation requires a specific risk assessment, scheduled check-ins, engineered controls such as lighting and CCTV, administrative limits on shift length, and a dedicated lone-worker device as the last line of defence. … Read more
TL;DR Safe isolation is the controlled process of disconnecting electrical equipment from every source of supply, physically securing that disconnection with a lock and tag, and verifying the circuit is dead using GS38-compliant test equipment at the point of work — a legal duty under the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 and equivalent standards internationally. … Read more
Regulation 4(4) of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 is eight lines long. It contains no schedule, no appendix, no weighting formula — just a flat instruction that the client must provide pre-construction information to every designer and contractor being considered for appointment, as soon as is practicable. On the refurbishment projects I work … Read more
03:12 in the control room. The screens throw a dim blue wash over four operators holding a continuous caster that hasn’t stopped running in seventeen days. Between roughly 2 and 5 a.m., the human body drops into its deepest biological trough of the day. Core temperature falls. Melatonin peaks. Reaction time slows. On a 24/7 … Read more
There is a moment during a FIBC discharge into a glass-lined reactor when the air above the receiving chute feels electrically loaded. Fine organic powder cascades in a continuous stream, and the particles scrape past each other at velocities that generate charge faster than it can bleed to ground. The operator’s gloved hand rests on … Read more
A 200-litre steel drum sits on a scale in the filling bay. A half-conductive hose is lowered through a dip pipe to the bung. When toluene starts moving at four metres per second through thirty metres of pipework, positive and negative charges separate as the fluid shears past the pipe walls. Within seconds the drum’s … Read more
On 17 July 2007, a driver at a solvent distribution terminal opened a fill line to transfer VM&P naphtha into a 15,000-gallon above-ground storage tank. It was routine — the terminal had run the same transfer thousands of times before. Inside the tank, a float on the level-gauge linkage had worked loose over years of … Read more