Safety Topic · 97 articles
Hazards are anything that can cause harm, injury, or damage in the workplace. This section covers various types of hazards, including physical, chemical, biological, and ergonomic risks. Learn how to identify hazards, assess risks, and apply control measures. Understanding hazards is the foundation of effective safety management and accident prevention.
TL;DR Around 1 million cases and nearly 60,000 deaths occur worldwide each year, most in tropical regions (CDC Yellow Book, 2024). England averaged 57 laboratory-confirmed and 89 probable cases a year from 2020 to 2023, peaking in summer and autumn…
TL;DR — The Numbers That Define Substation Safety 74% of workplace electrical fatalities struck non-electrical occupations — meter readers, contractors, and grounds crews, not electricians (ESFI, 2025). 1,940 workplace deaths involved electricity from 2011 to 2023 in the US, roughly…
TL;DR — The Numbers That Define This Hazard ~20 seconds to full burial: A worker standing in flowing grain can be buried completely in about twenty seconds, and knee-deep in roughly four to five (Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health,…
TL;DR — The Numbers That Govern a UV Print Shop Ozone PEL — 0.1 ppm over 8 hours: The enforceable US limit for ozone, the gas mercury curing lamps generate (US OSHA, 29 CFR 1910.1000 Table Z-1). Actinic UV limit…
TL;DR 18.4 fatalities per 100,000 US marine transportation workers (2011–2017) — roughly six times the all-industry US rate, per NIOSH (reviewed February 2024). 650 lives lost across 444 marine casualties in EU waters over ten years (2014–2023) — 89.7% of…
TL;DR: Pneumatic Tool Safety in Numbers ~37,000 — annual US emergency department visits from nail gun injuries, work-related and consumer combined (NIOSH/CDC) 2 of 5 — residential carpentry apprentices injured by a nail gun across a four-year training window (OSHA)…
TL;DR — The Numbers That Define This Hazard 6,000–15,000 RPM — the typical operating range for bench, pedestal, and portable abrasive wheels. Rim speed on a 9-inch angle grinder wheel reaches roughly 290 km/h at the point of contact. Over…
Thirty-two people went to work in our industry in 2024 and did not come home. The IOGP Safety Performance Indicators 2024 Data report records those 32 fatalities across 21 separate incidents — more than the 27 recorded the year before.…
At 04:17 on a dry winter morning, a 200-litre drum of toluene begins flowing through a stainless-steel transfer line into a glass-lined reactor on the floor above. The liquid looks calm. It is not. Inside that pipe, billions of toluene…
It is 04:40 on a cold-morning restart at the mill, outside air around minus two, and the 42-bar main steam header has been off load for thirty-six hours during a planned outage. The operator cracks the eight-inch warm-up valve maybe…
A packaged watertube boiler rated for 60,000 pounds of steam per hour holds somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 pounds of water inside its drum and generating tubes — pressurised to roughly 350 psig and heated to 440°F. That water is…
I was standing seventy metres from a 16-inch carbon steel spool piece during a pipeline hydrotest on a gas processing facility in the Gulf when the bolted flange connection failed at 1.3 times design pressure. The blind flange launched sideways…
Every safety category is listed in the A–Z directory.