Asbestos In Home

Asbestos still kills around 5000 workers each year, this is more than the number of people killed on the road.

When materials that contain asbestos are disturbed or damaged, fibres are released into the air. When these fibres are inhaled they can cause serious diseases.

These diseases will not affect you immediately; they often take a long time to develop, but once diagnosed, it is often too late to do anything. This is why it is important that you protect yourself 

now.

OSH In School

In this post, i will not be writing about what specific hazards are present at school and how to eliminate them but rather i will explain how to put in place an OSH management system that could be use to manage and control the risk at school. The reason is each school or any workplace has different type of hazards and need different way of controlling the hazards. To apply the same hazard to all school is not effective. To have a effective OSH mangement system to the right way to go.

1. Safety and Health Policy. Everything start from the fundamental. A policy will outline the core responsibility of the school management and their commitment to osh, to ensuring the safety and health of all occupants at the school, to provide resource to management safety and health and etc. The policy shall be sign off by the chairman of the school management.

2. Safety and Health Committee: The committee is responsible to carry out all the safety and health activities at the school. It should be consist of a Chairman (board of school director), a secretary (safety and health officer, if appointed or safety representative), min 4 representative from management (board of director, principle or vice principle) and min 4 representative form teachers, parent, student representative or support / ancillary staffs. The elected committee members are based on total number of school teacher and students exceeding 100 persons. The member will meet to discuss and plan out the activities to ensure safety and health.

3. Safety and Health Resource: Beside financial budget, other resource include school layout plan, building plan, osh organizational chart, evacuation route, emergency assembly point, safety signage, personal protective equipment (PPE), training and promotion for osh.

4. Safety and Health Rules and Responsibility: Rules on safety and health should be established, published and communicated to the staff, parent and student. Appoint person responsible for osh activity or contact person like fire warden, first aider and security officer.

5. Risk Assessment / HIRARC: Risk assessment or safety inspection on school compound shall be carried out to identify potential hazards, evaluate the risk and control measure to reduce the risk. Please refer the hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control (HIRARC) guideline publish by DOSH is a good reference on how to carry out risk assessment. Training should be provided to the safety and health committee to supply them the knowledge and skill to carried out the inspection.

6. Emergency Facilities: Fire fighting facilities (fire extinguisher, fire hose, sand bucket), first aid facilities (first aid box, school clinic), chemical spillage clean up kit (if laboratory is present), evacuation route and emergency response team should be provided.

Hope that this post will give you an insight on setting of OSH in school. Thank you for reading.
   

Tianjin Explosion

At first glance of the picture posted on the internet, its looks like something out of a science fiction story. The destruction is massive. After that, the first thing that come to my mind: chemical storage safety.

The accident location is at a chemical storage depot where imported chemicals are temporary stored before they are transported or distributed through the region. From the scale of the explosion and destroyed vehicle, one can expect the massive volume of chemicals stored. Death toll reach 112 with 90 still missing as of this posting today. With 700 reported injuries, damage of property, disruption of operation, law suit from the victim's family....the story will never end.

At Malaysia, under OSHA Control of Industrial Major Accident Hazards (CIMAH) Regulation 1994 enforce the requirement for such storage facilities. CIMAH regulation enforce the registration of competent person, demonstration of safe operation, emergency plan, threshold quantity of stored substance etc. Even in the case if your facilities or factory does not store above the threshold quantity, proper safe storage practice should be implemented. Chemicals compatibility and storage ventilation are two areas that should be look into. Flammable and oxidizer chemical should not be stored together because their fumes can react with each other to cause fire or explosion. Storage should be separate using barrier or distance between each other. The ventilation should be adequate to remove contaminated air from accumulating in the storage area. A wall or ceiling exhaust ventilation should be installed in place.

One Small Step for Safety

Just conducted another OSHA course last week for my Diploma in plantation management students. I been doing this OSHA course for while and every session is unique by itself. I decided to post about the recent session because it caught my attention on the origin place of the participant. The OSHA course duration is 2 days and cover all the basic in OSH legislative and risk prevention. 

                                    

On the second day of the course, three participants come to me and ask: "Sir, can we finished the course at 3pm" (instead of the scheduled 5pm). I ask "what is the reason" curious to find out why. One reply "because have to catch the express boat, last one leaving at 3.30pm". A few of the participants are coming from rural district, which is accessible by river only. They basically took a 2 hours boat ride to Sibu town to attend the course and go back afterward. Most of them has never heard of OSHA and their right as worker under the law. 

Most of the male participants are plantation field conductor handling spraying, manuring and collection work. My greatest hope is after the course, they would have gain the knowledge and awareness to safe guard their own safety at their workplace. From there let them be example to other to follow. A small step in growing safety culture.      

Expending Safety Culture

Speaking on the topic of safety culture, among the first thing that come to mind is safety health committee, employee safety minded, safety campaign etc. Most of us will think about our own organization first because we are responsible for our own workplace safety.

When a contractor come to our facility, we will highlight to the contractor about our safety, health and security rules, and that is the extend of our safety culture to the contractor. How many of us will actually audit the contractor or supplier's safety management level. In the end, we will award the project to the most price competitive contractor.

Imaging a situation for a project procurement, one of the major criteria for contractor selection is the contractor safety grade. Only grade A and B will be considered. Now this will surely put a charge on all contractor or those with low grade to improve their safety level. To make it more thorough, to achieve grade A, the contractor's supplier must be of the same grade. So one drive the other to improve their safety culture. Take example of our Halal industry, one of the important criteria for halal certification is the raw material must be Halal certified. Same thing apply here, no grade A, no business. Now, we are talking money $$...more business opportunity if the company has good safety grade or certification. No employer will mention again "its costly to invest in safety" because it will cost more to lose business opportunity.

Hierarchy Of Control

The phase Hierarchy of control should come familiar with safety practitioner. There may be additional steps in the pyramid but for certain the top will be 'Elimination' and the bottom is 'Personal Protective Equipment or PPE'. Theoretically the best control is elimination of the hazard and the least prefer is providing worker with PPE because this does not eliminate the hazard, it just prevent the hazard from doing more serious harm to the victim.

In real life, it may not always be the case, For example, To eliminate a hazardous process mean you may need to redesign your process flow, create additional less hazardous process even re-arrange your shop floor to create a new flow. This cost involve will be huge. To substitute a hazardous material or chemicals will be require less cost than elimination, eventually you can get something which is cheaper then your existing chemicals in term of material cost or waste treatment cost. But this will require time and effort to research and develop the new replacement chemicals. The employer must be prepare to commit man hours for this to be successful.

So what do you do when your employer is among those 'making profit only' type. Instead of starting from the top of the hierarchy, we have to start from the bottom, that's PPE. Make make sure no fatality or serious injuries will occur. At the same time, start administrative control using method like standard operation procedure, safety precaution sign, limited access area, training and educate the worker, inspection checklist etc. This will create safety awareness in your workplace. So when the awareness catch up, your employer in the process will also learn to respect the safety element. Now you move to the next step, propose low cost engineering control to your employer like install emergency stop bottom, guarding, safety interlock etc. Then you move to higher cost engineering control method like fume hood, automation, conveyor system etc. Very soon you will be in the Isolation control  already.

Safety and health culture does not come overnight. It has to be nurture and grow.

Fire hazard from the sky

A floating object made of paper, bamboo, lid candle or wax. Some call it sky lantern others 'Kun Ming Den' is gaining popularity among the local during mid autumn festival. The lantern is release to the sky carrying wish or prayer from the owner. 

Sky lantern is banned in the US as it pose a fire hazard, as the flight of the lantern is uncontrollable, it basically follow where the wind take it. On air, it pose a risk to flying aircraft. When the lantern landed on the ground, it not just a source of ignition. 

1. lantern landed on the airport runway can mislead the pilot as a landing beacon. 

2. lantern landed on the road may pose danger to motorcyclist

3. lantern landed on petrol station, fuel storage facility, tire storage, tire recycling plan, etc. can be catastrophic

In Malaysia, under section 285 of the Penal cose, those defying the ban can be jailed for six months or fined RM2,000 while under section 5 of the Exlosive Act 1957, those found letting off sky lantern could face jail term up to five years or fined RM10,000. Unfortunately, i still see lantern floating around airport area each year.