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.  

Today come across this news from Sarawak Tribune titled: 'Owner loses RM5 million after factory destroyed by fire'. The news mentioned the fire start at 2.20pm. when the owner heard his worker shouting that the factory caught fire. The owner try to put out the fire using a fire extinguisher but to no avail. The fire spread to the rest of the premise.

                                                                             photo taken from Sarawak tribune.

Beside the owner with his fire extinguisher, where are the rest of the workers? Running for cover or there is only one fire extinguisher available at that time. The number of fire extinguisher and their location in the factory need to be plan and maintained properly. The worker has to be trained on how to correctly use a fire extinguisher. For a factory like this, it should has it own ERT, emergency response team especially a fire fighting team. The members selected from different section of the factory. It doesn't cost much to train your worker on fire fighting as compare to install smoke detector and fire sprinkler system.

It might cost the owner to spend 1-2K a year to maintain the system. A few hundred to train his worker. But running the factory for 13 years without incident = priceless. In this case = RM5 million.

Conclusion: IF YOU THING SAFETY IS EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN, TRY AN ACCIDENT.

HIRARC Risk Assessment

HIRARC, hazard identification, risk assessment, risk control. Its a common name well known in the safety and health field. What is risk? Risk = likelihood x severity. Likelihood is the chances that an accident would occur. Severity is how serious the effect of the accident to the victim. If both are high, the risk will be high. Below is the guideline from DOSH for risk matrix.

	Severity (S)
Likelihood (L)	1	2	3	4	5
5	5	10	15	20	25
4	4	8	12	16	20
3	3	6	9	12	15
2	2	4	6	8	10
1	1	2	3	4	5

The green zone is consider low risk, the yellow is medium and the red is high risk. If you risk assessment put the risk at high. You better stop the work or process until you find a way to control the risk.

LIKELIHOOD	Description	Rating
Most likely	The most likely results of the hazard / event being realized	5
Possible	Has a good chance of occurring and it not unusual	4
Conceivable	Might be occur at sometime in future	3
Remote	Has not known to occur after many years	2
Inconceivable	Is practically impossible and has never occurred	1
Severity	Description	Rating
Catastrophic	Numerous fatalities, irrecoverable property damage and productivity	5
Fatal	Approximately one single fatality major property damage if hazard is realized	4
Serious	Non-fatal injury, permanent disability	3
Minor	Disabling but not permanent injury	2
Negligible	Minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, first aid type injury	1

One of the common mistake that some people make when assessing the risk is they don't take into account the current control measures and go straight into assessing the risk as there is no control measure in place. The is not right.

For example: for a worker operating a boiler. The likelihood an accident would occur is put 3 or 4. The severity is put 4 or 5. Because we think the boiler is very dangerous and could explode and when it does, there will be fatalities. But when you look into the current control measures like almost all boiler has to be inspected every 15 months by DOSH inspector and service by authorized boiler serving company. Not to mention the monthly maintenance by the owner. All this has reduce the likelihood and severity to 1 or 2 as accident could be slip or fall at the boiler area.

Always take into account the existing control measure when doing your hirarc.

Cold Room Storage Safety

Cold room, freezer room or blast chiller are among the name given for this refrigeration storage space. It very common among the food industry for storage of frozen food or raw material which require lower then ambient temperature of storage condition. What offend being overlook for cold room is the safety hazard it present. To maintain the cold temperature, air flow from outside is restricted so the cold room is build air tight. The insulation is so good that it is almost sound proved. Which mean that if you get trap inside a cold room, you cry for help wouldn't be heard form inside and you will soon suffocate and pass out due to lack of oxygen or intoxicated by toxic fume trapped inside.

Among the safety control that are recommended for cold room are 1. anti freeze door nope should be install on the inside of the room, to enable the entrant person to open the door from within in case the door is accidentally close. 2. A tool to force open the door or create an opening on the wall. It can a crow bar or an axe in case the inner door nope fail. 3. A third option is to install a alarm outside the cold room with the panic bottom on the inside, the downside of this is if your cold room is not humidity control, it can get very moist and it will damage the circuit for the panic bottom causing it to fail. 4. Establish a buddy system, where two workers are working together with one entering the cold room while the other stay outside. The outside stand by person should only left when the 'buddy' exit the cold room. In some case, cold room could be treated like confine space entry.

How to become a Register Safety and Health Officer : Part II

With the certificate of attendance, you can apply to take the SHO examination organized by NIOSH. The exam consist of 4 papers namely Paper I, II, III & IV. Paper I consist of multiple choice question, subjective question and essay question. The objective and subjective question, you have to answer all the question but for essay question, you only need to answer 4 out of 6 questions. Paper II consist of the same format with the difference:
Paper I - Niosh sho module I & II
Paper II - Niosh sho module III & IV

Paper III on the other hand is quite challenging, its a work station test where candidate are required to go through 10 work station each with its own set of question. With 5 minutes given to answer the question for each station. Reading the question already take up 1 minutes, maybe 2 minutes to figure out the answer and 2 minutes to write down the answer. You might end up not answering all the question.

Paper IV is a workplace assignment where the candidate choice a workplace to write a risk assessment report and submit the report to Niosh exam unit. This is followed by a presentation of your assignment to the examiner and followed by an interview session.

The duration for the candidate to complete or pass all the examination is 2 years starting from when the first paper is taken. i.e. If you take Paper I in Oct 2013, by Oct 2015 you must pass all the paper or consider fail in the exam. The second condition that will cause you to fail is failling a single paper for 5 times. i.e. if you fail paper IV, you may resit the paper again the second time, third time...until fifth time. If you still fail paper IV the fifth time, you have to retake the exam.

If that happen, it doesn't mean you cannot take the sho exam ever again. You can by taking a SHO improvement course (10 days) then re-apply to take the sho exam all over again from paper I to IV.

                                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ You only fail when you give up ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

How to become a Register Safety and Health Officer : Part I

I was taking a break from the blog to concentrate on my SHO exam. In Malaysia, the authority on safety and health is with the Department of Occupational Safety and Health, DOSH.

Under DOSH, the training and certification is done by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, NIOSH.

In Sarawak, there are college and university that collaborate with Niosh to offer Diploma in OSH. If you take those course you are exempt from taking the Niosh SHO course but you will have to sit for the Niosh SHO exams.

Step 1 - The Course

Niosh SHO certification programme

Module: 4 modules

Duration: 22 days (monday to saturday every week)

Location: Niosh center Kuching (near Pentanak Market), Bintulu & Miri

Cost : RM 4,000

Cannot take 1 month off !! another option is the module course, each module can be taking in one week for each month. Say, module 1 on the 1st week of Feb, module 2 on the 1st week of Mar, module 3 on 1st week of Apr and module 4 on May.

After you completed the whole course, you will be awarded with a Certificate of Attendance for Safety and Health Officer. The certificate qualify you to take the Niosh SHO exam with minimum academic qualification of SPM. The application for exam is conducted by Niosh Headquater in Bangi. You can request to take the exam in Kuching, Bintulu or Miri.      

Food Preservative

We will be taking about fish. We consume fish as part of our daily diet for its protein and vitamin. Fish accounted for 26% of our daily protein diet. But are you aware that beside the fish essential that we consume, we are also consuming other element together. One of them that come in mind is formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a chemical compound commonly used for preservation of biological specimens. It kills most bacteria and fungi so to make it suitable to use for preservation of specimens. Formaldehyde is highly toxic to animal including human and it has been classify as a known carcinogen, what this mean is clinical studies has shown that it can cause cancer in human. A low dose will cause skin burn and irritation. Higher dose will cause dizziness and abdominal pain. Long term exposure to formaldehyde will cause nasal cancer.  

Formaldehyde has made its way into the fishing industry, where formaldehyde are being apply to fish product to prolong its shelf live. Last year, 103 tons of fish from Malaysia and Pakistan exported to Medan Indonesia were found to contain formaldehyde. The shipment was quarantine off and sent back to Malaysia. A layer of formaldehyde is spray on top of the fish skin to prevent bacteria growth which is the leading cause of food decay. Formaldehyde is colorless, so you wouldn't see it.  Indirectly it reduces the operation cost by depending less on refrigeration and less on special care during transportation. Fish product reach the hand of consumer fresher but with the additional preservative.

Advice to the Consumer

1.     Wash all food thoroughly with running tap water because formaldehyde can be soluble in water so washing can remove the present of formaldehyde.

      2. Soak dry groceries like dried fish thoroughly in clean water before cooking and discard the water. 
3. Cook all food with the temperature of 75°C or above because heat can breakdown the formaldehyde.
4. Buy from reliable sources.