Safety

Don’t dehydrate

Safety /

James Cunningham recently gave a health and safety talk on “salt.” While too much salt can be detrimental to the human body, he said, too little is just as bad. The term salt itself is an inclusive term including potassium, magnesium and sodium salts. Heavy work or exercise in warm summer temperatures can quickly deplete your body’s salt levels. This will make you feel tired or “washed out” and your muscles will tend to cramp. Dehydration cannot be cured by simply drinking water. There must be the correct salt mixture in the water to allow the body to rehydrate. Sweet drinks are not a healthy solution and James suggested that, in hot conditions, employees drank water plus an alternative mouthful of a proper rehydrate solution.Cyclists, he continued, need to be especially careful as they often do not notice their level of perspiration. Severe loss of potassium salts coupled to dehydration can result in an avoidable heart attack.

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A quick look at house keeping in an Australian coldstore

Safety /

The photos were taken at an ice cream store in Melbourne. The actual cold stores were erected in the late 1970’s, so the facility is older than most South African cold stores.Note the following: 1. Strip curtain has no broken strips. 2. There is no ice in the doorway. 3. An “Albany” high speed door is also in use. 4. Fire extinguisher next to the door way. 5. Safety signs 6. Emergency torch. 7. The manager is wearing a high visibility vest and safety shoes. 8. Safety bollards.  In Australia, pedestrians must walk in defined walk ways which must be protected from forklifts and other materials handling equipment.  In this photograph the pedestrian route crosses one used by forklifts, ie a freezer doorway. Pedestrians must open a safety gate before walking in front of the freezer door. When the gate is opened a limit switch activates a red light inside the store so that forklift drivers working there know a pedestrian is in the doorway area. Inside the cold store working area, additional protection is given to pedestrians by placing a fixed rack in front of the walkway. In other places crash barriers are used instead.  Wire mesh covers the back of the fixed rack to prevent pallets from being pushed through the rack and onto pedestrians. Pedestrian walkways continue outside the working area.  Pedestrians can walk between the yellow lines. When they walk between the red lines they are in a danger area and must pay extra attention. This shows an employee stacking cases, coming from a blast freezer, onto a pallet. The pallet is placed on a platform which lowers itself as the cases are stacked, so the employee is always working at an optimum height to protect his back. There are two platforms so that he can start loading the second pallet while the completed one is waiting for a forklift to take it away. He is wearing ear muffs for noise protection as well as cold store protective clothing. Cold store is using a “man on” machine.  They are more manoeuvrable than a counterbalance forklift and they allow an employee to get on and off quickly making him more productive, ie he can check as well as move pallets.Note the steel mesh protection on the overhead guard as well as the crash barrier in the back ground which defines and protects the pedestrian walk way. The Cold store generally was in a spotless condition and employees were complying with the health and safety rules. I have visited no South African cold stores that come close to these standards.

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Forklift training for supervisors is critical

Safety /

Dear James I have gone on and on about how useless it is to train forklift operators, and then have no supervision!! If drivers on the road knew there were no policemen, do you really think, however well they were trained, they would obey all the rules of the road! One of our clients, who trains religiously, and has in excess of 20 operators on Counterbalanced and Reach trucks, operating in a yard and the warehouse, is distressed because there was an accident . Their own people are all trained by ourselves and have been there for a long time, so they did a 5 day course and have their licences renewed every two years, which as you know, involves retesting them. They also employ casuals from Employment agencies. Speaking to some of these who have been trained by various companies they have done one (Counterbalanced)or two days (For a Reach Truck as well) training. This has obviously not been checked by the client. The employment agencies want a licensed operator at the “cheapest” price. We have recently come across more and more “accredited” training centres that are offering shorter than the compulsory 5 days of training for novices. In addition, the client has never had a forklift Management Seminar!! In other words – the operators are trained and then left to their own devices to operate as they like until their next new licence is issued! It was considered very sad this week, when one of the regular operators had to have steel pins put into his toes because they were crushed by his own forklift!! He got off the machine, left the key in the ignition, and went to chat to the supervisor. A casual operator got tired of waiting for him, jumped on the machine, and reversed, hitting and displacing, the shrink-wrap machine and a pallet, which crushed the operators foot. The whole incident is clearly seen on their closed circuit TV. While I agree with them that the accident was the fault of the casual operator, it would never have happened if the permanent operator had removed the key when he got off the machine. He knows he should, and answers the question correctly when he does a theory test. It is very seldom we even have to penalise an operator for leaving the key in the ignition when he does his test. If they had trained managers and supervisors who “police” the operators, this sort of thing would be very unlikely to happen. Their standards would be maintained. Des Fell Managing Director    

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