Locking In Safety with a Lockout Program

There are very few people who know more about the value of such a program, and even how quickly the lack of a program can affect any member of a workforce. If you have any machinery or equipment that could provide high risk for injuries or worse among your workers, then perhaps reading Kina Repp’s story will inspire and motivate you to take care of your workforce with a lockout program, so there won’t be another Kina Repp.

Who is Kina Repp?

Oh, haven’t I mentioned her yet? Kina Repp is currently a workplace safety advocate based in Washington state, and she advocates for safety all over the country because of what happened to her the summer after her sophomore year of college in 1990. She was to spend a summer in Alaska working at a fish-processing plant in order to pay for her college bills durig the upcoming academic year. Just an hour into her first shift, she was cleaning a conveyor belt, when a co-worker turned in on and her arm got caught in the mchine, resulting in her losing that arm.

An investigation after the fact revealed several safety measures that could have and should have been in place but were not, the most important being a lockout program of some kind so the equipment would not work when a person is in risk around it.

The Safety Mistakes

In Kina’s case, there were several things that were wrong that basically “invited” this incident to occur. First, she was not properly trained on how to work around such equipment safely. Second, the conveyor was turned off but was not locked out, meaning that it was possible for the conveyor to be turned on accidentally or easily by any worker. Third, the person who turned the conveyor on failed to do a line-of-sight check to ensure that there was no one in danger of the conveyor before he turned it on. Fourth, there was supposed to be a machine guarding that would have prevented the accident, but that guarding was removed, ironically, to help make cleaning the conveyor easier. Fifth, an emergency stop cord and switch could have been used to stop the machine in an emergency, but the switch had not been installed – though by 1990 it was a common circuitry on many worksites.

What is a Lockout Program?

We’ll get into more details about this later, but I will go into the basics for now as to what it takes to have a lockout program. It is more than just a lock on a machine, though that is certainly part of it.

A lockout program, is just that – a program, not a simple switching procedure. A complete lockout program involves understanding all of the equipment you have in your work site and developing a way to lock out all of the ways that the equipment can be turned on and used. This involves not just the electrical aspect, but also any hydraulics, heat and mechanics. All workers should understand thoroughly how each of these systems work on each piece of equipment, and know the source of the energy or power for that equipment. From there, there needs to be a detailed process in locking down a piece of equipment so that each component of the equipment is addressed and there is an emergency switch used as a redundancy in case of a failure.

Next time, I will delve into the engineering of safety and discuss some hidden dangers to be aware of in a lockout program implementation.

For more information, you can check out the article by Matt Dudgeon in the January/February 2016 issue of OHS Canada magazine.