Hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day and weekend. Our morning session will cover a few items that are essential to reducing workplace hazards and strengthening our safety culture. These things fall under the Fourth and Fifth items on the Hazard Risk Control Pyramid. The hazard risk pyramid lists the ways to control hazards in order of effectiveness and priority.
The following is a list of them in order:
Elimination
Substitution
Engineering controls
Awareness
Administrative controls
PPE
If we cannot eliminate the hazard, we should use as many of the other five controls as we can to mitigate it. To ensure everyone is aware of hazards and how to control them, as well as to ensure that E Light Electric Services and OSHA requirements are met, awareness and administrative controls include weekly safety meetings, the continuous improvement discord server, JHA briefings, and general and specific training. This week we will discuss two ways in which we accomplish this.
The first requirement is annual training. Our field personnel must complete nine refresher courses annually through iAuditor (Safety Culture App). Each month for the first nine months, we require you to complete one of these nine training courses. In January this year, we had the NFPA 70E Electrical Safety Refresher, and in February we had the Safety Awareness training. The Safety Culture App (Iauditor) will notify you when a new course is available. When the course is due, the notice will be sent on the first of the month. Every month, the course is due by the last day of the month. Before then, you must open your Safety Culture app and complete the training. This training is required for your job and should be completed while you are logged in at work. Projects should set aside some time right after their first weekly safety meeting for the E Light Crew with assigned Safety Culture accounts to complete their monthly required training on their phones.
Secondly, we need to keep in mind the training required for using equipment on a project. Before you can operate any piece of equipment on a project you need to have read the operators manual for that equipment, including the pre-use inspections required, control operations and emergency operations such as lowering a scissor lift manually from the ground. Second, you should be trained on the general and specific hazards associated with that piece of equipment, and third, you should be observed by a competent person operating the equipment successfully and safely.
Online general training modules are available at Elightinformation.com which describe the hazards associated with Forklifts (Powered Industrial Trucks), Skidsteers, Aerial Lifts, Scissor Lifts, etc. Operators of these types of equipment must complete the appropriate training module. Under templates, we also have a specific training observation audit on Safety Culture. The template is entitled: Training - Equipment Operator Observation and Evaluation. The competent person on the project will need to open this template and fill in the Name of the operator, the make and model number of the equipment, and then have you demonstrate doing the pre-use inspection in the manual and operating the machine to determine if you are competent and safe at doing so. After that, they will sign the evaluation and email it to safety@elightelectric.com. Training records for employees will be updated to reflect that they have been authorized to operate that specific type, make, and model of equipment once this has been completed. Their ID card will display this when the QR code is scanned, so supervisors will know that they can operate that model and make in the future.
Please make sure we have accomplished this for all the equipment operators on each site. We can all help with this...Supervisors, ask for their training records. You can contact me directly by text or email to get training records. We are in the process of issuing the ID cards to all the employees currently. Once this is completed, you will be able to scan the QR code on the front of an employee’s ID badge and pull up a list of the make and models of equipment the employee has been training on and is authorized to use. If you can not verify the records, then have them read the operators manual and the demonstrate their ability to do these tasks and operate the equipment safely and then email the Template to safety@elightelectric.com and they will be authorized to operate the equipment and their training records will be updated for the future. We can all help by also telling the supervisor that you have not been observed operating that specific make and model of equipment so that we can provide that training and observation.
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