One of the warehouse guys was putting a pallet of parts on the racking in the warehouse with the small Clark LPG powered forklift and he damaged the very unprotected hydraulic brake lines. I was tasked with repairing it. I carefully drove it in the shop using the park brake to stop. I raised the forks high enough so no one would walk into them and then got a ladder and chained the cross bar the forks slide on to the mast and let the forks down on the chain. There was about 8 feet of chain hanging down so I stitched the rest of the chain through the steering wheel and dropped the key on the floor boards between the pedals. It was coffee time. Just as I was walking through the coffee room door I heard someone say "What the ***k". About a minute later one of the parts guys comes in the coffee room his face as white as a ghost and tells me "The forklift doesn't have any brakes" Fortunately he didn't injure himself or anyone else. The service manager gave me heck for not using a lockout tag. I don't think it would have helped. Now I keep a ring of blank keys that fit everything I work on in my tool box with "DO NOT OPERATE" tag on it. A blank key goes in the ignition with the tag on it.
I preach lock out tag out often. It usually falls on deaf ears. My personal experience was being called to unhook a conveyor that had been powered up temporarily to work the bugs out before being placed in service permanently in another location. When I got there, the big boss wanted to see it run before disconnecting. I pressed the start button. 25' in the air pieces started flying. A mechanic came running from another building. "WHY DID YOU START IT?????!" he yelled. "I replied I was last to work on it, it was in good working order when I left it." "Didn't you see the strap?" he replied. The machine was entirely painted Home Depot orange, as was the ratchet strap he put in place to hold motor & gearbox 25' above the floor when he removed a piece of the motor mount. I asked: "Why didn't you lock it out?" "How was I to know you'd start it?" was his answer.
Failing to lockout/tag out is basically a hanging offence in most places I've been. Anyone failing to LOTO would be out the door without their feet touching the floor.
Haven't locked out anything in a couple years now. But that's because components on a bench tend to not run without being attached to the machine lol.
The last decade has seen a big push to clean up the oilfield and make it safer. Lots of things to address, but changing the culture from 'Just get it done' to 'everyone goes home safely' has been a struggle. Most of the companies had to create zero tolerance policies and then enforce them on everybody equally. I watched superintendents and operations managers get fired right beside hourly laborers for violating a zero tolerance rule. Lock out/Tag out is a big one that still gets people fired even though the concept has been around for decades. A couple oilfield companies added one more step "try out" Lock out device. Tag it as locked out. Try to operate it to make sure it is de-energized. That was added because people were incorrectly locking out equipment, or improperly locking it out and people got hurt. If the person doing the work had tried to operate it, they would have seen that it was improperly locked out and could correct it before going into a hazardous situation. That said, I failed to properly do this on my own project this week. I disabled the power, tried to turn it on to make sure it was de-energized, but I did not tag it as locked out. Should I have? Probably, though I'm the only person working on my own personal equipment, using my tools in my own barn that nobody else uses.
I think we were better off when the stupid didn't last until the next time. JMHO.
Yeah, you'd think 8' of chain wrapped through the steering wheel, the forks chained up, and the key laying on the floor should have been a clue something unusual was going on.
Way back in my misspent youth I did a backpack working holiday down in Oz for a couple of years. One of the many jobs I had was plying my trade as a welder at an open pit mine in the NT. 4 of us worked night shift from late afternoon till after midnight. One night the job was to reline the bottom of some of the chutes on the crushing and screening plant. They were very strict about tag out on the claim. We got into the electrical room but had no clue what switch or panel was for what we were working on so we just hung tags on everything. Probably a dozen or more. Of coarse by the time 1:00 am rolled around the tags were long forgotten and back to camp we went. About 10 or 12 miles. A little after 8 am we had the pit boss pounding on our doors in the bunkhouse to get our butts out to the pit and get our tags off so the pit could start working. Nobody but the person whose name was on the tag could remove it unless you were maybe dead. We were not popular with management but the crew didn't seem upset with a late start. We didn't get fired. d.d.
The time when LOTOTO really comes into its own is when crews from multiple disciplines are working multiple shifts 24/7 on machines that might go over from one shift to the next for days or even weeks in some cases. When there can be over 100 bodies in the maintenance shop at any one time there has to be some sort of procedure that indicates to everybody that a machine is under repair or maintenance.
While I was on a reservoir project in Tampa FL I was a field engineer at the time for the batch plant making soil cement. LOTO was undoubtedly the single most important thing I was responsible for when the labor crew came in to clean the mixer between shifts. They had to get inside a mixer that had two mixing shafts with offset interlacing paddle arms to mix the material. Each shaft had a 150hp electric motor driving it so if things were started while the men were in the mixer, bad things would happen to say the very least. LOTO took time because the mixer wasn’t the only risk the men had. There were belts and feed chutes, air cannons to loosen bridged material and so on. What we wound up finding to be the most efficient and safest way to lock out the plant was to kill the main power to the entire plant for the 2-3 hour maintenance period they needed to clean the mixer. We could lock out individual sections of the plant for sure, including the mixer and feed belt to it, but I never liked that being the only bar between them and injury. Always made me uneasy, even after several months, when they were in the drum. Regarding failure to LOTO something, it was on the spot termination. There were also pretty stiff discipline applied to failure to unlock a machine and the lock needing to be cut off. Saw both happen but failure to unlock was more common. We did unfortunately have some real bone heads working there at the plant on support roles at different points in time so that part of the safety manual was utilized. It never failed to surprise me how some folks didn’t want to take the time to lock something out when the obvious result was potentially so ugly if it went south. I always stressed to the new guys when it comes to man vs machine you always loose out either with your life or part of your body.
I always enjoyed having to take LOTO training at the various mines I worked in. All day course where only 10 minutes was actually pertinent to being a mechanic. But hey I know the procedure to double block and bleed a pipe joint in the one in a gazillion chance I'll ever need to do it lol.
You'd be lucky to get an hour with us. Heavy Mobile Equipment LOTO was a totally different course to what the Process Plant did.
Pull the jabco look around get done rest it head home
It was all just rolled into one course out there. I'd say the best one was having to take a 6 hour work permit course just to walk across the path from the sign in shack and push a reset button on a portable heater lol.
...Also, removing a loto lock & tag by someone other than the installer is instant dismissal as well. Yes, my smiling face is on all my tags with the locks...... Apparently canaduh isn't as serious about worker safety.
Not sure if this would qualify as a LOTO situation. Several years before I retired from the quarry for a short time I had what was suppose to be a "helper"! On this day I was working on a Mack 10 wheeler that was having a starting problem. Actually it would fire up real good but the problem was somewhere in the electrical system, relay or starter switch. I was in the cab with the dash partially disassembled checking wiring and such to see if there was a loose wire causing the problem and listening for the relay clicking when I turned the key. At one point I got out of the cab to get a tool or test light and just as I stepped off the truck this "helper" pops out form under the truck. I probably not to nicely asked him "what the F! were you doing under there?" "Oh! I was just checking the clutch and throw-out bearing I thought it was acting funny the last time I drove it." Forget what I said after that but think he said something to some higher up because a few days later he managed to get transferred over the the Blacktop plant as a grounds man. No one ever said anything to me about it and to be honest I was not too upset to loose this so called helper! One other thing I recall about him was when he told about the time he worked as a mechanic for a company that ran a fleet of over the road milk tankers. He was bitching about how they had rules about washing their hands often while working on the tankers.
Depends on which part of canaduh !!! d.d.
A long time ago I was taught that good safety rules are written in blood. And the best part is that it's somebody else's so you don 't have to use your own.
I'll be the first to say I've broke about every rule listed here..... I need to work a bit safer id say.
The only time you need to worry is the time it kills you and you most probably won’t even see that coming...!!
As they say the first part is realizing you have a problem so I'll have to be a bit more cautious. I kinda like being in one chunk
Long before LOTO my late grandfather had a saying - "before engaging spanners, engage brain". It's funny but if you put the question to a group of people in any type of safety training course (where their minds ought to be somewhat focused) and ask them what's the most important piece of PPE anyone can have on a job, nobody ever answers "the human brain". You just have to be constantly aware of what could go wrong if whatever you're trying to do goes pear-shaped, and why working distracted for whatever reason makes you doubly dangerous to both yourself and those who might be around you.
Years ago, my brother and I worked in the shop for the same big trucking Co. A driver came in with an internal air leak in the transmission, and my brother started to check it out. He reached in to see which cylinder was leaking, and the driver went and got another mechanic, ( a high school classmate of my brother's), thinking it would go faster with 2 working on it. The other guy got in the cab and flipped the switch, cutting two of my brother's fingers off clean. Our whole lives, my brother has thought, "it won't happen to me"; and I have thought, "if it's gonna happen to somebody, it'll probably be me". We still think that way, despite his having racked up more injuries than me .
Mitch, I guess the fella doing the voice-over (Harry Morgan?) on this safety video was named after your brother. 40+ years and still relevant.
LOTO is quite worthless in my experience why? Because no one respects the tag out part. I’ve had many a time where a truck driver comes in to hand me a tag that they cut off the machine they were picking up. If they had the least little respect for it they would come to me before starting the machine and verify whether I had simply forgotten to remove it or it was still under repair. The other problem with LOTO is that they tell us either the master switch has to be off or a battery cable disconnected and padlocked. Sounds great until you are doing troubleshooting or repairs that require the power to be own and/or engine running. *** am I supposed to do, run back and forth every five minutes deenergizing the machine in between testing and fixing wires or attaching and disconnecting test hoses?!? Also most master switches still don’t have the capability to be physically locked out which is entirely stupid on the engineers part. Just taking the key out isn’t enough IMHO And a tag doesn’t fix stupid idiots who’d drive off with half the interior torn apart, or a chain wrapped around the steering wheel as per the OPs case. You want a LOTO program that does more than check off the insurance company’s box then it has to be real and tailored to being a mechanic.
You wouldn’t have disliked working with our LOTO then, because there was a system built into it to allow live testing - anything from a simple power on to allow you to connect ET or check wiring with power on, to full performance testing for pressures, cycle times, or whatever. In its simplest form it is Red Tensor barriers (think airport checkin) around the machine with a “Live Testing in Progress. Do not Enter” sign at the access point. IMHO there’s a big difference between a LOTO system designed as a tick box exercise (as yours appears to be, and believe me I feel your pain) to one that is designed as an attempt to keep people safe while at the same time letting them get on with their work.
Your safety people are realists mine are idiots with zero experience in the industry who tell us stupid stuff such as “tie off at 4 feet” when the reel pack or lanyard won’t be effective until about 20 feet…after putting on a fall protection class where they have us calculate our effective drop length. The only saving grace is they stay mostly at our main branch and I see them once or twice a year.
Most of the safety systems I worked under were generally designed by the user department, equipment maintenance in my case, with minimal input from Safety apart from the final sign off.
We have a few steering wheel lockout covers. I've got kits in the trucks and extra in our job trailer. Some places are no loto kit=no work
My standpoint is my lock is protecting my life. If someone removes or otherwise screws with my lockout, they are try to kill me and will be treated as such. Our lockout system was built by trades and ops and signed off by corporate safety. It had provisions for troubleshooting using ppe and control measures like control zones. Never had a problem with my lockout being defeated but we did have lots of “educational opportunities “ with people who just didn’t grasp the concept. Cam
Went to look at a big dozer this week. Had a lock out tag on the transmission lever that had the mechanics name and phone number on it. Called him up and he sounded surprised. Told him why I was there and asked permission to start and operate the machine. He told me he was expecting my call. Only had the tag out on the lever to keep the curious at bay until the machine got moved off site after my inspection.
Lockout devices have 6 spaces for 6 individuals. If 6 people working, should have as many padlocks. Last person to complete removes the device. I get the argument constantly, "lockouts are only for electrical work." I am amazed there are as many idiots with two arms as there are.
"Group LoTo" And then you work on complicated machinery requiring several locks, and multiple workers. They have these metal boxes (look like an ammo box) with holes thru the corners for each member's locks. Inside is the special lock's keys just for that machinery.
We did a shovel teardown one time. I think we had about 5 or 6 sets of scissors with 5 locks each hanging off the main disconnect.
Not just electrical work. One of our guys was trouble shooting a problem on a new hydraulic log loader in the yard outside the plant. I wasn't there so I'm not sure what hose he had off but it was probably the 2 inch discharge hose on the main pump. Because he was right there until he wasn't he didn't have it tagged. Went in the shop to grab something from his tool box and along comes someone from engineering wanting to check something. Flashes it up and almost instantly there is about 2 barrels of hydraulic oil on the concrete. Didn't do any damage but took a lot of zorb-all to clean it up. d.d.
The person that started the equipment should get qty (1) week off unpaid.
Yup, negating/removing/ignoring a LOTO lot should be at minimum (if no-one got harmed) qty (1) week off unpaid. That will get people's attention, and then after a year or so, removing a tag should be immediate firing.
a lot of the mining equipment over here has two isolators fitted one for the start circuit and one for the accessory circuits. in conjunction with lock out procedures allows for live testing of electrical circuits without risk of engine operation
It wasn't tagged out. The guy who left it untagged maybe should have.d.d.
Yup, that's the way I read it. Both should have been reprimanded.
Why do you think the engineer who flashed it up should be reprimanded. He was both authorised and qualified to run a machine for testing purposes.He probably wouldn't have been great at loading logs with it but neither would I as a mechanic. It could have been any of the mechanics or most of the engineers in the shop that hit the start button maybe just to move it out of the way to get to something else or to swing it around to access something to get a measurement even. d.d.
The guy clearly did not do a walk around or check anything prior to starting the unit. Seeing tools, spill trays, open compartment doors, hoses/parts etc laying around should trigger a reaction like "hey I wonder what's happening here, maybe I should go ask if someone's working on this?" The mechanic should have definitely done his part to lock/tag out the machine but the guy who started it also shares a slice of the blame as well.
This............
About that time he thought of loto
Sounds like something that normally happens in the logging industry. Both would have been the recipients of a rigging fit for the amount of money the oil cost. The owner might have even slammed his ball cap on the ground.
We maintained a lot of remotely controlled and Auto start equipment. 4 1200 hp pumps and motors on one side of the wall and 4 DC drives in the electrical room on the other side. My former boss came in on the millwrights were starting to take apart one of the pumps, let’s call it #3. He went into the electrical room and noticed #4 was locked out. That is why some kind of verifying step is needed in a lockout. A test start, voltage check, bleed valve opened……Cam
Exactly. I’ve never done work beyond the most minor thing that didn’t involve a pile of tools, parts, panels open, etc that would be immediately spotted by using some common sense and looking at the machine. Certainly not work that would involve pulling major lines. honestly part of the safety rules up the wazoo has been to replace common sense and thus allow the idiots to thrive. “bUt iT waSNt lOcKeD oUt”