Last week we let two people get hurt in our business.  One suffered an electric shock and the other trapped a finger and had ten stitches.

In both cases if they had STOPPED TO THINK about the potential risks of their activities and followed these SAFETY ESSENTIALS it is likely that injury would have been avoided:

• ISOLATION PROCEDURES – Never work on live or moving machinery – always ‘lock out’
• SAFE SYSTEMS – Follow safe systems of work, site rules, signage and traffic signals
• PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT – Always wear the correct PPE

And no one STEPPED IN to stop them.

Here are the key details of the incidents:

In the first incident an electrician suffered an electric shock whilst working on some laboratory equipment. The electrician had initially locked the equipment off at a local isolator before re-energising the circuits to test certain parts. Unfortunately, after taking a phone call from his office, it seems he forgot to isolate the circuits again before connecting a power cable to a control box and as a result he received a 415v electric shock through one of his fingers. Fortunately an employee who was nearby was able to stop the power supply.

In the second incident contractors arrived at one of our sites to remove some redundant sleepers in preparation for the installation of steelwork on a receiving hopper. They arrived on site before their CEMEX point of contact and, rather than waiting to receive their induction and Permit to Work, they started on site. Whilst two of the contractors were manually lifting the sleepers into a loading shovel bucket one of the contractors failed to let go of the end of a sleeper and trapped his left hand middle finger against the loading shovel bucket; he required ten stitches as a result.  Effective planning and co-ordination of the works, along with the use of suitable gloves for the task, would have minimised the risk of injury.