Safety engineering, Health and Safety E-Consultation

Fume Metal Fever Sec.1

2008-05-26T23:44:00.000-07:00

OVERVIEW
Metal Fume Fever is the name for an illness that is caused primarily by exposure to zinc oxide fume (ZnO) in the workplace. The main cause of this exposure is usually breathing the fumes from welding, cutting, or brazing on galvanized metal. Metal Fume Fever is an acute allergic condition experienced by many welders during their occupational lifetimes. Studies indicate that the most common cause of metal fume fever is overexposure to zinc fumes from welding,burning, or brazing galvanized steel. Since galvanized steel is more and more common in industry, the chances of welders having to work on it are occurring more frequently all the time. Other elements, such as copper and magnesium, may cause similar effects.

EFFECTS OF OVEREXPOSURE
Zinc oxide fumes cause a flu–like illness called Metal Fume Fever. Symptoms of
Metal Fume Fever include headache, fever,chills, muscle aches, thirst, nausea, vomiting,chest soreness, fatigue, gastrointestinal pain, weakness, and tiredness. The symptoms usually start several hours after exposure; the attack may last 6 to 24 hours. Complete recovery generally occurs without intervention within 24 to 48 hours. MetalFume Fever is more likely to occur after a period away from the job (after weekends or vacations). High levels of exposure may cause a metallic or sweet taste in the mouth,dry and irritated throat, thirst, and coughing at the time of the exposure. Several hours after exposure, a low–grade fever (seldom higher than 102 F or 39 C). Then comes sweating and chills before temperature returns to normal in 1 to 4 hours. If you encounter these symptoms, contact a physician and have a medical examination /evaluation. There is no information in the literature regarding the effects of long–term exposure to zinc oxide fumes.

PERMISSIBLE EXPOSURE LIMIT (PEL)
The current OSHA standard for zinc oxide fume is 5 milligrams of zinc oxide fume per
cubic meter of air (mg/m3 ) averaged over an eight–hour work shift. NIOSH recommends
that the permissible exposure limit be changed to 5 mg/m3 averaged over a work
shift of up to 10 hours per day, 40 hours per week, with a Short–Term Exposure Limit
(STEL) of 10 mg/m3 averaged over a 15–minute period. Consult the NIOSH standard, Criteria Document for Zinc Oxide,listed in the Information Sources for more detailed information.

Fume Metal Fever Sec.2

2008-05-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

HOW TO AVOID THE HAZARD
• Keep your head out of the fumes.
• Do not breathe fumes.
• Use enough ventilation, exhaust at the arc,or both, to keep fumes and gases from
your breathing zone and the general area.
• If adequacy of the ventilation or exhaust is uncertain, have your exposure measured
and compared to the Threshold Limit Values (TLV) in the Material Safety Data Sheet
(MSDS) for the galvanized material.
• Never take chances with welding fumes. If none of this is adequate or practical,
wear an approved respirator, air–supplied or otherwise, that adequately removes the
fumes from your breathing zone.Page 2 Fact Sheet No. 25 – 1/02

RESPIRATORS
Good safe practices recommend using engineering controls, such as local exhaust
and/or general ventilation, to reduce the exposure level to zinc oxide fumes. However, there are times when such practices and controls are not feasible, or are in the process of being installed, or are down during periods of failure. Then respirators are needed. Respirators are often used for operations in confined spaces, such as tanks or closed vessels, and in emergency situations. Always use only respirators that are approved by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) or by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Fume Metal Fever Sec.3

2008-05-26T23:39:00.000-07:00

MONITORING AND MEASUREMENT PROCEDURES
• Eight–Hour Exposure Evaluation

Exposure measurements are best taken so the eight–hour exposure is based on a single
eight–hour sample or on two four–hour samples. Several short–time interval samples
(up to 30 minutes) may be used, but are not preferred. The air samples should be
taken by a qualified person using approved collection methods and devices. Take the
samples in the employee’s breathing zone(air that would most nearly represent that
inhaled by the employee).

• Short–Term Exposure Limit (STEL)
Evaluation Take the measurements during periods of maximum expected concentrations of zinc oxide fume. Take a 15–minute sample or a series of consecutive samples totaling 15 minutes. Collect the samples in the employee’s breathing zone (air that would most nearly represent that inhaled by the employee). Take a minimum of three
measurements on one work shift––the highest measurement taken is an estimate of
the person’s exposure.

Metal Fume Fever Sec.4

2008-05-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

SUMMARY
Here are the main points when dealing with galvanized metal:
• Metal Fume Fever is the result ofoverexposure to zinc fumes from welding, cutting,
or brazing on galvanized steel.
• Metal Fume Fever is a short–term illness with classic flu–like symptoms.
• The permissible exposure limit (PEL)according to OSHA is 5 milligrams of zinc
oxide fume per cubic meter of air––always monitor and measure your breathing air.
• To avoid the illness, keep your head out of the fumes and do not breathe the fumes.
Use enough proper ventilation and/or exhaust. If uncertain about the ventilation,
use an approved respirator.
• There are no known long–term effects of this disease.

INFORMATION SOURCES

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Criteria for a Recommended Standard – Occupational Exposure to Zinc Oxide, DHEW, NIOSH Publication No.76–104; NTIS Publication No. PB–246–693,available from National Technical Information Service (NTIS), 5285 Port Royal Road,Springfield, VA 22161.

American Welding Society (AWS) Study.Fumes and Gases in the Welding Environment,
available from American Welding Society, 550 N.W. LeJeune Road, Miami, FL33136
American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists publication, Threshold
Fact Sheet No. 25 – 1/02 Page 3 Limit Values (TLV) for Chemical Substances and Physical Agents in the Workroom Environment, available from American Conference
of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), 1330 Kemper Meadow Drive,Cincinnati, OH 45240.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration(OSHA). Code Of Federal Regulations,
Title 29 Labor, Chapter XVII, Parts 1901.1 to 1910.1450, Order No.869–019–00111–5, available from Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh,PA 15250.

American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, Documentation of the
Threshold Limit Values and Biological Exposure Indices, available from American
Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), 1330 Kemper Meadow
Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45240.

The following references include the specific precautionary methods used to
protect against exposure to fumes and gases:

American National Standards Institute(ANSI). Safety in Welding, Cutting, and Allied
Processes, Z49.1, available from American Welding Society, 550 N.W. LeJeune Road,
Miami, FL 33136.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Safety and Health in
Arc Welding and Gas Welding and Cutting,NIOSH Publication No. 78–138, available
from National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Robt. Taft Labs, 4676
Columbia Pkwy, Cincinnati, OH 45226.

American National Standards Institute(ANSI). Method for Sampling Airborne
Particulates Generated by Welding and Allied Processes, F1.1, available from
American Welding Society, 550 N.W. Le-Jeune Road, Miami, FL 33136.

Occupational safety and health

2008-03-02T21:55:00.002-08:00

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Occupational safety and health (OSH) is a cross-disciplinary area concerned with protecting the safety, health and welfare of people engaged in work or employment and entrants. As a secondary effect, OSH may also protect co-workers, family members, employers, customers, suppliers, nearby communities, and other members of the public who are impacted by the workplace environment.
Since 1950, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have shared a common definition of occupational health. It was adopted by the Joint ILO/WHO Committee on Occupational Health at its first session in 1950 and revised at its twelfth session in 1995. The definition reads: "Occupational health should aim at: the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of workers in all occupations; the prevention amongst workers of departures from health caused by their working conditions; the protection of workers in their employment from risks resulting from factors adverse to health; the placing and maintenance of the worker in an occupational environment adapted to his physiological and psychological capabilities; and, to summarize, the adaptation of work to man and of each man to his job."
The reasons for establishing good occupational safety and health standards are frequently identified as:
• Moral - An employee should not have to risk injury at work, nor should
others associated with the work environment.
• Economic - many governments realize that poor occupational safety and health
performance results in cost to the State (e.g. through social security
payments to the incapacitated, costs for medical treatment, and the loss
of the "employability" of the worker). Employing organisations also sustain
costs in the event of an incident at work (such as legal fees, fines,
compensatory damages, investigation time, lost production, lost goodwill
from the workforce, from customers and from the wider community).
• Legal - Occupational safety and health requirements may be reinforced in
civil law and/or criminal law; it is accepted that without the
extra "encouragement" of potential regulatory action or litigation, many
organisations would not act upon their implied moral obligations.

Hazards, risks, outcomes

2008-03-02T21:54:00.000-08:00

The terminology used in OSH varies between states, but generally speaking:
• A hazard is something that can cause harm if not controlled.
• The outcome is the harm that results from an uncontrolled hazard.
• A risk is a combination of the probability that a particular outcome will occur and the severity of the harm involved.
“Hazard”, “risk”, and “outcome” are used in other fields to describe e.g. environmental damage, or damage to equipment. However, in the context of OSH, “harm” generally describes the direct or indirect degradation, temporary or permanent, of the physical, mental, or social well-being of workers. For example, repetitively carrying out manual handling of heavy objects is a hazard. The outcome would be a musculoskeletal disorder (MSD). The risk can be expressed numerically, (e.g. a 0.5 or 50/50 chance of the outcome occurring during a year), qualitatively as "high/medium/low", or using a more complicated classification scheme.

Risk assessment

2008-03-02T21:53:00.000-08:00

Modern occupational safety and health legislation usually demands that a risk assessment be carried out prior to making an intervention. This assessment should:
• Identify the hazards
• Identify all affected by the hazard and how
• Evaluate the risk
• Identify and prioritise the required actions
The calculation of risk is based on the likelihood or probability of the harm being realised and the severity of the consequences. This can be expressed mathematically as a quantitative assessment (by assigning low, medium and high likelihood and severity with integers and multiplying them to obtain a risk factor, or qualitatively as a description of the circumstances by which the harm could arise.
The assessment should be recorded and reviewed periodically and whenever there is a significant change to work practices. The assessment should include practical recommendations to control the risk. Once recommended controls are implemented, the risk should be re-calculated to determine of it has been lowered to an acceptable level. Generally speaking, newly introduced controls should lower risk by one level, i.e, from high to medium or from medium to low
The precautionary principle is an increasingly used method for reducing potential chemical or biological OSH risks.

What is System Safety?

2008-03-02T21:46:00.000-08:00

System safety uses systems theory and systems engineering approaches to prevent foreseeable accidents and to minimize the result of unforeseen ones.Losses in general, not just human death or injury, are considered.Suc h losses may include destruction of property, loss of mission, and environmental harm.
The primary concern of system safety is the management of hazards: their identification, evaluation, elimination, and control through analysis, design and management procedures.Mueller, in 1968, described the then new discipline of system safety engineering as “organized common sense”
It is a planned, disciplined, and systematic approach to identifying, analyzing, and controlling hazards throughout the life cycle of a system in order to prevent or reduce accidents. System safety activities start in the earliest concept development stages of a project and continue through design, production, testing, operational use, and disposal.One aspect that distinguishes system safety from other approaches to safety is its primary emphasis on the early identification and classification of hazards so that corrective action can be taken to eliminate or minimize those
hazards before final design decisions are made. Although system safety is a relatively new discipline and still evolving, some general principles
are constant throughout its various manifestations and distinguish it from other approaches to safety and risk management.

• System safety emphasizes building in safety, not adding it on to a completed design: Safety
considerations must be part of the initial stage of concept development and requirements definition: From 70 to 90 percent of the design decisions that affect safety will be made in these early project phases. The degree to which it is economically feasible to eliminate a hazard rather than to control it depends upon the stage in system development at which the hazard is identified and considered.Early integration of safety considerations into the system
development process allows maximum safety with minimal negative impact.The alternative is to design the plant, identify the hazards, and then add on protective equipment to control the hazards when they occur—which is usually more expensive and less effective.

• System safety deals with systems as a whole rather than with subsystems or components:
Safety is an emergent property of systems, not a component property.One of the principle responsibilities of system safety is to evaluate the interfaces between the system components and determine the effects of component interaction, where the set of components includes humans, machines, and the environment.

• System safety takes a larger view of hazards than just failures:
Hazards are not always caused by failures, and all failures do not cause hazards.Serious accidents have occurred while system components were all functioning exactly as specified—that is, without failure.If failures only are considered in a safety analysis, many potential accidents will be missed.In addition, the engineering approaches to preventing failures (increasing reliability) and reventing hazards(increasing safety) are different and sometimes conflict.

• System safety emphasizes analysis rather than past experience and standards: Standards and codes of practice incorporate experience and knowledge about how to reduce hazards, usually accumulated over long periods of time and resulting from previous mistakes.While such standards and learning from experience are essential in all aspects of engineering, including safety, the pace of change today does not always allow for such experience to accumulate and for proven designs to be used.System safety analysis attempts to anticipate and prevent accidents and near-accidents before they occur.

• System safety emphasizes qualitative rather than quantitative approaches: System safety places major emphasis on identifying hazards as early as possible in the design stage and then designing to eliminate or control those hazards.A t these early stages, quantitative information usually does not exist.Although such quantitative information would be useful in prioritizing hazards, subjective judgments about the likelihood of a hazard are usually adequate and all that is possible at the time that design decisions must be made.

• Recognition of tradeoffs and conflicts:
Nothing is absolutely safe, and safety is not the only,and is rarely the primary, goal in building systems.Most of the time, safety acts as a constraint on the possible system designs and may conflict with other design goals such as operational effectiveness, performance, ease of use, time, and cost.System safety techniques
and approaches focus on providing information for decision making about risk management tradeoffs.

• System safety is more than just system engineering:
System safety engineering is an important part of system safety, but the concerns of system safety extend beyond the traditional boundaries of engineering.In 1968, Jerome Lederer, then the director of the NASA Manned Flight Safety Program for Apollo wrote:
System safety covers the total spectrum of risk management.It goes beyond the
hardware and associated procedures of system safety engineering.It involves: attitude
and motivation of designers and production people, employee/management rapport, the relation of industrial associations among themselves and with government,human factors in supervision and quality control, documentation on the interfaces of industrial and public safety with design and operations, the interest and attitudes of top management, the effects of the legal system on accident investigations
and exchange of information, the certification of critical workers, political
considerations, resources, public sentiment and many other non-technical but vital
influences on the attainment of an acceptable level of risk control.These ontechnical
aspects of system safety cannot be ignored.
Using these general principles, system safety attempts to manage hazards through analysis,design, and management procedures.Key activities include top-down system hazard analyses(starting in the early concept design stage to eliminate or control hazards and continuing during the life of the system to evaluate changes in the system or the environment), documenting and tracking hazards and their resolution (establishing audit trails); designing to eliminate or control hazards and minimize damage, maintaining safety information systems and documentation; and establishing reporting and information channels.

What is the difference between Industrial Safety and System Safety?

2008-03-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

Industrial, or occupational has traditionally focused primarily on controlling injuries to employees on the job.The industrial safety engineer usually is dealing with a fixed manufacturing design and hazards that have existed for a long time, many of which are accepted as necessary for operations.
More emphasis is often placed on teaching employees to work within this environment than on removing the hazards. Industrial safety engineers collect data during the operational life of the system and eliminate or control unacceptable hazards if possible or practical.When accidents occur, they are investigated
and action is taken to reduce the likelihood of a recurrence—either changing the plant or changing employee work rules and training.The hazards associated with high-energy or dangerous processes are usually controlled either
(1) by disturbance control algorithms implemented by operators or an automated
control system or
(2) by transferring the plant to a safe state using a separate protection system.
Safety reviews and audits are conducted by industrial safety divisions within the company or by safety committees to ensure that unsafe conditions in the plant are corrected and that employees are following the work rules specified in manuals and instructions.Lessons learned from accidents are incorporated into design standards, and much of the emphasis in the design of new plants and work rules is on implementing these standards.Often, the standards are enforced by the government
through occupational safety and health legislation.
In contrast, system safety is concerned primarily with new systems.The concept of loss is treated much more broadly: Relevant losses may include injury to nonemployees; damage to equipment,property, or the environment; and loss of mission.As has been seen, instead of making changes as a result of operational experience with the system, system safety attempts to identify potential hazards before the system is designed, to define and incorporate safety design criteria,
and to build safety into the design before the system becomes operational.Although standards are used in system safety, they usually are process rather than product standards—reliance on design or product standards is often inadequate for new types of systems, and more emphasis is placed on upfront analysis and designing for safety.
There have been attempts to incorporate system safety techniques and approaches into traditional industrial safety programs, especially when new plants and processes are being built.Although system safety techniques are considered “overkill” for many industrial safety problems, larger plants and increasingly dangerous processes have raised concern about injuries to people
outside the plant and about pollution and have made system safety approaches more relevant.F urthermore, with the increase in size and cost of plant equipment, changes and retrofits to increase safety are costly and may require discontinuing operations for a period of time.
From the other side, system safety is increasingly considering issues that have been traditionally thought to be industrial safety concerns.In some cases, the neglect of these issues has caused serious losses:
Over a period of two years, a contractor experienced 26 satellite damaging mishaps
during manufacturing! Twice they hit it with a forklift.Twice more they hit it with
a crane hook.W renches were dropped into the satellite.Mak eshift workstands failed.
It appeared as if there were forces bent on destroying the satellite before it got to the launch site.In vestigation revealed that the System Safety activity never had addressed the manufacturing phase of the program because the phase was covered by existing industrial safety activities.
In summary, industrial safety activities are designed to protect workers in an industrial environment; extensive standards are imposed by federal codes or regulations providing for a safe workplace.Ho wever, few, if any, of these codes apply to protection of the product being manufactured. With the relatively recent introduction of robots into the workplace environment and with long-lived engineering programs like the Space Shuttle that have substantial continuing complex
engineering design activities, the traditional concerns of industrial safety and system safety have become more intertwined.

Indication of Dangerous Areas

2008-02-19T02:15:00.000-08:00

Purpose : Designed to prevent workers and guests from nearing or entering dangerous area or the range of mechanical or equipment operation

Indication of Dangerous Areas
The “Dangerous Signs” should be installed on walls or wire nets or at construction site, they should be fixed on subjects such as fence and all position should be next to dangerous areas

What benefits can be reach?

2008-02-18T02:37:00.000-08:00