HEALTH & SAFETY
Protecting
lone workers is a key priority
track equipment and its location digitally, without resorting to lists on clipboards, also offers significant savings in time and loss of assets.
STREAMLINING TURNAROUNDS SAFELY Turnarounds (or TARs) are essential – yet extremely expensive – periods of regeneration for plants and refineries. Taking an entire part of an operation offline while plants are inspected and/or revamped can cost millions a day and workforces can double or even triple from say 500 on a typical downstream site to over 1,000 to get the job done as quickly as possible. Tis huge influx of workers undoubtedly
increases safety managers’ reliance on technology. Tey simply cannot comprehensively keep track of the functionality of their gas detector fleets and the workers using them without it. Cloud-based platforms for managing the health of fixed and portable gas detection services help to mitigate the administrative and management burden on safety managers at these challenging times, ensuring that their fleets are available, functioning correctly, ready for use and compliant. What’s more, these systems are a key driver behind helping to achieve compliant operational practices, flagging whether operatives aren’t following strict standard operating procedures. With
many new contractors on site, the ability to identify those posing a risk and swiftly move to re-educate or retrain them is vital. Historically, daily data would remain on each device and be routinely overwritten, unless an event prompted a sporadic download, or a written report. Today, maintaining historic central archives of detection device data – sometimes spanning decades – provides companies with an invaluable record. Any exposure incidents or toxic breaches can be thoroughly analysed and documented. For workers, the advent of real-time monitoring during operations via live feeds is revolutionising safety. Data streaming can provide safety controllers and colleagues with situational awareness, physical status and the ability for workers to issue individual or team evacuation alarms and even mobilise first responders should a situation arise. Developing next-generation safety technology is of course hugely dependent on innovation but truly understanding customer needs and feedback to engineer the necessary hardware and software functionality is of equal importance. It’s listening carefully to customer feedback and applying those learnings in an innovative way that produces next- generation safety technology. Adoption will stand or fall on the ability of solutions to add value to
multiple stakeholders without completely changing the way safety management and procedures work. Seamless integration and easy, intuitive operation only comes from extended testing by everyone involved – from safety managers to supervisors through to operatives. Of course, innovation is meaningless unless the underlying outcome offers a real-world, practical benefit. Tere is no doubt that technological
advances are having huge impact on the world as a whole. All things considered, the health and safety industry should embrace the opportunities new technologies provide to keep workers connected, thus providing an additional layer of safety through technology. MSA’s mantra is certainly to encourage the industry to ‘expect more’ from gas detection programmes. Te reason behind the creation of Safety io is to pioneer technology advancements, with the ultimate goal of improving decision making, reinforcing best practices and pursuing a safety-first, injury free workforce. It’s too good an opportunity to miss.
Matt DeLorenzo is with Safety io, an MSA Safety company.
www.safetyio.com
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