STATE OF EQUIPMENT IN MANITOBA

Are you confident in the state of safeguarding on your equipment? If faced with an inspection from the province or an investigation after an injury, would you stand behind the level of safety controls on each of your machines? We often hear people tell us that their machines are all safe and properly guarded. However, the reality is that the majority of machines that we see are lacking proper guarding and leaving workers at risk for injury.

We can categorize equipment into four states of machine safety compliance. Read below to learn the four states and see if you can identify where your equipment belongs.

 1.      Missing guards – These machines have no guarding or are missing guards around key hazards.

 2.      Guards are inadequate for the risk level – It is important that guarding is selected through the risk assessment process. When this step is missed, it is common to see guards that do not sufficiently protect workers. An example of this is using an awareness chain or guard rail to restrict access to a machine instead of using a perimeter fence.

 3.      Guards are not designed to meet CSA requirements – Sometimes, the appropriate type of guard is chosen, but the design is lacking which leaves the worker exposed to hazards. Therefore, you may have fixed guards that are not properly secured in place or light curtains that are installed too close to the hazard.

 4.      Machines are properly guarded – This state is most likely achieved when a risk assessment has been performed, guarding methods are chosen by starting at the top of the hierarchy of controls and guards are designed using CSA Z432 specifications.

 Do you have a good understanding of where your machines fall in this list? WESguard is a web application which makes the process of identifying and categorizing your equipment easy and affordable. With a built-in inventory tracker, simple machine-specific safety audit and an easy-to-use risk assessment tool, ensuring your workers are safe has never been easier.

 For more information visit www.wesguard.ca/freetrial and jump start your machine safety program today.

*These are not verified statistics, only a representation of what we generally see on a daily basis