Before installing safety equipment, companies need to make sure that it doesn’t create new hazards while guarding against others, said Aaron Conway, president of MHI member Mezzanine Safeti-Gates and chair of the  MHI Industry Group ProGMA.

“It’s one thing to add safety equipment to provide fall protection and meet OSHA or ANSI regulations, but if that safety equipment is too cumbersome to operate, your employees won’t use it and will go unprotected,” Conway said.

Safety systems should not depend on someone to make efforts to move, open or close the device. Instead, in the case of pallet drop area fall protection, safety systems should always be closed through the use of a dual-gate system so when one side of the device is opened, the opposite side closes, maintaining a safe environment at all times.

With the set up for fall protection and dual gate safety systems, the employee on the platform will raise or lower the gate depending on the work they are doing, so the safety device must be easy and ergonomic to operate.

“Installing heavy systems that employees need to move throughout the day does solve the problem of fall protection, but also creates a new risk if employees have to move the heavy device,” he said. If the safety gates are manually operated, companies should use counter- balanced gates so the gate closing on one side helps to raise the gate on the other side.

“With a well-designed, counterbal- anced gate system, the effort to open and close the gates is minimal,” Conway said. “Designs may also include a hydrau- lic damper that opens the gates. This allows the gates to be operated with a fingertip, and controls the speed of the gate so it opens and closes in a slow, con- trolled fashion.”

Another option to ensure safety equipment is ergonomic is to add power operation to the system, he said. There are many different ways to configure power and technology, from push button stations to remote control operations, and power can be added to existing safety gates.

Introducing bionomics

How to safely perform the physical tasks associated with material handling is the bottom line–for both worker safety and reducing expensive workers’ comp costs. This was the impetus behind Dennis Downing founding Future Industrial Technologies Inc. in California in 1992.

In the firm’s initial research, Downing and his team would go into organizations that had retooled their processes to be more ergonomic, but found that their workers were still experiencing back and shoulder injuries due to cumulative microtrauma “because they were never taught how to use their bodies correctly.”

“We created a field within ergonomics called bionomics—teaching people the natural laws of the body as they lift, bend, push and pull,” he said. “We then designed a program that would

help employees better use their bodies, whether or not they were working within an ergonomically designed environment.

Our field within ergonomics complements the engineering side with the human side.” The key to changing worker behavior is demonstrating how bionomics benefits them personally, so the firm tailors’ programs for the particular workers attending the workshops.

Moreover, since people learn how to do proper physical activities “by just doing them,” workshops include having attendees practice proper techniques. “In our Backsafe Injury Prevention Program, we developed a practical training module, in which we set up an obstacle course in the corner of a company’s warehouse, where workers practiced properly lifting, bending, pushing and pulling—as it relates to what they have to actually do in their jobs,” Downing said. “We find that bad habits break down, which not only benefits the workers, but their employers, too.”

 From Magazine MHI Solutions