Houston, TX – August, 2021 – Confined spaces are vulnerable to oxygen displacement. Do you know just four minutes without oxygen can cause brain damage, and even death? Confined spaces are a major cause of fatalities in the workplace. This is why it is a primary need for any facility, plant or site to ensure safety in confined spaces.
Imagine a worker entering a confined space for some maintenance or repair work, unaware of a gas hazard in that space. When the worker doesn’t respond, someone enters to check or rescue that worker, only to succumb to the same gas hazard. This is not an uncommon scenario in confined spaces.
Here are 5 important things to keep in mind for a confined space entry plan, whether it is to check or rescue someone from a confined space.
Strategy
Before you create a plan to enter a confined space, you must understand the rules and regulations for entry. Create a clear, written procedure for your workers to follow for confined space entry.
Workers should be trained on this plan and the protocol to follow for confined space entry and rescue. One of the most critical steps in the entire plan is to safely test the atmosphere within a confined space.
Hazards
Being aware of which gas hazards could be present in a confined space is extremely important for reducing risk. Once your workers have some idea of the likely gas hazards, a proper plan can be made to detect those hazards. It is essential that those potential hazards be identified before a confined space entry.
It has been observed that workers may ignore alarms as false alarms but this can prove deadly. Knowing the potential gas hazards, having an efficient mechanism to check for their presence, and a plan to deal with them, if needed, can help the workers take alarms more seriously and keep them safe.
Bump Test, Zero, and Calibrate
Once you are aware of the potential hazards, you can get the right tools to identify them. An essential tool is a reliable gas detector with the right sensors. Once you have the right sensors, you must confirm that your monitor is working properly.
Do not skip any steps, whether it is a bump test, zero, or calibration – when it comes to the sensors. Missing any steps can put you at risk of entering a confined space without any warning about the deadly gas hazards. While bump tests ensure the sensors can identify hazardous gas and whether the alarms and on-screen alerts are working, calibration helps to check the accuracy of the gas detector in reading gas concentrations. Zeroing in clean, fresh air ensures an accurate baseline for readings.
Sampling Pump
This may seem basic, but you can’t skip this. For pre-entry sampling, the gas detector must have a sampling pump. The pump can draw air from the confined space to the detector for detection.
In an attempt to get a job done quickly, one may be tempted to cut corners. Hanging the gas detector in the confined space and then pulling it out will not always detect a gas hazard. In fact, it may damage your gas monitor requiring costly repairs and causing safety hazards.
Ongoing Monitoring
Checking gas hazards in the confined space once is not enough. Since conditions in confined spaces can change quickly, continuously monitoring is required to prevent accidents.
If you are looking for buy safety equipment, such as hard hats and gas detectors in Houston, TX, talk to one of the leading industrial safety equipment suppliers Green Light Safety at 832-262-9931 right away. With over 15 years’ experience in this industry, Green Light Safety specializes in rentals, sales and service of Gas Detection equipment as well as calibration of the equipment.