Across the UK and the world, material handling equipment safety is a big deal. Injuries and fatalities with moving objects have remained a very high risk in the workzone, even more so as we move through a phase of shifting from manually operated through equipment to autonomous equipment and robots.
Keep it simple, list out all equipment on site, review each one and understand the risk each one holds as a priority, then to assess where each piece is used – do they cross zones for example. Once this has been compiled, stand back and identify if there is there any pedestrian traffic in the same zone at any point.
We would recommend to physically visit each zone and look at the environment – Can your drivers see where they’re going, or do they have blind spots around the vehicle/site? Does your worksite have poor visibility? Ask yourself as many questions and speak with others to seek a second opinion.
This doesn’t need to be technical, a simple excel sheet can be built like below is a starting point
To provide some guidance we have listed below some example areas you can identify and review around your site…
Data
- Equipment
- Brand
- Weight
- Full capacity
- top speed
- controlled by
- Work Zone
- Workers
- Pedestrians
- Max Height
- Min height
- Max width
- Min width
- Zone Environment risks
Action
- Worker Protection Required
- Pedestrian Protection Required
- Zone improvement Required
Further monitoring
Action status – Complete/work in progress – on track/work in progress – delayed/not started
Maintenance cycle – every day/week/month/quarter/year
A lot of risk reduction comes back to segregation of people and equipment, as much as possible whilst remaining practical.
Having data and awareness of the environment helps to make the correct decisions with barrier choice as these must be designed to withstand impact.
This can be as simple as line marking systems and barriers through to lighting systems and wrist/audible alerts such as VibraTags
You can arrange a site visit to review your MHE safety with one of our experts who will come back with a detailed site plan to minimize any risk of an incident on your site
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