Canadian Occupational Safety

October/November 2017

Canadian Occupational Safety (COS) magazine is the premier workplace health and safety publication in Canada. We cover a wide range of topics ranging from office to heavy industry, and from general safety management to specific workplace hazards.

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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2017 33 R obb Parrott had seen enough. After spending 20 years as an operator in the oil and gas industry, he had witnessed multiple incidents, near misses and honest mistakes where flanges were taken apart when they were still live and under pressure. The final straw was an accidental release at the plant where Parrott worked that left a colleague with serious burns on his face and neck. He was in the hospital for weeks. "He pulled a part of a line that was just over 200 C, 1500 kPa pressure and it was pretty much the heaviest tar we had. It sprayed everywhere. It was just a little one-and-a-half inch line; it was nothing," says Parrott. "(But) it was the closest we had seen without a fatality. We couldn't believe the guy lived." The solution put in place at the multinational oil and gas company was terrible, Parrott says. "They changed our whole safety protocol. They tried to roll out something that was safe to the nth degree and they rolled it out too fast, and this whole thing they tried to... cover it with paperwork, so it just became a nightmare," he says. "This happened at a world-class facility with multiple levels of safety. It still is. It's a really safe place to work — one of the safest places I have ever worked — and this still happened there." Discouraged by the company's solution, Parrott got together with a couple of co-workers to brainstorm a better way to stop these types of incidents. "We knew for sure there had to be a physical barrier. Just like the locks on the electrical breaker," says Parrott. "So the three of us, we went into my garage with a MIG welder and a beer fridge." They came up with the flange lock: a metal device that goes across the flanges and securely attaches to nuts on either side that the worker locks in place with his padlock. New lockout device hoping to put an end to pipefitter injuries By Amanda Silliker PHOTO: INTEGO INDUSTRIAL SAFETY

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