Safety of Workers during Maintenance of Machines, Equipment and Processes: A Canadian Perspective

摘要

Maintenance activities can be hazardous to workers intervening on industrial machines, equipment and processes. Annually in Quebec, 20 workers, including maintenance personnel, are killed and around 13000 accidents can be linked to machines, equipment and processes. Based on the Quebec's Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (RSST), workers intervening in hazardous zones of machines, equipment and processes during maintenance, repairs, and unjamming activities have to apply lockout procedures. The purpose of lockout is to protect personnel from injuries from the inadvertent release of hazardous energy on machines. Lockout involves shutting down the machines, isolating them, applying individual locks, releasing residual energies and verifying the absence of energies, all in accordance with written procedures. It is a risk reduction method used in factories to protect workers from injuries. In this paper, it will be shown that (i) the concept of lockout has different meanings or definitions in the literature (ii) the legal requirements on lockout vary in different Canadian provinces and in different countries (iii) most standards on lockout tend to have similar requirements and that (iv) the lockout programs (policies) obtained from 31 factories and organisations in Quebec do not fully comply with the provincial regulation and have several elements which are missing. Moreover, reasons which could explain those findings will also be presented in this paper.