When it comes to safety, conveyors are machines, too

摘要

A contractor was found dead of suffocation and a broken neck behind the guard of a conveyor's tail pulley. The fact that these machines can stretch through doorways is another one of their hidden safety hazards. The victim in this case was a contractor employed to move boxes from the conveyor to pallets and keep the area swept up. Investigators identified several underlying problems, each of which resulted in an OSHA citation. The contractor had been trained to alert his supervisor when leaving his work area, but he had not done so while the conveyor was off. Therefore, the supervisor should have assumed he was in the conveyor area and located him before turning on the conveyor.