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Guess I should Have Locked It Out!

mekanik

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 20, 2015
Messages
943
Location
Canada's Northwest
One of the warehouse guys was putting a pallet of parts on the racking in the warehouse with the small Clark LPG powered forklift and he damaged the very unprotected hydraulic brake lines. I was tasked with repairing it. I carefully drove it in the shop using the park brake to stop. I raised the forks high enough so no one would walk into them and then got a ladder and chained the cross bar the forks slide on to the mast and let the forks down on the chain. There was about 8 feet of chain hanging down so I stitched the rest of the chain through the steering wheel and dropped the key on the floor boards between the pedals. It was coffee time. Just as I was walking through the coffee room door I heard someone say "What the F**k". About a minute later one of the parts guys comes in the coffee room his face as white as a ghost and tells me "The forklift doesn't have any brakes" Fortunately he didn't injure himself or anyone else. The service manager gave me heck for not using a lockout tag. I don't think it would have helped.
Now I keep a ring of blank keys that fit everything I work on in my tool box with "DO NOT OPERATE" tag on it. A blank key goes in the ignition with the tag on it.
 

Willie B

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
4,039
Location
Mount Tabor VT
Occupation
Electrician
I preach lock out tag out often. It usually falls on deaf ears.
My personal experience was being called to unhook a conveyor that had been powered up temporarily to work the bugs out before being placed in service permanently in another location.
When I got there, the big boss wanted to see it run before disconnecting. I pressed the start button. 25' in the air pieces started flying.
A mechanic came running from another building. "WHY DID YOU START IT?????!" he yelled. "I replied I was last to work on it, it was in good working order when I left it."
"Didn't you see the strap?" he replied.
The machine was entirely painted Home Depot orange, as was the ratchet strap he put in place to hold motor & gearbox 25' above the floor when he removed a piece of the motor mount.
I asked: "Why didn't you lock it out?"
"How was I to know you'd start it?" was his answer.
 

Nige

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2011
Messages
28,977
Location
G..G..G..Granville.........!! Fetch your cloth.
One of the warehouse guys was putting a pallet of parts on the racking in the warehouse with the small Clark LPG powered forklift and he damaged the very unprotected hydraulic brake lines. I was tasked with repairing it. I carefully drove it in the shop using the park brake to stop. I raised the forks high enough so no one would walk into them and then got a ladder and chained the cross bar the forks slide on to the mast and let the forks down on the chain. There was about 8 feet of chain hanging down so I stitched the rest of the chain through the steering wheel and dropped the key on the floor boards between the pedals. It was coffee time. Just as I was walking through the coffee room door I heard someone say "What the F**k". About a minute later one of the parts guys comes in the coffee room his face as white as a ghost and tells me "The forklift doesn't have any brakes" Fortunately he didn't injure himself or anyone else. The service manager gave me heck for not using a lockout tag. I don't think it would have helped.
Now I keep a ring of blank keys that fit everything I work on in my tool box with "DO NOT OPERATE" tag on it. A blank key goes in the ignition with the tag on it.
Failing to lockout/tag out is basically a hanging offence in most places I've been. Anyone failing to LOTO would be out the door without their feet touching the floor.
 

colson04

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 11, 2016
Messages
2,057
Location
Delton, Michigan
The last decade has seen a big push to clean up the oilfield and make it safer. Lots of things to address, but changing the culture from 'Just get it done' to 'everyone goes home safely' has been a struggle. Most of the companies had to create zero tolerance policies and then enforce them on everybody equally. I watched superintendents and operations managers get fired right beside hourly laborers for violating a zero tolerance rule. Lock out/Tag out is a big one that still gets people fired even though the concept has been around for decades. A couple oilfield companies added one more step "try out"

Lock out device.
Tag it as locked out.
Try to operate it to make sure it is de-energized.

That was added because people were incorrectly locking out equipment, or improperly locking it out and people got hurt. If the person doing the work had tried to operate it, they would have seen that it was improperly locked out and could correct it before going into a hazardous situation.

That said, I failed to properly do this on my own project this week. I disabled the power, tried to turn it on to make sure it was de-energized, but I did not tag it as locked out. Should I have? Probably, though I'm the only person working on my own personal equipment, using my tools in my own barn that nobody else uses.
 

donkey doctor

Senior Member
Joined
May 18, 2010
Messages
425
Location
Ladysmith bc canada
Occupation
retired
Way back in my misspent youth I did a backpack working holiday down in Oz for a couple of years. One of the many jobs I had was plying my trade as a welder at an open pit mine in the NT. 4 of us worked night shift from late afternoon till after midnight. One night the job was to reline the bottom of some of the chutes on the crushing and screening plant. They were very strict about tag out on the claim. We got into the electrical room but had no clue what switch or panel was for what we were working on so we just hung tags on everything. Probably a dozen or more. Of coarse by the time 1:00 am rolled around the tags were long forgotten and back to camp we went. About 10 or 12 miles. A little after 8 am we had the pit boss pounding on our doors in the bunkhouse to get our butts out to the pit and get our tags off so the pit could start working. Nobody but the person whose name was on the tag could remove it unless you were maybe dead. We were not popular with management but the crew didn't seem upset with a late start. We didn't get fired. d.d.
 

Nige

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2011
Messages
28,977
Location
G..G..G..Granville.........!! Fetch your cloth.
The time when LOTOTO really comes into its own is when crews from multiple disciplines are working multiple shifts 24/7 on machines that might go over from one shift to the next for days or even weeks in some cases. When there can be over 100 bodies in the maintenance shop at any one time there has to be some sort of procedure that indicates to everybody that a machine is under repair or maintenance.
 
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631G

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 27, 2008
Messages
336
Location
Georgia
Occupation
Civil Superintendent
While I was on a reservoir project in Tampa FL I was a field engineer at the time for the batch plant making soil cement. LOTO was undoubtedly the single most important thing I was responsible for when the labor crew came in to clean the mixer between shifts. They had to get inside a mixer that had two mixing shafts with offset interlacing paddle arms to mix the material. Each shaft had a 150hp electric motor driving it so if things were started while the men were in the mixer, bad things would happen to say the very least. LOTO took time because the mixer wasn’t the only risk the men had. There were belts and feed chutes, air cannons to loosen bridged material and so on. What we wound up finding to be the most efficient and safest way to lock out the plant was to kill the main power to the entire plant for the 2-3 hour maintenance period they needed to clean the mixer. We could lock out individual sections of the plant for sure, including the mixer and feed belt to it, but I never liked that being the only bar between them and injury. Always made me uneasy, even after several months, when they were in the drum.

Regarding failure to LOTO something, it was on the spot termination. There were also pretty stiff discipline applied to failure to unlock a machine and the lock needing to be cut off. Saw both happen but failure to unlock was more common.

We did unfortunately have some real bone heads working there at the plant on support roles at different points in time so that part of the safety manual was utilized. It never failed to surprise me how some folks didn’t want to take the time to lock something out when the obvious result was potentially so ugly if it went south. I always stressed to the new guys when it comes to man vs machine you always loose out either with your life or part of your body.
 

92U 3406

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 3, 2017
Messages
3,099
Location
Western Canuckistan
Occupation
Wrench Bender
I always enjoyed having to take LOTO training at the various mines I worked in. All day course where only 10 minutes was actually pertinent to being a mechanic. But hey I know the procedure to double block and bleed a pipe joint in the one in a gazillion chance I'll ever need to do it lol.
 

Nige

Senior Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2011
Messages
28,977
Location
G..G..G..Granville.........!! Fetch your cloth.
I always enjoyed having to take LOTO training at the various mines I worked in. All day course where only 10 minutes was actually pertinent to being a mechanic. But hey I know the procedure to double block and bleed a pipe joint in the one in a gazillion chance I'll ever need to do it lol.
You'd be lucky to get an hour with us. Heavy Mobile Equipment LOTO was a totally different course to what the Process Plant did.
 

92U 3406

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 3, 2017
Messages
3,099
Location
Western Canuckistan
Occupation
Wrench Bender
You'd be lucky to get an hour with us. Heavy Mobile Equipment LOTO was a totally different course to what the Process Plant did.
It was all just rolled into one course out there.

I'd say the best one was having to take a 6 hour work permit course just to walk across the path from the sign in shack and push a reset button on a portable heater lol.
 

digger doug

Senior Member
Joined
Nov 2, 2011
Messages
1,371
Location
NW Pennsylvania
Occupation
Thrash-A-Matic designer
Failing to lockout/tag out is basically a hanging offence in most places I've been. Anyone failing to LOTO would be out the door without their feet touching the floor.
...Also, removing a loto lock & tag by someone other than the installer is instant dismissal as well.
Yes, my smiling face is on all my tags with the locks......:rolleyes:
Apparently canaduh isn't as serious about worker safety.
 

kshansen

Senior Member
Joined
Mar 11, 2012
Messages
11,129
Location
Central New York, USA
Occupation
Retired Mechanic in Stone Quarry
Not sure if this would qualify as a LOTO situation. Several years before I retired from the quarry for a short time I had what was suppose to be a "helper"!

On this day I was working on a Mack 10 wheeler that was having a starting problem. Actually it would fire up real good but the problem was somewhere in the electrical system, relay or starter switch. I was in the cab with the dash partially disassembled checking wiring and such to see if there was a loose wire causing the problem and listening for the relay clicking when I turned the key.

At one point I got out of the cab to get a tool or test light and just as I stepped off the truck this "helper" pops out form under the truck. I probably not to nicely asked him "what the F! were you doing under there?" "Oh! I was just checking the clutch and throw-out bearing I thought it was acting funny the last time I drove it."

Forget what I said after that but think he said something to some higher up because a few days later he managed to get transferred over the the Blacktop plant as a grounds man. No one ever said anything to me about it and to be honest I was not too upset to loose this so called helper!

One other thing I recall about him was when he told about the time he worked as a mechanic for a company that ran a fleet of over the road milk tankers. He was bitching about how they had rules about washing their hands often while working on the tankers.
 
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