Occupational Safety And Hazard Assessment In Steam Boilers

Nationwide Board Inspection Code (NBIC) and Factories and Machinery Act (Malaysia) recognized the opportunity hazards of steam boilers and established various codes and regulations pertaining to controlling the health risks and minimizing risks. Each year, the authorized inspectors inspect fireside and waterside for defects, scaling, and corrosion. Each year, all essential valves and fittings are dismantled for evaluation. Plate thickness is checked, boiler water analysis results are reviewed, and indeed, the authority enforces rigorous maintenance on steam boilers but still, various boiler accidents happened. One might wonder why. Rationale lies within salient factor: human error is the leading edge cause of boiler no one can. One statistic indicated that 83% of boiler accidents were a direct result of human errors as a lack of strategy and appreciation. Although inspection has become stricter, nearby authority doesn't cover inspection on boiler safety controls and all routine or non-routine behavior. OSHA can only provide guidelines for safety the particular workplace but ensuring the implementations is beyond their scopes.

The fundamental cause of hazards in an organization is organizational inadequacies. The inadequacies can be related to safety controls, safe operating procedures (SOP), hazard and risk assessment and controls, and training or understanding. With inadequacies, employees commonly do not realize the potential health risks and consequences of their actions. Therefore, to minimize or eliminate risks encountered with all employees, contractors, and visitors of their activities, an organization should establish occupational as well as wellness safety (OHS) management solution. Only through OHS that hazards could be recognized, and safety and health risks can be assessed and effectively addressed. The management can set objectives, provide suitable controls, provide sets of procedures (SOP's), organize training programs, and establish safety performance assessments.

Boilers have lots of potential hazards that should be controlled by safety devices and safe work rehearsal. Before identifying the hazards, one should be aware of the concept hazards. In this particular context, hazard is understood to be "a source or situation with a possible for harm in terms of injury or ill health, damage to property, quite possibly combination of these". To begin identifying hazards, the management must exactly what activities have concerns. Activities can be divided into two categories which are routine and non-routine. Routine activities include daily operation, chemical preparation, and fuel storage and handling, while non-routine activities include boiler overhaul, confined space entry, and emergency response. Your first stage in hazard identification is your choice of of job to be analyzed.

The management is to choose the key activities first, such as daily operation and chemical preparation. Ultimately second stage, OHS management is to break the activities into logical steps. The logical steps must be unique to the activities, and trivia activities such as switching on lights always be avoided. Examples are taking data from various meters during operation, or pouring boiler chemicals into a jar. Inside the third stage, the management is to distinguish hazards and figure out the corresponding risks each step. When preparing boiler chemicals, the boiler operators are subjected to corrosive liquid spill and acid gas variation. Risk is the consequence, and in this case, prospective for loss are eyes lesion and pain, burn injury, or cancer if handling hydrazine. High noise level which is above 85 dBA is an example of hazard in daily operation and the risk is obvious, which is deafness. In stage four, the management is to settle on risk elimination or reduction measures.

For high noise level, risk elimination or reduction measures would require path noise control such as acoustic insulation (lining) or acoustic partition, enclosure for the noise-radiating source, increase pipe size minimize steam turbulence, or install noise diffuser / extractor. The best approach to be able to control noise at source, such as installing silencer, changing equipment for example changing normal pressure reducing valve (PRV) to low-noise PRV. Other risk controls for high noise level would be wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) or reducing exposure time. Probably the most common hazard for boiler operation is low water and risk could be deemed as a permanent trouble for the boiler or huge increase. Modern boilers are usually equipped with automatic level controllers, low water level burner interlocks, low water alarm, and regular checking of gage glasses your boiler affiliates. All these are risk controls by safety contraptions. Working in confined space is a non-routine activity, the hazard associated places is physical injuries or fatalities due to asphyxia or poisonous gas, and present-day risk control is following the guidelines of confined space entry, which shall not be covered here.

In pouring the chemical into a jar, the hazard is chemical splashes to eyes, and baths is eye lesion and injury. From this, the chance control will wearing safety goggles. Product or service of daily operation is blowing down. Blowdown can cause spillage of hot water, which is the hazard, and may scald boiler operators, which is the exposure. The example of risk control is blowing down into the blowdown chamber as opposed to directly into the atmosphere thereby reducing potential spillage of hot water to the surrounding.

In the final stage, after job safety analysis is finished for each activity, the activities, hazards and risks, and the related risk controls should be documented for reference. Based on that, safe operation procedures can be established positive risks in the workplace can be eliminated or minimized. Training must be conducted with competent person-in-charge to all boiler operators to explain in detail the hazards, risks, controls, procedures and responsibility as well as dependability.

For any organization which does not have structured OHS management system, I'd personally recommend OHSAS 18001 or MS 1722 certification. OHSAS 18001 or MS 1722 provides an established of procedures and tools to promote continual improvement through hazard identification, risk assessment, and control of risk from a very systematic way. In addition to these benefits, I noticed with the implementation of OHSAS 18001 standards, the management and employees on my organization have improved significantly in their understanding of health and safety legislation as well as enabling you to demonstrate concurrence.

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