FEATURES
The bulk of responsibility for compliance regarding machinery and equipment lies both with the manufacturer and the purchasing
party or employer.
Continued from page 38
employer. “These include, among others, the Driven
Machinery Regulations, General Machinery Regulations,
Facilities Regulations, Pressure Equipment Regulations, and
Electrical Installation Regulations. A health and safety
professional will need to look at all legislation when putting
together a health and safety management system
specifically for a sawmill.”
SAFETY ELEMENTS AT SAWMILLS
As is true for any industrial environment, health and safety
in the sawmill depends on two important factors: the
creation and maintenance of a safe working environment
and the prevention of unsafe acts or omissions by
employees. “Physical controls such as good housekeeping,
proper machine guarding, lighting, and ventilation are
relatively easy to achieve, but the modification and control
of human behaviour is considerably more difficult,”
Wainwright observes.
“Aside from the general hazards associated with all
factory-type operations where moving machinery is used,
sawmills by their very nature present particular hazards in
40 JUNE / JULY 2018 //
terms of wood dust and noise. The effective management of
noise and prevention of noise-induced hearing loss is a
particularly difficult challenge. Although every effort is
made to reduce noise where practicable, enforcement in the
compliance to use of hearing protection by employees is
not easy and requires constant vigilance,” he notes.
According to Bradley Joemat, group safety manager at
the MTO forestry group, the company defines five elements
of safety in sawmills as follows: premises, operations and
housekeeping; mechanical, electrical and personal
safeguarding; fire protection and prevention; incident
recording and investigation; and health and safety
organisation.
TRANSGRESSIONS: MAN AND MACHINE
The greatest contributing factor to a transgression in terms
of safety at a sawmill is ‘the human factor’, which, according
to Swift, “Is the decisive decision or pure lapse in
judgement where an employee fails to follow a procedure
or safety rule. This employee non-compliance may result in
an incident that causes an injury. An incident can be a costly
See more on page 42