Study on Lockout Procedures for the Safety of Workers Intervening on Equipment in the Municipal Sector in Québec

In Québec, workers intervening in hazardous zones of machines, equipment and processes during maintenance, repairs and unjamming activities have to apply lockout procedures. Lockout procedures involve shutting down the equipment, isolating it, applying individual locks, releasing residual energies and verifying the absence of energies. Lockout has mostly been linked to industrial sectors. However, the municipal sector also faces challenges when it comes to controlling hazardous energies. The objectives of this research are to study serious accidents linked to our subject, study the application of lockout in different municipalities in Québec, identify the specificities for the municipal sector and propose some means to support the application of lockout. We will show that lockout procedures are required in different locations in municipalities and that they are currently being implemented in the municipal sector in Québec. Moreover, we propose a model which aims at facilitating the implementation of lockout procedures in the municipal sector.     

Experimental analysis of 31 risk estimation tools applied to safety of machinery

This article studies differences in the results of using different risk estimation tools in the same hazardous situations involving dangerous machinery. We investigated how (a) types of risk estimation parameters and methods of constructing tools, (b) the number of levels of each parameter, and (c) the number of risk levels influence the results. Consequently, 31 risk estimation tools were compared by using them to estimate risk levels associated with 20 hazardous situations. Risk estimation appears to be tool-dependent, as different tools give different results with identical hazardous situations. The scope of the tool, its use, and construction could explain these differences. This article also proposes a series of rules for constructing tools to alleviate many problems associated with the variability of risk estimations.