Last week the Associated Press reported that an executive at the Imperial Sugar Co. testified at a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee on workplace safety that he had found such "shocking" and "disgraceful" conditions at the Georgia plant last year that he warned his superiors that a ...

How many hands can I see for “safety device”? Now, how many of you say – no, an e-stopping device is not a safety device? I see! So the room is practically divided into two camps. One of the camps has several individuals that sit on safety standards committees and others who are suppliers of e-stopping devices. You guys have ...

Tolerable risk is the term used for the past several years referring to a level of residual risk for a given hazard after applying risk reduction measures. ANSI B11.TR3; 2000 further defines tolerable risk as: Risk that is accepted for a given task and hazard combination [hazardous situation]. However, as more focus continues to be directed at ...

I often hear discussions about NFPA 79 (Electrical Standard for Industrial Machinery) having more importance than the ANSI B11 series of machine tool standards. Conversely, there’s an equal if not larger camp of user’s that profess the ANSI B11 series as “the rule of the land” inferring that NFPA 79 takes a back seat to ...

Yes it’s true, Europe has started a two year phase out of the risk categories; B, 1, 2, 3, & 4 as established by EN 954:1996 and hence referenced in numerous US based standards such as NFPA 79, ANSI B11, S2, ANSI B155.1, etc. to name a few. A  European standard, EN ISO 13849-1:2006, has recently been approved announcing a new system ...

I got an interesting question this week from one of our sales people.  He told me that a competitor, new to the process safety market, supplied his customer with a list of their users who are compliant with 29CFR1910.119.  He wondered if we had a similar list or a way to neutralize their insinuation that their system was better ...