We safety managers have a habit of lumping everyone into two categories: management and workers. We tend to regard maintenance people as workers and define our relationship with them as ensuring that they're just as prepared to do their job safely as are any other worker on the floor. But if you dismiss maintenance people purely as wrench turners and consumers of training, monitoring and auditing resources, you're depriving yourself of a potentially powerful asset. There can be much more to the safety/maintenance relationship. Let me explain.

The Bare Minimum

How do we think of our maintenance personnel? We know that these are certified and competent people. We also know that when a violation or equipment failure causes a hazardous situation, we can call on maintenance personnel to get production moving again quickly.

We also know that we've done a lot to enable them to do their job safely. We've trained them in LOTO and have established best practices or procedures to get them through the needed repair. We've trained and tested them on applicable hazards and ensured they use proper PPE so they don't become a name on your OSHA 300 report.

Congratulations. Good work. But this is just the beginning.

The Case for Marrying Safety to Maintenance

When an accident happens, we safety people scramble to complete an analysis. When a near-miss happens, we rush to get a report. We want to scrutinize behavior-based forms for weaknesses in our people.

In contrast, when a machine breaks, maintenance replaces a part and often the event goes by without a mention. When a deficiency is reported by form, maintenance will often perform the work called for and close out the job.

And that's where the information flow between maintenance and safety breaks down.

Cross-Talk Between Maintenance and Safety: An Example

At one shop I worked in, a maintenance worker kept resetting circuit breakers for an old section of the shop. This happened at least once a day.

I asked a maintenance man how long this had been going on. The man scratched his head and replied, "I guess about two years now."

Investigating a bit, I found out that the building section had been expanded, and extra lights installed. Over the past two years, new equipment was moved in. What had started out as an old stock room, was now a welding area where grinders, roller positioners and other high-amp devices were being used. Management had even moved in a large ice machine. The original design wasn't meant to handle the current spikes being applied.

The worker was simply responding to requests to reset the breakers. He hadn't informed anyone else that this was a recurring problem and it didn't require paperwork, so management was unaware that they had electrically overloaded the building section over time.

I went to the manager and tactfully brought his attention to the problem as an urgent fire hazard. Soon, an electrician was bringing in new circuits and installing a circuit breaker sub-panel to ease the load on the old wiring. The circuit breaker problem disappeared, as did the fire hazard.

The Moral of the Story

This story illustrates the importance of communication between maintenance and safety personnel. Had the company safety people been working closely with maintenance, perhaps the suggestion would have come into focus much sooner. Oddly, everyone who worked in the wing had put up with the annoyance without stopping to consider if this ritualistic maintenance was masking a safety hazard. The maintenance worker shrugged the hazard off as something to be "looked into" someday. Since it only took a few easy seconds to correct, it was low on his priority list.

Conclusion

Your maintenance staff are a gold mine of information. Next week, we'll look at how to mine for gold. We'll explain what you can learn from maintenance trends and lay out some questions you need to ask yourself and your maintenance team to find the nuggets of information that can translate into better safety performance.

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