NORFOLK, Va. –
Defense Logistics Agency Distribution Norfolk, Virginia, personnel participated in various activities including emergency rescue drills, review of 2019 Industrial Hygiene Surveys, and a hazard Find It – Fix It during Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Safe and Sound Week Aug.12-18. Safe and Sound Week recognizes the successes of workplace safety and health programs and offers information and ideas on how to keep America's workers safe.
The weeklong event was designed to raise awareness and understanding of the value of safety and health programs in the workplace. During DDNV’s program, each day of the week brought attention to various issues, processes or events:
Monday – Unsafe/Unhealthful:
Supervisors and their teams openly discussed what they believe to be the one work condition or process that poses the most danger to employees. Topics reviewed included processes that currently have controls, but employees wanted to review, because of the hazards associated with the task, as well as physical hazards found in the workplace.
Tuesday – Find it–Fix It:
To promote a safe and healthful work environment by ensuring hazard awareness, improving infrastructure and reducing workplace injury and illness, supervisors walked their work areas with affected employees to ensure employees knew the hazards in their workplace. The teams also looked for any hazards that were not listed on their abatement log. If new hazards were found, the teams mitigated the hazards that they could control. If the hazard could not be immediately mitigated, the teams instituted interim controls and the hazards were added to the abatement log.
Wednesday – Emergency Rescue Drill (Turret Truck):
Hands on emergency rescue training was conducted for employees who operate a turret truck. Turret truck operators ascended to an approximate height of 20 feet. Operators then activated the turret truck’s emergency descent mechanism that lowers the turret truck’s cabin to ground level. The drill also included emergency rescue procedures to be employed in the event of failure of the decent mechanism.
Thursday – Mishap Lessons Learned:
Employees reviewed the “top ten” mishaps that occurred during the previous quarter. The review consisted of all activity associated with the incident including the root cause(s), corrective actions taken, and any actions taken to prevent future occurrences, while no personal information was divulged.
Friday – Industrial Hygiene Survey Results:
Supervisors reviewed the latest Industrial Hygiene Survey (June 2019). Surveys were broken down for each work area by work tasks and their associated stressors (health hazard) with an explanation of what was tested, why it was tested, the results of that testing and any precautionary measures that are required.
Although supervisors have completed the DLA Safety Supervisor course(s) through DLA’s Learning Management System (online cloud-based training and education tool,) numerous supervisors struggled with the Abatement Log/Enterprise Safety Applications Management System process and hazard recognition. DDNV is scheduling local hands-on training for directors and supervisors during the month of September that will address the discrepancies.
In summary, 43 hazards were mitigated and employees submitted nine unsafe/unhealthful reports that could potentially reduce the risk of workplace injury.