Spent three days conducting mock OSHA inspections — a grocery store in WV, a concrete block manufacturing plant, and a river terminal facility in the Ohio Valley. Different industries, nearly identical findings.
FROM THE FIELD
After enough of these, the list stops surprising you. Here’s what turned up at all three:
1. Extension cords doing permanent work. A cord running to a bench grinder that’s been in the same spot for two years isn’t temporary power, it’s an installation. This one is nearly universal and it’s an easy citation.
2. Lockout/tagout procedures that exist but aren’t machine specific. Everyone has a written LOTO program. Far fewer have the equipment-specific procedures the standard actually requires. An inspector will ask for the procedure for one particular press, not the binder.
3. Blocked electrical panels. Thirty-six inches of clearance, and it’s the first-place people stack pallets. It’s also the finding that tells an inspector how the rest of the walkthrough is going to go.
4. Hazardous Communication Program lacking. There is always a binder, it is just covered in dust, outdated. Digitize Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and save a tree or ten. There is a reason this shows up year after year on OSHA’s top 10 most cited violations.
5. Training that happened but can’t be produced. This is the one that costs people the most. The training was done, the employees remember it, and there’s no signed roster to show for it.
What to check Monday: walk your electrical panels and look for extension cords. Both take fifteen minutes and both are visible from across the room, which is exactly why they get cited.
A QUESTION WE GOT THIS MONTH
An HR manager asked whether she could require a post-accident drug test after an incident with no injury and no property damage. The answer came down to her own policy language, not the regulation, her written policy tied testing to injury, so testing on a near-miss would have been outside her own rules. Worth reading your policy before you need it, not after.
If you want the one-page Post-Accident Response Checklist we hand out, just drop me an email and I’ll send it over.
Cheers,
Josh