Safety.

Safety is generally (and rightly) now considered as one of the most important, if not THE most important aspect of modern engineering.  People should not be killed, maimed, injured, or even slightly hurt by bits of kit, or indeed by any of the processes of those bits of kit.

Safety comes in a lot of different guises:  It can be a piece of kit designed to fail safe, a bit of kit added to another bit of kit to allow you to use it more safely, a way of working, or various other things.  These all boil down to fall into one of two categories: Primary safety and Secondary safety.  Primary safety is providing equipment or design to ensure that a dangerous occurance does not happen.  Secondary safety is providing equipment or design that keeps people safe should something dangerous occur.

A good example of this is on a Car:  Headlamps are a Primary safety item, allowing the driver to see where (s)he is going, and hence drive without crashing into things at night.  Seatbelts are a Secondary safety item, reducing the severity of the damage (injury) should a collision occur, possibly because the primary safety system has stopped working (although not always.. people still crash at night even with their headlamps on.)

The issue with Safety is that it makes no allowance for the individual.  In the above example, this is perfectly reasonable, as every driver needs to see in the dark, and every driver needs restraining in the event of an accident.  Within the engineering industry, the lines are much less defined, and a Safe method of working is not always as obvious as "it's dark, so we need lights".  The way that more subtle risks, and their mitigation are calculated is with a Risk Assessment.  These are formal documents and are the outcome of a skilled person assessing a task/process/event etc. and working out what needs to be done to ensure that this can be completed in a safe manner.  Once a Risk Assessment has been completed, people completing the task *(note, generally not the person who completed the risk assessment) then follow the instructions in the Risk assessment to carry out the task safely.

There are two issues with this.  The first one is that a Risk Assessment makes no allowance for the skill or intelligence level of the person who has to follow it, and (partially as a consequence of the first issue) there is a belief that if a Risk assessment is followed, then clearly you are working safely, as "that's what the document says, I'm doing, it, it must be safe."

One of the things that is regularly misused in Risk Assessments as a way of mitigating risk is the use of Personal Protective Equipment.  PPE is, and always has been, the last resort of Engineering to make sure a person is kept safe while carrying out a process.  If possible, the risks should always be engineered out at the design stage, and only if this is completely impossible or impractical should Personal Protective Equipment be specified.  The reason for this is clear... the danger in the process is still very much present, and only an item of clothing or equipment being worn by the operative is keeping them safe.  Theoretically, if the PPE fails the operative in some way, they are then immediately exposed to the risk.  If the risk is designed out at the design stage, then no PPE is needed, and it matters not what the operative is wearing or using, the risk is not present.  Far better.

Unfortunately, the use of PPE is generally much cheaper and easier than engineering out a risk, so it gets used excessively.  So much so that there is now and expectation for the use of PPE, and the lack of PPE in certain environments is more noticeable than it should be.  This is very true on certain sites that I visit.  There is a minimum PPE requirement simply to gain access to site, these being High-Visibility clothing, Steel Toecap Boots, Hard Hat, and in extreme circumstances, Gloves and impact-resistant glasses.

This is, quite frankly, absurd.  The requirement for these items stems from incidents that have occured on sites, and the knee-jerk reaction is to implement PPE.  This is bad in many ways, as it clearly indicates that the risks have not been correctly assessed and simply a blanket rule has been applied, and it (as I mentioned above) makes no allowance for the individual, their skill levels, or indeed what they are planning to do on site.  What it also does is make working on site much more uncomfortable than it needs to be.  Anyone who has had to endure a hard-hat, steel boots, gloves and glasses on a baking-hot summer's day will know what I mean.

Recently, I have experienced this absurd belief that "PPE makes everything safer" turned up to Eleven.  How?  On the shop floor that we, as a company, are now part of, there are painted walkways, and "working areas".  The walkways are painted green, and the working area orange.  The decree is that if you are in an orange area, thou shalt wear a high visibility jacket and steel toecap boots.  This, like the implementation of PPE above, is absurd.  Absolutely no allowance is made for the activity being carried out, and from a true risk assessment point of view, there is no discernable difference between the walkway area and the shop floor area.  So, you have to ask, what is the point?  Not least because there is no physical difference, but also the PPE specified is pointless..

High Visibility wear was designed to ensure that people working outside, near vehicles, in low light levels were visible to the drivers of vehicles.  Prior to the implementation of high-vis, people wearing dark or dirty clothing could become invisible against a dark background, and hence were at high risk of being hit by a vehicle.  Introduce high visibility clothing, and suddenly the invisible person in low light levels becomes very visible, as the high visibility clothing actually converts ultra-violet light into visible light, thus making the wearer glow.  It's very effective, and has saved many many lives.  However, in a well-lit workshop, in daytime hours, where there are no vehicles moving, there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

Steel toecap boots were designed to protect the wearer from falling debris.  The cap over the toe has a rating, measured in joules, as to the maximum energy item that it can withstand (very crudely, the weight of the object multiplied by the height it's fallen from).  Now, in a workshop environment, there may be a benefit to wearing steel toecap boots, as an item falling from racking or someone dropping something they are carrying could easily damage a foot.  However, the implementation of steel toecap boots is somewhat pointless when there is no requirement to have covered legs, meaning people wear steel boots, and shorts.  Ah good, my toes are protected, but the huge gash in my leg from the falling item, ah well, never mind.  On top of that there is newer reasearch showing that steel toecaps can (and often do) make certain circumstances worse, as if the energy of the falling item significantly exceeds the rating of the shoe, or if the toe is placed under something heavy enough to just deform the steel cap, the cap can end up severing the toes, whereas had the steel toe not been present, it may have been a simple crush injury.  Painful, yes, but at least you still have your toes!  Not only that, the weight of steel toecap boots is not insignificant, and it can make the wearer much more clumsy.

So, given all the above, it is no surprise that while working in an area of the workshop that I am completely familiar with all the risks, and had assessed that PPE was completely un-necessarry, when I was approached by a different member of staff who does not know the risks in my area, and was told "safety!! put your high vis and boots on", my reply was fairly curt and was not positive.  Yes, well done you, you've just walked into a production area that you are not familiar with and don't know the risks of, distracted me from my task, to tell me to wear two items of PPE that are both completely un-necessary for the task in hand, and in the case of Boots would have made me MORE likely to come to harm.

I fully expect quite a bit of fall-out from that incident, as clearly I wasn't working safely, was a danger to myself and others, and should pay more attention to company health and safety rules.  It's a lose-lose situation.

All in the name of Safety.