The title may seem like a bit of a weird statement considering Health and safety largely relies on teams helping each other. However, sometimes helping your mates out may do more harm than good.
Many hazardous gases cannot be seen or smelt, and they move very quickly to fill a space, meaning they can unknowingly build to a dangerous level in the blink of an eye. The video below is a health and safety informational video created in 1973, it focuses on the dangers of hydrogen sulphide gas and stresses a lot of the points that you would hear in any safety training today.
Six people died unnecessarily because they went into the area where the gas hazard was to help out their mate.
You may remember 1973 as the year that Pink Floyd released arguably their most famous album: “Dark side of the moon”, or when President Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term, and Westworld was released into Cinemas. It was a memorable year!
But now Richard Nixon is long since dead, Dark side of the moon (whether you love or hate it) has become one of your grandad's classic albums, and Westworld looks like a secondary school film project, but people are still following their mates into places full of gas hazards!
Just recently, we came across an article in the april edition of HSM magazine, about a prosecution where a worker had entered a tank to carry out welding work, was overcome by Argon gas leading to asphyxiation and collapsed. Shortly after, their colleague entered the tank to help, and the same fate befell him. Luckily emergency services were able to rescue the two workers by using breathing apparatus, and neither person died, but have we learnt nothing since the age of polyester and nylon? this was a completely preventable accident.
The dangers of gases are not easily realised or understood, and people in the examples above had no real idea of the danger they were putting themselves in. Training ordinary people doing a job to think about the potentially unseen, fast-moving danger of gases is what 3Bz Easy Gas Safety is all about.
Training the team to recognise a possible gas danger and also to realise that it’s essential that they don’t deal with the hazard themselves and instead call the emergency services. The professionals are trained and have the correct equipment to deal with such incidents. This is the most important piece of advice we can give. You wouldn’t go to work in platform soles and loon pants, so don’t act like you’re from 1973 either. No more helping your mates out, leave that to the professionals!
