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+---- Thread: 2008 Q2 Consideration of maint staff safety earlier in lifecycle (/showthread.php?tid=1994)
2008 Q2 Consideration of maint staff safety earlier in lifecycle - PJW - 04-10-2015
Another of Dorothy's attempts which she sent me directly and on which I have added my scribbled comments.
I didn't think there was quite enough here and I didn't "get" what she had meant by the numbers- obvious once explained that after an entry had been written out in one box then the number in another box meant it also applied there as well; I am afraid that I had been looking for another sheet on which they might have been defined.
Indeed this may have been a better way to have presented it- no actual writing in the table itself but use it just to record in the relevant box(es) which items described in a numbered series on a separate sheet of paper are considered applicable. I would have used that sheet for-
- a brief intro into the various causes of safety hazards I was considering (electric shock, working at height, trapping of body parts, long term ill health from noxious chemicals, hit by train, slips/trips/ falls etc,)
- a statement that the less frequently that equipment needs preventative maintenance and the more reliable it is then the less "at risk" staff are since the number of times exposed to the hazardous environment is reduced. Similarly the quicker the diagnostic / rectification/ return to service activities and the fewer staff needed to undertake them, the smaller the length of exposure. Hence anything that increases Reliability or Maintainability would contribute to overall risk reduction and if the overall system is fault tolerant (redundancy, graceful degradation) then remedial work can be undertaken in more controlled and therefore potentially safer conditions than in the heat of a crisis to get trains moving again.
However even as her answer stands, it clearly shows that the whole question has been addressed as the matrix has the various items of equipment in rows and the various different categories of consideration in columns so it is immediately clear that there is something in every box.
We struggled a bit with the "location" because it seemed to us that the equipment's positioning is itself at least broadly defined as part of the "design" and where this isn't well specified the precise detail of exactly where it is situated is determined as part of "installation", hence anything that we could think of for that last column could actually also have gone into one of the two preceding ones. The important thing is probably to ensure that there are some entries in those previous columns which are distinctly different from "location".