Zero Harm: Top 6 Steps to Master It

Zero harm isn’t achieved by chance, it’s the result of meticulous planning, strong organisational skills, and a commitment to prioritising health, safety and the environment. This best practice guide discusses how you can achieve zero harm on your next turnaround or shutdown, without compromising productivity.

Turnarounds and shutdowns are among the most demanding projects within the industrial sector. They involve carrying out extensive maintenance, repairs or upgrade work to ensure equipment and machinery is running safely and efficiently.

Planning large scale works like this requires collaboration between project managers, engineers, contractors, safety officers and technical experts, all working together under pressure to meet project deadlines and achieve objectives, all while maintaining a strong focus on preventing avoidable harm.

The Difference Between Shutdowns and Turnarounds

Shutdowns are pauses within certain areas of a plant, or refinery. This could be taking a furnace offline at an waste-to-energy plant for maintenance works, or closing a particular production line for upgrade work at a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Turnarounds are planned years in advance, and are used to carry out maintenance works, inspection of equipment, repairs or upgrades.

Whilst most plants or refineries look to plan years or months in advance, they can occur when accidents or emergency works are needed to be carried out. Whether planned or not, both are costly, and are often up against tight budgets and deadlines to meet.

Common industries that carry out shutdowns or turnarounds include:

• Pharmaceutical Factories
• Petrochemical, Oil & Gas
• Waste-To-Energy
• Power Stations
• Manufacturing
• Food & Drink Manufacturing

What is Zero Harm?

Zero harm is a safety culture that focuses on preventing injury, ill health, environmental harm and operational incidents. It requires careful planning, strong leadership, and engagement across both the workforce and contractors hired in. The key elements to creating a zero harm culture include:

Safety as a core value.

Ensuring that health and safety is built within the culture of a workplace and everyday life at work. Creating an environment that makes employees feel safe to raise concerns when things are being carried out incorrectly, or in a manner that could cause injury, or affect people’s health.

Training on systems.

As well as having a safety culture at the core of a business, it’s important that all employees are effectively trained and understand the risks when using equipment or systems within a workplace. This is especially important during a shutdown or turnaround when activities such as welding, cutting, burning or grinding are carried out simultaneously across the facility or plant, often by contractors not familiar with the processes.

Leadership.

Ensuring the culture starts from the top and senior leadership actively promote safety protocols, behaviour, and integrate safety into strategic planning.

Continuous learning.

Things can still happen no matter how much you push safety, how you handle this is important. Should something happen that’s unsafe such as slip, trip, fall, or even something more serious, reporting this is vital. Reporting leads to reviews of processes and procedures, and if something goes wrong, a lesson can be learnt with a change in a risk assessment, or how someone uses a piece of equipment.

Top 6 Ways to Ensure Zero Harm on a Turnaround or Shutdown

With a range of activities being carried out, an increase in footfall due to contractors being on site, tight deadlines and schedules to meet, and unfamiliar teams working together, achieving zero harm requires a collaborative, proactive approach.

1. Planning and risk identification

Before work begins, it’s important to consider the full scope of works being carried out:

• How many different contractors are going to be on site at one given time? What access and training do they need?
• What type of activities need to be carried out and across what areas?
• Do we have details risk assessment for all the areas?
• If equipment is being used, are the instructions clear?

Meticulous planning and risk identification prevents any harm coming to workers or contractors.

2. Competent workforce and strong supervision of contractors

When handling multiple contractors that aren’t familiar with the layout of the facility, or the processes you carry out, it can be a real challenge. To avoid this, ensure appropriate training and inductions for the site are carried out. Initially when work starts, ensure adequate supervision is given.

3. Hierarchy of controls

The environment within a plant or refinery completely changes during a turnaround or shutdown. It goes from a highly organised environment with automated routines, to high-risk tasks happening across the site, carried out by multiple contractors making it much more difficult to achieve zero harm.

The hierarchy of controls helps us to tackle hazards in a structured way, starting with the most effective measures to keep people safe, progressing to the least effective. By systematically applying control measures, it mitigates the health risk on site, prevents accidents, and creates a culture based around health and safety.

We often see people relying solely on PPE, expecting this to be a suitable solution, but this isn't the correct approach. For PPE to be effective, it needs to correctly fitted, specified and maintained, and even then no PPE can guarantee 100% effectiveness all of the time. PPE only protects the people wearing it, meaning those within the surrounding area are still at risk of exposure. It's important to consider if you can eliminate, substitute or control the hazards first, and use PPE as the last line of defence.

The below diagram illustrates the hierarchy of controls:

4. Manage fatigue

The demand from a project so large can have workers carrying out 12 hours shifts across multiple days. Conditions can include working in tight, enclosed or confined spaces, hot furnace chambers and other uncomfortable environments. Giving workers job rotations so they are not carrying out one single task in a 12 hour shift can ensure they remain alert and aware of their surroundings. It's also important for workers to have regular breaks away from work spaces.

5. Carry out a toolbox talk every day

Scope of works and timelines can change dramatically once a turnaround or shutdown is underway, and they are often carried out over a long period of time. Ensuring the workforce is reminded of the risks and kept engaged throughout the project is vital. Carrying out a toolbox talks is a great way to start the day. The HSE defines a toolbox talk as, “a short presentation to the workforce on a single aspect of health and safety.” Toolbox talks are seen as a positive way to encourage a safety culture and create a safe space for H&S practices to be discussed amongst colleagues on site.

6. Effective tools and solutions

Common activities carried out include TIG welding, MIG welding, cutting, grinding, and burning. All of these activities create hazardous dust and fumes. Welding fume is a complex mixture of metallic oxides, silicates, and fluorides and contain harmful particles from the material being welded and the electrode. Health risks associated with exposure to welding fume include arc-eye, irritation of throat and lungs, asthma, and metal fume fever. Research conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that exposure to welding fumes, including mild steel welding, can cause lung cancer.

A common dust encountered during shutdowns and turnarounds is silica dust. Respirable Crystalline Silica (also known as RCS) is a naturally occurring substance which can be found in a number of materials, such as stone, granite, rock and concrete. When these materials are cut, drilled, sanded, grinded or polished, it creates an abundance of respirable crystalline silica dust particles.

Without effective measures in place these activities could impact zero harm through:

• Creating a hazardous, unsafe environment with hazy conditions caused from dust and fume build up.
• Impact workers productivity.
• Workers being exposed to fumes and dust and inhaling it, leading to serious health risks such as COPD, lung cancer, tuberculosis and kidney disease.

RVT Group can help. We provide effective, compliant controls that minimise the risk to workers through extracting hazards from the source, preventing them from becoming airborne.

For several years, RVT Group has supported shutdowns and turnarounds across the UK. Our solutions include dust, fume, noise, ventilation, confined space working and much more.