Page 16 - Occupational Health & Safety, November 2018

CONFINED SPACES
Confined Spaces: We Have a Failure to Communicate
Given the statistics on confined space deaths, shouldn’t rescuers know about atmospheric conditions before entering and attempting rescue? And shouldn’t the attendant know about the entrants’ readings in real time anyway?
BY KYLE KRUEGER
Aquote from the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke” perfectly sums up the problems that we all face with confined spaces: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach.” Approximately 60 percent of all deaths in a confined space are rescuers1, because the men and women inside the space can’t communicate about the dangers within.
According to a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) study, the majority (more than 55 percent) of these deaths are because of atmo- spheric hazards. People routinely die because they don’t know that the atmosphere they are about to walk into is filled with deadly concentrations of gas.
The best way to erase atmospheric-related con- fined space deaths is through proper use of gas detec- tion and leveraging technology to communicate those hazards to all would-be rescuers. We need to solve our communication problem and understand how to properly rescue those we cannot reach.
Four Key Failures
Failure #1: No real-time Peer to Peer gas hazard communication: Historically, gas detection devices have been very good at alerting the person wearing the device of the hazards. However, they have been terrible at letting anyone else in the work group know about these hazards. Given the statistics on confined space deaths, shouldn’t rescuers know about those at-
mospheric conditions before entering and attempting rescue? And shouldn’t the attendant know about the entrants’ readings in real time anyway?
With the advances in wireless communication in gas detection devices, we need to be clear on what the appropriate means for communicating this informa- tion should be. While devices that can communicate the readings to a remote person via the Internet could provide benefit, it does absolutely nothing for those in the immediate work group who could fall under the “would-be” aforementioned “60 percent” of rescu- ers. Peer to peer gas detection communication, such as LENSTM Wireless, is the best way to let those who would be in immediate danger know of the hazard, so they can make the best decisions in real time. Ad- ditionally, technologies such as LENS allow for com- munication between personal and area monitors so that users can easily place these monitors in spaces and communicate gas information without a person having to be in the atmosphere to begin with.
Simple communication investments can be made to easily engineer these ad hoc networks to deliver the critical information to those whose lives depend on it most.
Failure #2: Not abiding by the 2 by 2 rule: Be- fore entering a confined space, one should test the atmosphere before entry. That is overall common sense and accepted knowledge. However, how one should go about that is one of the most commonly misunderstood items when it comes to proper gas detector use. To outline this juxtaposition, let me use a common example: If someone were fishing, would he immediately reel in his line if no fish bit, then de- termine no fish were in the lake? No! Well, why is that? We all know that fishing is a process; it takes time, skill, and patience to get what you are really looking for, right? Then explain to me why so many people think that they can drop a line of tubing into a space, wait a few seconds, then immediately deter- mine that space is safe?
The 2 by 2 Rule was established to have simple, clear guidance to determine whether a space is safe. The rule states that it takes 2 minutes of sampling time PLUS . . . 2 seconds for every one foot of tubing. That is the amount of tubing connected, not the size of the space. Here is a common scenario: If sampling a 10- foot space with 20 feet of tubing attached, how long
16 Occupational Health & Safety | NOVEMBER 2018
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