Hazard Identification and Control
Find hazards before they find you
Common methods: walkthrough inspections, job hazard analysis (JHA/JSA), audits, incident and near-miss review, employee reports, checklists, What-If analysis, and management-of-change review whenever a process, material, or equipment changes.
- JHA sequence: select the job, break it into steps, identify hazards at each step, develop controls, then implement and review. Distractors routinely place "train the worker" first.
- Inspection vs. audit: inspections look at conditions; audits evaluate conformance of the management system to a defined standard. Items swap these terms.
- Hazard classes to recognize: energy and stored energy (lockout/tagout), confined space, falls, machine guarding, electrical, ergonomic, chemical, and thermal.
Traps. Choosing PPE when a feasible engineering control appears in another option - PPE is the last line of defense. Accepting "retrain the worker" as the fix for a design-induced hazard. Forgetting that near-miss underreporting is itself a finding, since it removes the earliest warning data available.
Rule of thumb. Wherever a feasible engineering control exists, it outranks administrative controls and PPE. Administrative controls and PPE are defensible only when engineering is not feasible, and then only in combination with a documented rationale.
Worked example. Operators reach into a press to clear jams. The correct hierarchy answer is to eliminate the need to reach in by redesigning or automating the feed, or by adding interlocked guarding - not to post a warning sign and retrain. The sign and the training change nothing about the energy and the reach distance that produce the exposure.