Safety should be the primary concern on any worksite. Tucker Paving has learned in our thirty years in the construction industry that a proactive approach is the best way to prevent accidents and improve safety. Conducting a daily hazard assessment is a good starting point to preventing accidents before they can occur.
The Daily Hazard Assessment Defined
A daily hazard assessment is a series of procedures that aims to gather information on potential hazards on a worksite and identify and enact mitigations for those hazards. Workers and management alike can be—and should be—responsible for the parts of the process.
Utilizing such a process means that the lion’s share of accidents are actually identified and corrected before they can actually happen and cause injuries, damage, or worse.
Steps for a Daily Hazard Assessment
A daily hazard assessment typically has six steps. They are:
Step 1: Collect information about possible hazards on a worksite. This involves gathering data from a variety of sources, such as worker input, records of past accidents and injuries, results of job safety analyses, operating manuals, Safety Data Sheets (SDS), and more.
Step 2: Inspect the workplace for safety hazards. Regularly inspect all areas of the worksite for safety hazards. It’s a good idea to use a checklist, keep a record of the inspections, and to do them at different times of the day.
Step 3: Identify health hazards. Identify hazards that could pose a danger to employees’ health, such as chemical hazards like solvents, paints, and toxic dusts; physical hazards like noise, radiation, and heat; biological hazards like infectious diseases; and ergonomic risk factors like heavy lifting, repetitive motions, and vibrations.
Step 4: Investigate all incidents. Ensure that you conduct thorough investigations of incidents, including both incidents that resulted in injuries and those that were near misses. A close call—even though no one was injured—indicates that there is a problem that could lead to injury in the future. Create a trained investigative team, made up of workers and supervisors, that will identify what hazards led to each incident and the best option for remedial action.
Step 5: Identify those hazards that are the result of emergency and irregular situations. Identify hazards and mitigations that might arise from emergency situations and situations that are irregular, such as medical emergencies, violence, nonroutine maintenance, natural disasters, fires, and more.
Step 6: Identify the nature of all the hazards that were discovered, create mitigation measures, and prioritize those hazards that are most likely to occur. In this last step, your team will go through all of recognized hazards and identify options for negating the risk of those hazards turning into real accidents; at this step, it’s important to focus first on those hazards that are more likely to cause injury—such as the dangers presented by an often-used machine that is in disrepair—versus those that are less likely to occur—such as an earthquake hitting your worksite.
On the Tucker Paving team, safety is always our biggest priority. In our 30 years in the asphalt and concrete paving industry, we’ve never regretted preventing an accident. Let us assist you with your next project by calling us at (863) 299-2262, or filling out our contact form online.
