By MICHELE F. MIHALJEVICH
Indiana Correspondent

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Use of “lock out, tag out” measures to control electricity in the workplace, including on the farm, could save many lives annually, according to an Ohio State University safety expert.

Nationally, two people are killed every day by electricity in the workplace, said Timothy Butcher, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) program coordinator for the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at OSU.

“Properly locking and tagging that electricity could save those lives,” Butcher noted. “Failure to adhere to ‘lock out, tag out’ measures is in the top 10 causes of death in the workplace.”

Lock out, tag out methods are in place to control hazardous energy, such as electricity and chemicals that might be released unexpectedly.

“If chemicals are under pressure, the valve might give way,” he said. “If not properly controlled, hazardous energy has the potential to harm or kill an employee. A little bit of investment can save a lot of time.”

Butcher recommends identifying all devices or pieces of equipment that should have locks, and providing each with a dedicated lock that is used exclusively to control hazardous energy. Each lock should have a key in the control of the business owner or the person responsible for using the device or equipment.

Tagging locks, switches and other devices and equipment is also an important step, he noted. “You want to let people know why the lock is there, or what a switch is for. So, label it – ‘This controls the grain silo auger,’” he gave as an example.

“Labeling is also important for rescuers and temporary employees who don’t know the farm as well as those who live there. You also want to talk to family and employees and let them know when they shouldn’t circumvent these measures.”

Farmers sometimes bypass these safety measures because of time constraints, Butcher explained.

“Some farmers do work to adhere to safety rules, but some farmers don’t. It runs the gamut. Some aren’t doing things as well as they could be,” he said. “They say they don’t have time for safety. There is a lot of pressure in production agriculture, pressure that other industries don’t have. But if you don’t find the time now to do it right, when will you find the time?

“They also have a familiarity with the equipment, so they don’t see a value in identifying things properly. And if the equipment isn’t brand new, some labels may have worn off.”

Given the various roles farmers have in a day, it’s easy to see why they might sometimes take shortcuts that could endanger them, family members or employees, said Jeff Carter, deputy commissioner for the Indiana Department of Labor and head of Indiana OSHA.

“It concerns me greatly. The family farmer has to be the jack-of-all-trades. They have to know about seeds and planting, they work on complex machinery and then they might have a little machine shop where they work on something else. That transition is not always easy for everyone,” Carter said.

“I’m amazed at their versatility. But at busy times, such as harvest time, they put in a long day of physical labor and might make a mistake because they’re tired, and don’t lock something out properly. There are people killed on a regular basis doing regular farm work.”

Family farms, especially older ones, might have outdated or patchwork electrical systems that could be potential dangers, Carter said.

“You may have switches that no one is sure what are for,” he pointed out. “There may have been a label on it 20 years ago, but it’s long since worn off and is no longer legible. And on older farms, it may not be that simple to lock something out. Some of these things can be very tricky.”

While lock out, tag out rules do apply to general industry and some agriculture-related businesses such as grain-handling facilities, they don’t apply to the average farm, Butcher noted. “The standards for general industry are more strict,” he said. “Farms aren’t required to follow the standards with the same rigor as industry.”

Most of the time, Indiana OSHA doesn’t visit a farm until there’s been a death or serious accident, Carter said, adding, by law, OSHA is to be contacted if an employee is killed on the farm.

“We’re the enforcement arm, so if we’re called, it’s usually not a good thing,” he noted. “It means something bad has happened at that point.”

Agriculture is the most hazardous occupation per capita, when considering the number of injuries and number of people involved in the industry, Butcher said. According to the University of Illinois, 551 people die in an average year while doing agricultural work in the United States, and about 88,000 have lost-time injuries.

Since OSHA began in 1971, the rate of workplace deaths nationally has been reduced significantly, Butcher said.

Prior to OSHA, there were as many as 10,000 deaths a year in the workplace. Last year, there were about 3,800, he noted.