Whether you’re operating a distribution center or manufacturing high-volume orders of metal goods, machinery is a serious and risky topic for any industry. Depending on what you operate in your facility, each workstation or distinct set of equipment presents multiple potential risks, including electrical components, sharp or heavy objects, noise and vibration hazards, and disruption to lines of sight or communication, as outlined in OSHA 1910.
Oversized equipment presents an additional danger: falls and trips from elevated heights. Large equipment on the ground floor and equipment installed on mezzanine levels present both height risks for people who need to climb the equipment and a trip or mobility hazard to people walking on an elevated platform.
Despite the outsized dangers, OSHA has cited proper machine guarding as one of the most common safety violations in 2024. Investing in industrial gates and other machine guarding solutions, as well as optimizing your facility’s layout to minimize hazards, can ensure your 2025 has fewer potential OSHA violations. Learn more about the fall protection solutions your team can and should implement, the benefits of better facility safety, and how to get started.
OSHA 1910.212: One of the Most Common OSHA Violations
OSHA releases details of which safety violations are the most common for a given year. These statistics highlight the risks that are extremely prevalent across a wide range of facilities and the risks that organizations are least likely to have suitably compliant protections in place. In 2024, one of the most common standards that was violated was OSHA 1910.212, which lists out general requirements for machinery and machine guarding for all types of machinery. This set of standards includes:
- Different types of guards, such as barriers or two-hand tripping devices
- What elements of machines must be guarded, as well as some of the most common types of machinery that require guarding
- Requirements for the machinery to be considered sufficient protection
Safety managers can’t simply consider the type of machinery. Instead, you must consider the full array of risks the machinery presents based on workflows, its position within a worksite, and surrounding machinery or tangential hazards. Depending on your facility’s location, you may also need to consider CCOHS compliance requirements and local requirements alongside OSHA standards.
Types of Fall Hazards That Machinery Present
When most facility managers and safety teams consider machinery-based hazards, they focus on sparks and sharp edges. The dangers of cutting tools, sharp shavings from metal workpieces, and welding machinery are obvious. However, some machinery can pose additional fall hazards that are less obvious to casual observers and harried safety staff. Start to consider dangers such as:
- Tall machinery that staff will need to climb during maintenance and routine inspections
- Rotating parts that can knock staff down from elevated platforms or walkways
- Machinery perilously near hatches or ladders without compliant safety gates for ladders
- Machinery that blocks visibility around mezzanine or narrow walkways, making collisions, trips, and falls more likely
- Moving equipment that can knock employees down through open loading dock doors
These are just the hazards from indoor equipment; exterior installations pose additional fall risks due to high elevations, slippery roofs, and machinery obscuring open access hatches or narrow pathways.
Facility and safety managers can better recognize indoor safety threats by conducting their own safety audits and observing how staff operate throughout the course of a typical workday. By seeing how staff navigate around machinery, your teams can better implement hardware and equipment-based solutions, as well as behavioral protocols.
Solutions Your Facility Can Start Implementing
Better facility safety is at the core of making sure your organization doesn’t run into compliance violations with 1910.212 and fall protection standards. Follow these simple facility safety tips to make your safety procedures stronger and more compliant with OSHA requirements:
Audit Your Facility
You can’t protect your facility or your staff if you don’t know where the weaknesses are in your OSHA compliance efforts. We recommend routinely auditing your indoor workspaces. Pay particular attention to space such as:
- Stairways
- Mezzanines
- Loading docks
- Ladders
Elements such as poor lighting, moving or swinging machinery, and a lack of proper perimeters around machinery can increase the risk of safety incidents. By thoroughly auditing your facility, you can create an actionable “to-do list” of violations to start eliminating by installing solutions like pivoting mezzanine safety gate solutions or safety gates for ladders. You can also conduct multiple audits throughout different parts of the workday or different months of the year to capture changes that might not be immediately obvious.
Analyze Your Organization’s History of Violations or Safety-Related Incidents
Conducting your own safety audits gives you the most direct insight into what compliance standards your facility meets and which ones you need to concentrate new efforts on. But if you can’t implement a safety audit just yet—or you’re looking for additional data to justify purchases, training, or process changes—comb through your organization’s incident history.
You can use past violations in OSHA safety audits or past injury reports to zero in on the laxest areas of your safety procedures and the biggest risks present at your property. Using this information, you can assess whether the risks are still present and start to purchase safety equipment or implement training to reduce the dangers.
Create a Solid Perimeter Around Elevated Platforms and Walkways
Another way to tackle the fall and slip hazards that machinery can cause is to eliminate fall and slip hazards more broadly. The interior areas mentioned above—stairways, mezzanine, loading docks, and ladders—are dangerous because staff can fall off the elevated surfaces. So, create a solid perimeter around those exposed edges so staff can’t fall from them, regardless of whether machinery is the underlying culprit or not. Popular solutions include:
- Hefty guardrails against open edges of mezzanine and raised platforms
- Pivoting mezzanine safety gate installations
- Industrial gates around ladders and stairways that have an automatically closing gate mechanism
- Guardrails around hatches and ladders
Additional components might include warning lines that make edges more apparent or harnesses and active fall prevention systems.
Choose Industrial Gates and More from Fabenco
OSHA 1910 standards outline the safety protocols that general industry and commercial organizations must follow, with OSHA 1910.212 outlining proper responses to many machinery-based hazards. At Fabenco by Tractel, we specialize in supplying companies with the fall prevention and protection tools they need to keep staff safe and score higher in OSHA audits. Reach out today to explore our available selection of industrial gates, pivoting mezzanine safety gate products, safety gates for ladders, and more.
