When the seasons change from winter to spring, facilities have a long maintenance checklist to get through. Your team may have their hands full with quarterly deep cleaning tasks, machinery inspections, and de-winterization processes. Even when your services and workflows don’t change from season to season, spring cleaning can dominate the month ahead because of oncoming OSHA and CCOHS inspections. The best way to protect your company during safety inspections is to implement OSHA requirements for fall protection long before the safety inspectors arrive.
This can be an overwhelming task if your teams are already overloaded with production projects and quarterly goals, so we recommend taking a streamlined approach: identify the most likely or most significant gaps that companies like yours have to grapple with, and make sure that portion of OSHA compliance is handled. For most industrial indoor facilities, the biggest problem you need to tackle is indoor fall hazards—and, especially, having the right safety gates to stop fall incidents. Use this quick guide to prepare your safety gates for spring OSHA inspections, and take this significant to-do off your spring cleaning list today.
How to Prepare Your Industrial Gates for Spring OSHA Inspections
Be ready for springtime OSHA inspections by guaranteeing that your facility has adequate protections in place for the biggest and most common safety hazards. All industrial facilities have some risk of indoor trips and falls, but those risks may be even more significant in your facility if you have multiple levels, your workers face extreme temperatures, or your facility has incurred penalties before. Follow these five simple steps to protect your team and your company.
#1: Understand the Harms of Noncompliance With OSHA Requirements for Fall Protection
OSHA inspectors conduct detailed inspections to ensure multiple different aspects of your facility’s operations comply with the relevant OSHA standards. Failing to comply can result in ‘serious’ and ‘other-than-serious’ penalties, with fines in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per incident. Examples of noncompliance include not having safety gates, not having the right safety gate that meets OSHA’s requirements, having the safety gate propped up, and so on.
However, OSHA fines organizations for willful or repeated violations much more harshly, with each incident costing up to $165,514. Knowing the financial harms, as well as the safety risks to your staff if there aren’t adequate fall prevention measures, can help your organization properly prioritize compliance projects and get more buy-in for improvements.
#2: Run Your Own Internal Audits to Check Your Safety Gates
Conduct your own OSHA compliance audit before the inspectors arrive. This process can help you assess your facility’s safety through a fresh perspective and notice details that may have faded into the background. During this process, note potential infractions like:
- Safety stairway gates or mezzanine gates that are in poor repair or no longer in compliance with OSHA standards
- Safety gates that stay propped open during peak hours or are not used properly
- Areas that need safety gates but may have a different barrier or no barrier at all
Ideally, conduct your audit during working hours rather than before or after hours. This will allow you to ‘catch’ more potential problems based on improper usage and gain a greater understanding of how safety protocols actually live out in your facility.
#3: Decide Where Your Facility Needs Passive Safety Barriers
This step is part of your internal safety audit, but it’s also important as its own standalone measure: actively look for gaps in your passive fall protection installations. These can look like:
- Any gaps in the perimeter of a raised floor or mezzanine that is at least four feet above the floor below, as these require mezzanine gates or permanent guardrail barriers
- The tops of stairways, where busy workers might trip or fall backward down the stairs without one-way safety stairway gates
- Warehouse dock doors—whether your facility keeps those doors closed most of the time or if you prop them open for a breeze
It’s easy to get distracted by checking on your existing gates and safety hardware and not realize there are empty gaps. By proactively searching out where you don’t have gates and guardrails, you can significantly improve overall safety.
#4: Decide If You Need to Maintain, Repair, or Upgrade
Review the results of your audit and start creating an action plan. What can better signage and training resolve? Do you have gates that are partially out of compliance—for example, are they too small or missing a self-closing mechanism? Or do you have several areas where you need to install a self-closing gate for the first time?
Note down what you need to do to resolve each infraction, and work with your facilities management team to close up as many gaps as possible. Even for solutions with a hefty upfront cost, such as installing a brand new extended safety gate across a wide stairway, your team can quickly recoup the investment through reduced penalties and fees, fewer safety incidents, and greater productivity.
#5: Ensure Training and Compliance Are in Place
Once you install your new industrial gates and make the safety adjustments that resolve all the red and yellow flags in your initial safety audit, move on to training and informing your teams. Make sure everyone knows how to use the gates and barriers, and conduct spot checks to guarantee that the gates are being used properly. These efforts can inform your staff about your new safety measures and how to follow OSHA requirements for fall protection. It can also make compliance second nature for the day when official OSHA inspectors show up this spring.
Be Ready to Pass Your Spring Inspections With Safety Gates From Fabenco
Installing OSHA-compliant safety gates from Fabenco is a quick and long-lasting way to improve your facility’s safety record and compliance. Our gates are built to last and provide proper support so it’s safer to walk around on elevated pathways, up and down stairs, and near dock doors with a steep four- to six-foot drop. We provide fall protection solutions such as industrial gates, mezzanine gates, and stairway gates so you have an OSHA-compliant solution ready-made for every part of your facility. Contact us today to tell us what you’re looking for and what OSHA requirements for fall protection you want to focus on.
