Contractor killed in confined space incident....

The use of contractors in our industry has increased as the amount of workers in our plants have decreased. Some plants are operating at or near production records but with only fraction of employees compared to 10 years ago. The remaining employees have been replaced with contractors. The safety of these contractors is an ever challenging problem. Here is a recent incident:

A worker died during the week of May 25, in a tank of red mud residue – a kind of waste produced while refining bauxite into alumina – at a plant in Asia.

The worker was in the process of clearing the residue tank with a high-pressure hose on Wednesday when a chunk of mud fell apart and hit him.

He was employed by an outside contracting firm, which was contracted to provide cleaning and waste disposal services at the plant.

The tank’s measured roughly 20 meters in diameter and stood 28 meters tall.

The worker was standing at the bottom of the tank to hose down the tank's inner wall when the accident happened. 

Another worker who was then hanging on the wall, jumped to the bottom in an effort to save his colleague.

The worker died ten minutes after rescuers got him out of the tank, while the second worker survived with injuries.

A local government official told the local newspaper that the worker died from a collision with a chunk of hardened red mud, not the mud’s chemical effects.

Since this Asian country announced plans to build a series of bauxite refineries many years ago, many experts and the public have worried about the threats they pose to the environment.

Opened late last year, this bauxite refinery was designed to produce 650,000 tons of alumina – the main ingredient for aluminum production – a year.

The Aluminium Plant Safety Blog offers our sincere condolences to the deceased worker’s family, friends and coworkers. The APSB prays for a quick recovery of the injured worker’s physical and mental injuries.

Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) has information on confined space which can be found here. OSHA also has information about contractor safety, which can be found here.

The Health & Safety Executive has a useful pamphlet on confined space. Which can be downloaded here.

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