Safety Equipment Inspections and Preventative Maintenance

Posted: May. 1, 2019 • By Kevin Kohler

Safety Equipment Inspections and Preventative Maintenance

Can we count on our safety equipment?

We may be relying on safety equipment with our lives. Consider the following from a Work Safe BC Bulletin:

Several workers in a vault below a bridge could have been poisoned by carbon monoxide (CO) from gas-powered tools they were using in the confined space. The air monitoring equipment being used to check for toxic gases could not sound an alarm if CO reached dangerous levels because there was no CO sensor in the instrument. It is vital to worker safety that these monitors be properly configured, calibrated, and maintained. Instrument inaccuracy can lead to serious accidents…

Although it seems obvious that the repercussions are severe when safety equipment is faulty, it requires a high degree of organizational commitment to establish a rigorous inspection and preventative maintenance program.

Somebody inspects my safety equipment for me, right?

Yes and no. Workers must be able to recognize when there is a problem with their safety equipment. This requires training in how to perform inspections of the safety equipment that they use on a regular basis. These so called “pre-use” inspections may be required legislatively, or by a general duty requirement, at the following frequencies:

  • After each use
  • Daily or at the beginning of each work shift
  • As recommended by the original equipment manufacturer
  • When the equipment has been damaged or deployed

For the safety equipment used on a day-to-day basis workers must be trained to:

  • Perform safety inspections that can identify problems
  • Confirm that the safety equipment is compliant and has been maintained, calibrated, tested or re-certified as required (through tags or electronic records, etc.).
  • Remove defective equipment from service.

The safety equipment subject to these day to day inspections includes:

  • Personal protective equipment (protective headwear, footwear, eyewear, etc.)
  • Respiratory protective equipment
  • Personal fall arrest systems (harnesses, lanyards, and associated components)
  • Portable gas monitors
  • Hearing protection (ear muffs, plugs)

What about the safety equipment that I only rely on in an emergency?

Safety equipment that we might only use in an emergency includes:

  • Safety showers and eyewash stations
  • Fire extinguishers and fire fighting equipment
  • Emergency alarms (process, fire, evacuation) and lighting
  • Emergency signage
  • Self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA)
  • First aid and medical equipment

How do we make sure that safety equipment is inspected and ready to go?

The following steps will help to make sure that there is a robust system in-place that ensures that safety equipment can be relied upon:

  1. Establish a database with equipment numbers for all safety equipment
  2. Review the OEM manuals, legislation and best practices and establish inspection and PM schedules
  3. Determine what training is required for workers to be “qualified” for the inspections and PM activities they are carrying out
  4. Determine the outside resources required to support the inspection and PM process
  5. Establish the tracking and verification system that workers will use (checklists, on-line records, certification tags, inspection tags, etc.) to conduct and verify inspections
  6. Establish an audit system to verify the effectiveness of the inspection system

Some safety equipment is seldom, if ever, used yet lives may hang in the balance if the equipment does not work. As a result our verification systems are critical to ensuring a safe workplace.


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