Occupational hazards are easy to underestimate. It is always a news story that happened hundreds of kilometers away. Someone acted irresponsibly and now we all find out about it. So, it is something that happens to others, not to us, that is what we tend to think.
At the same time it is equally as easy to overestimate the potential accidents in your company. There are teams that waste time and resources on unrealistic scenarios that can not be countered anyway. They are laughed off at the water cooler and everything returns back to normal.
That is until a real accident with sizable consequences does happen.
Consult Professionals
There are experts for handling chemicals in an industrial setting or logistics center. You can consult these professionals in safety management engineering to perform a risk assessment. They will propose set of measures for elimination or mitigation of injury to workers and damage to property. Chemical accidents happen due to many reasons. Among the top five are failure of equipment, error of an operator. Also high up there are warnings that were outright ignored, or the safety review was done inadequately. The point is, they happen and you need to protect your assets.
Provide Work Safety
It is crucial to put effort into work safety and there are a lot of ways to eliminate or reduce the risk of personnel injury. Skilled and loyal workforce is not an expendable asset by any means. If your premises do not include special bund for storing chemicals than things can go down really fast. In case of leakage you are not able to control the flow of chemicals. The personnel at the lowest point of the site is exposed to contact with dangerous chemicals. Depending on the type of chemical, even involuntary inhalation of vapours can cause injury. Having small drums, canisters and containers of chemicals and liquids is not an excuse to bypass the safety precautions. You can buy lightweight and durable portable bunding modular system. They are built for containing spills coming from these smaller vessels. And most of them are adjusted for easy forklift and pallet truck entry.
Care for the Environment
Proper bunding system protects the environment from accidental spills. You can follow rules and regulations for disposal of chemicals. If your chemical poses high risk for damage than you might even exceed what is proposed by governments and international standards. Failing to do so results in a leak (when it happens) that flows to the nearest low point. Typically this is either a drain or manhole. Any of them ends up into the watershed and can spread to river population and the general population alike. It has the potential to cause death to thousands of species that done you no wrong. Why have this kind of event on your hands?
It Costs Less and Is More Effective
As much as it sounds counter intuitive, investing in a bunding system is cost effective when compared to the costs associated with spillage clean up. And don’t let yourself be fooled, these events always come back to haunt you. The trace of the chemicals leads inevitably to the source, and if that is you, there is no way around it. It doesn’t matter if you own a large industrial plant or you just have a warehouse on the edge of town. When authorities or local population find out, the bill for cleaning up will be addressed to you. Having a spill containment bund in place reduces the costs quite substantially.
Recover Your Expensive Goods
Chemicals are a commodity. If you have gone through the trouble of procuring these goods to sell them or use them chances are you don’t like to see them spill in the drain. Even a portable bunding system can go a long way in capturing and recovering expensive chemicals. It doesn’t even have to be an expensive goods that you want to secure. Maybe the chemicals you store are hard to maintain, allocate or create on your own. Letting them go for no apparent reason is wasteful and reckless.
Counteract Legal Liabilities
Dealing with a harmful chemical spill is legal minefield. In case of damage to property or injury to individuals you will face a barrage of charges you didn’t even knew existed. Unfavorable publicity is guaranteed and court proceedings are not excluded. No one wants to deal with the mess regardless if you represent a big company or small warehouse. You have to foresee the legal liability of losing control over the goods stoked up in your operations base. Who would welcome beef with their neighbor regardless if we are talking about a company, a homestead or a simple household here.
Adjust and Create Solutions
These are but some of the reasons you should look more closely on securing your liquid tanks. Although they are all relevant and time-tested, it is possible that you find yourself in the middle of some less typical situation. In this case you should get creative and solve the issue before it becomes a problem. You might not need a proper bunding system. If you are handling chemicals in containers you will surely benefit from the ideas put into some of the solutions. You can adopt these to your particular circumstances. Maybe you don’t need modular bunding system, but you will appreciate bunded pallets. Or maybe you need to stack these barrels on top of one another and you have doubts as to the shelf you can use to do just that. There are establishments that decide to store their chemicals outdoors because of whole host of reasons. You can find such options available online. The point here is – whatever your chemical safety needs there are ways to satisfy them. They are easy to pull off and there are reasons to do so.
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