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COVID-19 has changed our lives dramatically, forcing all of us to make personal and professional changes. One important change has been physical distancing through varying strategies, like reducing your workforce, staggering shifts, rotating staff, etc. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to implement some of these protective measures when workers must share spaces, tools, and more. This “new normal” can be difficult to adapt to under daily operating conditions, and even more difficult if you’re approaching a critical shutdown or turnaround.
If the show must go on for your shutdown or turnaround, here are three ways you can use your gas detection program to make things easier and safer.
1) Reduce contact during maintenance
Most workers share gas detectors with peers on different shifts. This means workers need to visit a shared office or maintenance site at least twice a day to pick up and return the detectors. While doing this, your worker is likely indoors and in contact with maintenance technicians or other peers while they manually charge, bump test, calibrate, and upload data logs from the monitor.
There are two easy ways to reduce the amount of time your workers spend in shared spaces for gas detection: docking stations and subscription-based service programs.
Docking stations can drastically reduce the amount of time your workers spend in close contact with others by simplifying daily tasks like bump tests, charging, and data logging. With docking stations, your workers place their monitor on the dock after their shift and it automatically initiates basic maintenance tasks. The next day, your worker simply picks up the monitor from the dock and gets to work. A process that can take 10-15 minutes manually now takes just seconds. As an added bonus, docking stations mean additional contractors on your site will have access to fully functional gas detectors without needing to learn maintenance protocols.
Gas detection subscription services take safety a step further by covering repair. Programs like Industrial Scientific’s iNet® Exchange are especially helpful if you have reduced staff available for maintenance or are limiting visitors during your shutdown/turnaround (including on-site repair services). With a full-service, subscription-based program like iNet Exchange, a docking station reviews the performance of your monitors, sensors, circuit boards, microprocessor, and pumps each time your workers dock their monitors. When a monitor needs attention, we’ll automatically send you a new one. Before you know it, you have contactless delivery of a new monitor. Your workers can spend less time crowded in a maintenance room and more time working at a safe distance.
2) Proactively set boundaries and track worker contact
Just like in sports, the best offense is a good defense. It’s important to take a proactive approach to physical distancing, especially if your shutdown or turnaround means you’ll have more workers milling about. Geofencing capabilities within some live monitoring software programs allow you to map out work zones and assign safe capacity limits. If too many workers enter a defined area, you receive an instant alert that the area is over capacity so you can take action. Implementing proactive measures like this can help reduce the spread of COVID-19 on your site.
In the unfortunate event that someone on your site does develop symptoms or test positive for COVID-19, contact tracing or exposure tracking become critical. Contact tracing, or identifying where a person has been and who they have contacted, must be conducted swiftly and thoroughly to be effective. If one of your workers develops symptoms, you must be able to quickly create a report that shows who that worker may have contacted throughout the day. This type of report allows you to understand potential risk patterns at your company, which is critical to business continuity and the longer-term health and safety of your workforce.
Intelex Exposure Tracker, for example, prompts workers who may be contagious to log their activity in an app for easy reporting. The app allows you to quickly trace exposures at your site, reducing the risk of exposure and controlling the impact to employees, your business, and any additional contractors on site. With an accurate record of potential and confirmed exposures across your site, you can confidently pinpoint who may have been exposed and alert them to get tested and self-isolate to reduce the spread on site.
3) Keep shared devices clean
Because many gas detectors are worn in the breathing zone and shared by several users, it’s a good idea to routinely clean and sanitize your gas detectors. However, you can’t use just any cleansing agent. The precision sensors in your monitors are highly sensitive to many different chemicals, including alcohol and other disinfectants, so using them could prevent your monitor from alerting you to gas hazards. Additionally, alcohol-based cleaners will cause your monitor to go into alarm. If you zero the monitor too soon, the monitor will read falsely low, potentially putting you in unsafe conditions. To give your monitor a serious cleaning, wipe it with a bleach and water solution of approximately 50 parts water to one part bleach recommended by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
You can use this same solution to clean docking stations, wiping any parts where the monitor contacts the docking station. For other areas of the docking station (screens/buttons/etc.), the water mixture might cause problems. For those areas, you can use Isopropyl alcohol (90% or above). However, make sure that if you use any alcohol-based cleansers on or near a docking station you allow enough time for those to off-gas before docking a monitor.
Remember: no matter the circumstances, one thing you can’t afford to change is providing your workers with lifesaving gas detection equipment.
For more information on simplifying maintenance, visit www.indsci.com/inet-exchange.