Recognizing hazards

At the end of his first month, Jordan was invited to join a workplace inspection with Amara and the greenhouse lead, Marisol Vega. Once a month, two committee members walk through a part of the site with a checklist, looking for hazards. This month it was the greenhouses and the potting area.

Jordan thought he knew the greenhouses well by then. He walked through them a dozen times a day. But in forty minutes with Amara and Marisol, the three of them found eleven hazards he had walked past without noticing: a hose stretched across the main aisle, a cracked step on the potting bench platform, an extension cord running through a puddle, a sprayer of fungicide with no label, a bag of perlite open next to the fan, a wasp nest under the shade cloth, a heater vent blocked by stacked trays, a loose overhead hanging basket hook, an emergency exit partly blocked by a pallet of pots, a first aid kit with nothing left in it but tape, and a heavy watering wand hanging at head height by the door.

'You stop seeing things you see every day,' Amara said. 'That's normal. That's why we walk it on purpose, with fresh eyes, and why we ask new people to come along. You see stuff we don't anymore.'

This lesson explains how to recognize hazards: the kinds of hazards found at work, the ways to look for them, and how to judge which ones matter most. HSE-103 Hazard Recognition and Risk Assessment covers these skills in much more depth.

What makes something a hazard

Lesson 1 defined a hazard as anything that could cause harm. That definition is very broad on purpose. A hazard can be an object, like a blade. It can be a substance, like a chemical. It can be a form of energy, like electricity or a load held up in the air. It can be a condition, like a slippery floor or extreme heat. It can be a way of working, like a job that requires the same twisting motion hundreds of times a day. It can even be a person or a situation, like an angry customer or a shift with too few staff.

A useful habit is to ask, for any task, 'What could hurt me or someone else here, and how?' The 'how' matters. A gravel pile is not dangerous in itself, but a person climbing it can slip, a loader working it can hit someone, and its dust can get into lungs and eyes.

Six kinds of hazards

Safety professionals often sort hazards into categories. The exact names vary, but most use groups like these six. Sorting hazards this way helps you look for things you might otherwise miss.

• Safety hazards can cause injury quickly, often in a moment: moving vehicles and equipment, machines with moving parts, sharp tools, working at height, slippery or cluttered floors, electricity, and falling objects. They cause most sudden injuries.
• Chemical hazards come from substances that can harm you if you breathe them, swallow them, or get them on your skin or in your eyes: pesticides, fertilizers, cleaning products, fuels, propane, solvents and dusts. Lesson 9 covers them.
• Biological hazards come from living things or their products: bacteria and fungi in soil and compost, mould, insect stings, animal bites, and blood or bodily fluids when giving first aid.
• Physical hazards are forms of energy in the environment: noise, heat, cold, sunlight, vibration and radiation.
• Ergonomic hazards come from the way the body is used: heavy or awkward lifting, repeated motions, twisting and reaching, long periods of standing or sitting, and poorly designed workstations. They are the most common cause of lost-time injuries in many workplaces.
• Psychosocial hazards come from the way work is organized and how people treat each other: high workload, long hours, fatigue, harassment, violence, working alone and lack of support. They can harm both mental and physical health. Lesson 11 covers them.

Some hazards fit in more than one group. Heat is a physical hazard, but working hard in heat is also an ergonomic issue, and the pressure to keep going on a busy day is psychosocial. That is fine. The categories are a tool for looking, not a filing system.

Ways to find hazards

There are several ways to find hazards. A good workplace uses all of them.

Look around before you start

The simplest method is a quick check before every task. Stop for a moment and look at the area, the equipment, the materials and the people around you. Ask what has changed since last time. Is the floor wet? Is the weather different? Is there a new product, a new tool or someone new on the team? Many workplaces use a short written or spoken check for this, sometimes called a field-level hazard assessment or a pre-task plan. HSE-230 covers these.

Inspections

Planned inspections, like the one Jordan joined, look at an area in a set way, often with a checklist so nothing important is skipped. They should be done by people who know the work and include workers, not only managers. The point is to find and fix hazards, not to give a score. An inspection with eleven findings that all get fixed is far more useful than one with no findings because nobody looked closely.

Job hazard analysis

A job hazard analysis, sometimes called a job safety analysis, breaks a task into steps, lists the hazards at each step, and sets out how each hazard is controlled. It is usually written for tasks that are risky, done often, or new. Greenway has them for loading customer vehicles, operating the forklift, mixing and applying pesticides in the greenhouse, and using the cardboard baler. The analysis becomes the basis for the safe work procedure and for training.

Reports from workers

Workers find hazards all the time while doing their jobs. Hazard and near-miss reports, covered in Lesson 6, turn what they see into action. A workplace with many reports is not more dangerous. It is usually a place where people feel safe to speak up.

Learning from incidents

When something does go wrong, an investigation should look for the hazards and conditions behind it, and check whether the same hazards exist elsewhere. After Ethan climbed the forks, Priya checked whether any other area lacked the ladder or step stool it needed. She found two.

Other sources

Safety data sheets, equipment manuals, the regulator's guides, industry associations and injury records from similar businesses all point to hazards you might not think of. Before Greenway started selling propane cylinder exchanges, Tom read the supplier's manual and the fire code rules, and the committee looked at incidents at other retailers. That is how they knew to put the cage outside, away from doors and drains, with no-smoking signs.

Hazards that are easy to miss

Some hazards hide in plain sight. These are the ones new workers and experienced workers alike tend to overlook:

• Hazards that build up slowly, such as noise that damages hearing over years, or lifting that wears out a back over a career.
• Hazards that come and go, such as a floor that is only wet after watering, or a dock that is only icy in the morning.
• Hazards created by change, such as a new product, a rearranged store, a new staff member or a new piece of equipment.
• Hazards in tasks that are rarely done, such as clearing a jam in the baler or changing a propane tank on the forklift.
• Hazards from other people's work, such as a contractor working on the roof above the yard.
• Hazards that are 'normal', because everyone has always done it that way.

Judging the risk

Once you have found hazards, you need to decide which matter most, because you cannot fix everything at once. That is what risk assessment does. The idea is to think about two things for each hazard: how likely it is to cause harm, and how serious the harm would be.

A common tool is a risk matrix. Each hazard gets a score for likelihood, say from 1 for rare to 5 for almost certain, and a score for severity, from 1 for a minor injury needing first aid to 5 for a death or permanent disability. Multiplying the two gives a risk score. High scores are fixed first.

Amara ran the greenhouse findings through the committee's simple scoring sheet. The short program below does the same thing.

# Rank hazards from the greenhouse walk by risk = likelihood x severity (each 1 to 5)
hazards = [
    ("Extension cord through a puddle", 3, 5),
    ("Hose across the main aisle",      4, 2),
    ("Exit partly blocked by pots",     2, 5),
    ("Wasp nest under shade cloth",     3, 3),
    ("Unlabelled fungicide sprayer",    3, 3),
    ("Watering wand at head height",    3, 2),
]

def band(score):
    return "very high" if score >= 15 else "high" if score >= 10 else "medium" if score >= 5 else "low"

for name, likelihood, severity in sorted(hazards, key=lambda h: -h[1] * h[2]):
    score = likelihood * severity
    print(f"{name:34} L={likelihood} S={severity} risk={score:>2} ({band(score)})")

Extension cord through a puddle    L=3 S=5 risk=15 (very high)
Exit partly blocked by pots        L=2 S=5 risk=10 (high)
Wasp nest under shade cloth        L=3 S=3 risk= 9 (medium)
Unlabelled fungicide sprayer       L=3 S=3 risk= 9 (medium)
Hose across the main aisle         L=4 S=2 risk= 8 (medium)
Watering wand at head height       L=3 S=2 risk= 6 (medium)

The cord in the puddle came out on top. It was unplugged and moved within five minutes of being found, and the committee asked for a covered outdoor outlet near the potting bench so a cord would not be needed at all. The blocked exit was cleared the same day. The hose got a hose reel. The wasp nest was removed by a pest control contractor that week.

Risk matrices are useful, but they are a guide, not a calculator. Two people can give the same hazard different scores. Any hazard that could kill someone deserves attention even if it seems unlikely, because 'unlikely' events happen eventually when a task is done thousands of times. The point of scoring is to have a conversation about priorities, not to prove that a hazard can be ignored.

Your part as a new worker

New workers are not expected to be experts at hazard recognition. But new workers have one big advantage: fresh eyes. You notice things that others stopped seeing long ago. If something looks odd, unsafe or confusing to you, say so. You might be the first person to notice a hazard that has been there for years.