Without proper identification and determination of all hazards associated with a confined space, working in it could be an accident waiting to happen.

Canadian Occupational Safety recently hosted a roundtable forum on confined space, attended by occupational health and safety experts from across Canada: Lisa Bolton, lawyer at Sherrard Kuzz LLP; Ron O’Neil, director at Fall Protection Group Inc. in Calgary; Wagish Yajaman, a consultant and occupational hygiene specialist with the Industrial Accident Prevention Association; Tim Morrison, president of Safety Scope Inc. based in Vaughan, Ont.; Peter Gilmour, regional prevention manager for WorkSafeBC in Kamloops, B.C.; Stan Rodriguez, director of health, safety and environment at IPEX Management Inc. in Toronto; and Gabriel Mansour, a provincial coordinator with the Ontario Ministry of Labour.

The seven-member panel agreed that identification of a work area as confined space is vital in ensuring the safety of the workers.

“StatsCan says there are about 65 to 75,000 companies in Canada that are affected by confined space, and that ranges from cement plant, bakeries, pharmacies and telecommunications,” says Safety Scope’s Tim Morrison, whose company provides confined space safety and rescue training. Some of these workplaces are fully aware that they are dealing with confined space hazards and have control policies and programs in place to deal with those hazards.

But it’s those companies that do face confined space risks, but are unaware of them, that are worrisome, the panel agrees.

“With those stats that you mentioned, sometimes the core that know they are dealing with confined spaces and that know what to do with the means and measures, that’s great. But you mentioned the bakeries, etc., that are not used to them and do not know how to deal with them, they don’t recognize some of the vaults that they use as a confined space,” Ron O’Neil of Fall Protection Group Inc. says.

For example, manure pits found in farms pose confined space hazards, but people working in the farm may not necessarily know these risks nor have the knowledge required to work safely in or around manure pits.  An all-too-common scenario in a number of manure pit fatalities usually involves multiple victims, where one goes in and gets injured and a co-worker or family member would climb in the pit in a rescue attempt, only to be subjected to the same hazard as the original victim.

Another issue of concern is the increasingly mobile workforce, says lawyer Lisa Bolton. “As legal counsel, I see fairly frequently situations where employers really don’t appreciate that a workplace can move around where the workers are. So if they may have a plant or a facility that they in their own mind consider to be the workplace, but they forget that they may have service workers going around and they may be in confined spaces that aren’t necessarily physically on the employer’s property.”