Sink or swim: a look at workplace water safety
Water safety in the workplace often slips through the cracks when one is juggling and managing other risks such as fire prevention, trips and falls, and chemical hazards. Unfortunately, ignoring this hazard can have dire consequences such as injuries, including brain damage, and electric shocks.
Working near or on water can result in drowning easier than you might imagine. Just think about scaffolding adjacent to a lake or a fixed renewal energy site on the banks of a man-made dam. A simple stumble can lead to disaster.
The importance of water safety in the workplace cannot be overstated. Your diligent water risk assessment and response plan can prevent drowning or electrocution and save a life.
Legal responsibilities
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act (HSWA) 1974 puts a duty on you, the employer, to ensure the health, safety and welfare of employees as far as reasonably possible. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations (MHSWR) 1999 supports this act and obliges you to perform risk assessments to:
- Discover all the potential hazards.
- Grade risks according to their severity and probability.
- Devise and implement safety prevention and control measures.
- Develop and review action plans from time to time.
Remember, if you have five or more employees, your risk assessments and emergency plans must be in writing. Under these laws, employees must use health and safety information and training to identify and report dangers.
Water safety risk assessment and response plans
The HSE developed a specific water safety leaflet that helps with risk assessments and response plans. According to these guidelines, accidental drowning often happens because of:
- Unavailability of personal buoyancy equipment.
- Buoyancy equipment failures caused by lack of maintenance, testing and training.
- Disregard for, or misjudging, a water hazard.
- Lack of supervision.
- Panicking – the inability to handle a water emergency.
- Failure to take into account weather warnings.
- Water – whether it’s in the form of rain, a leak, or a collection point – is an unpredictable natural element. Even a small amount such as a puddle can hold safety risks.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) found that, on average, 400 people drown each year. These numbers include leisure-based drownings occurring in swimming pools or the ocean.
Recent HSE statistics show that 123 workers died due to work-related incidents over the 2021/2022 period. Of these, 30 occurred in the construction industry and another 22 in the agricultural, forestry and fishing industries. These incidents include water-related deaths. Water safety practices and emergency plans in the workplace can help with the prevention of on-the-job drownings and electrocutions caused by water.
Managing water-based risks in the workplace
Assessing water risks in the workplace requires a trained eye and an open mind to evaluate every hazard. Something as seemingly insignificant as a leaky tap near electrical equipment can have catastrophic consequences.
As mentioned, it’s your legal responsibility to perform workplace risk assessments, acquire and maintain the right equipment to manage identified hazards, and implement an emergency plan to handle incidents. Legislation requires that you:
- Identify the possible causes of injuries and illness in your business. These include water-based hazards.
- Decide how likely it is that a hazard will cause harm and how serious this harm may be. Water risks pose threats on different levels, all of which can lead to death.
- Get action plans in place to handle dangers and update these regularly.
Remember, your action plans not only detail emergency procedures but also prescribe how often equipment must be checked, tested and maintained.
The types of water dangers depend on your work environment and the nature of your business activities. You’ll find some common water hazards in workplaces near water.
Drowning can occur anywhere. Just think of jobs where there’s a risk of falling into a body of water. This can happen on construction sites, on water platforms such as those found on fish farms, and in shipyards.
Electrocution occurs when an open electrical source comes in touch with water. Here, a minor leak can pose a major hazard in any setting. Your job can easily involve the use of tools near water, such as warehousing operations or maintenance teams on docksides.
Contaminated water exposes people to things such as chemicals, bacteria and other dangerous materials. Contact or ingestion can lead to serious illnesses such as different cancers, gastrointestinal distress and mortalities.
Floods cause severe damage, injuries and deaths in low-lying areas or places with poor drainage. When your location is in a high-risk area such as this, your emergency planning must include specialised flood prevention equipment to prevent damage and keep people safe.
Cold water shocks occur at research sites or workplaces where the water temperature is significantly colder than the human body temperature. This causes emergencies such as drowning, hypothermia and cardiac arrest. For these scenarios, you’ll need additional equipment such as emergency foil blankets and AED devices and signage.
Identifying these hazards, implementing emergency plans, and training employees in water safety go a long way towards minimising water dangers. So, be thorough in your assessments and response plans.
Tips and best practices for effective water safety measures
The layout of your setting and the nature of your activities largely determine your water safety measures. Use your risk assessment as a guide to get the equipment you need and apply the required precautions.
For sites near water, put up barriers and have life jackets or flotation devices at hand in case someone falls in. When choosing your personal buoyancy equipment, consider:
- What it will be used for.
- The size and weight of the wearer.
- Swimming abilities.
- Additional PPE in case of bad weather conditions.
- On-site AEDs for sudden cardiac arrest. These life-saving devices are a must when working near or on water. Remember, your employees will need specific training on how to use AEDs.
Approved water safety devices usually carry combined BS and EN approvals. Our health and safety experts sourced only quality-approved equipment, giving you peace of mind.
It’s good and well to stock all the necessary safety devices, but they mean nothing when your employees don’t know how to use them. Training is the cornerstone of your safety practices and needs careful planning and continuous execution.
Employee training often occurs on different levels. For example, you may have designated representatives who handle equipment such as AEDs and other safety devices. There’s also general water safety training that requires the involvement of all. Education and training are not a one-off thing. Implement refreshers regularly to drill principles into employees.
Water safety signage is another invaluable tool when it comes to water safety. These easy-to-understand signs show people where to find the necessary emergency equipment such as rescue boats or lifeboats. The white-on-green signs are highly visible and communicate vital information in a nutshell.
Remember, situations and setups change. Conduct your water safety audits regularly to stay up to date with all eventualities. For example, a harmless lake during a drought takes on another, riskier nature after heavy rains.
Water safety is non-negotiable. You cannot put it on the back burner just because it seems to be naturally there. Staying compliant and diligent saves lives.