When he bought Blair Buchholtz a cup of coffee nearly two years ago, the safety products salesman wasn’t even sure if a new product line was of much value at all.
“I opened their brochure and my eyes lit up within five minutes,” says Edmonton Transportation Services’ general supervisor of aggregate and recycling.
“It was the answer to my prayers for a whole new order of safety for my people when they’re working around big, moving machinery in our yards.”
Almost instantly, Blair ordered $150,000 worth of the equipment, and these days, you can’t be anywhere in one of his unit’s aggregate crushing, sand recycling, road sand mixing or asphalt production yards without a very special safety vest and hard hat.
Buried in the hard hat and the stitching of the bright orange safety vest are a bunch of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. And mounted on each of the yard machines – skid-steers, 20-ton front-end loaders and dump trucks – is a box with innards that emit a certain radio frequency.
As soon as a person is within 6.5 metres of a working machine, the machine’s monitor picks up a reflected radio signal from the person’s RFID vest and/or hard hat.
That sets off a piercing warning signal both inside the machine’s cab and outside for the person to hear. It also lights up a strip of extremely bright flashing red LED lights pointed right at the operator inside the cab.
Bottom line: there’s no way a machine operator can NOT know there is a human within the danger zone and bring the machine to a halt.
The ScanLink technology costs about $3,500 for each vehicle monitor ‘box’, and $50 for vests. The City’s use of the technology is believed to be a first in Western Canada.
“Anyone who enters the operational areas at our locations has to wear an RFID vest and hard hat,” says Blair.
“And when private firms supply their own front-end loaders to load aggregate they’re purchasing for reuse, we require them to have monitor boxes mounted on those machines.”
“If you don’t wear and use RFID equipment, you don’t come into one of our yards. Period.”
The technology came with a special laptop that’s used monthly to verify that vehicle-mounted monitoring boxes, hard hats and vests are in working order.
At Blair’s suggestion, the manufacturer has developed a version of the monitor that can be mounted on arms that swing out from the conveyor belts his people use to stockpile crushed aggregate and recycled sand, providing a 2.5 metre safety zone around potentially dangerous contact points.
Blair, who sadly remembers a tragic accident in 2011 when a worker in Edmonton was crushed by a loader whose operator had not seen him, says the RFID technology came none too early for him.
“I have a great team of people working with me, and I want the best tools in the industry so all 22 of them get to go home every day, healthy and happy.
“This technology is helping us do just that.”
