I invited the fire department over to inspect my shop. They liked my safety gear, first aid kit, fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, etc. One guy liked the way I soldered hardware cloth to the fluorescent light reflectors to protect the bulbs. They did not like the cans of finish and paints I had stored on metal shelving.
I remember the time OSHA went through a Ultra high tech Radar site. My dad was the senior most person there other than the General and sometimes higher due to certain clearances he needed.
He got tagged because of his Polly Perk - those plastic coffee pots that had (as most today do) a two prong plug. It sat on his desk.
He took the cord to the shop and drilled out the rivet in the pot side, secured a three prong plug/cable and stripped 6" from the end. Cut the black and white lines short and attached the socket for the poly side. The Ground looped back from this socket and then up to a Green tagged lug. This lug was sheet metal screwed into the side of the perk.
That mod passed OSHA.
He naturally used a SS screw - didn't want the iron taste!
Martin
Some insurance inspectors are like that, others understand that the company has already agreed to insure the risk, and their job is to help both the owner and the insurance company reduce the risk of losses. I'm happy to have one of the latter working for me now as an agent -- sure, he knows what not to insure, but he also knows that nobody is perfect, so you have to present the risk to the underwriter in a reasonable light.
If the insurance company did a good job underwriting the application in the first place, then they won't be looking for reasons to dump it. But not every company does a good job the first time, and not every loss control inspector understands their job as reducing risk while keeping the customer. If it's the first time this inspector has inspected the risk for this insurance company, then sure, I can see being nervous about it, even if that doesn't seem like a productive approach.
...
Yeah, but that's a far cry from the "treat it like an inquisition" approach...
Martin H. Eastburn wrote: ...
Me, I woulda' cut the 2-prong plug off and put on a 3-prong.
I'll send you the hip-boots I wear when I visit this NG!
Insurance companies are in business to make profit. To do that, they need customers. The best customers are the ones that pay their premiums on time and have few claims. The company that insures us gives a seminar at least once a year of topics such as safety, workman's comp claims, drug testing, etc.
They help us avoid problems as a partnership, not the Gestapo to give us a hard time. Listen to the inspector and his report as it can save you money. Ed
Back in the 80's, our liability policy was canceled shortly after an inspection visit. Since we'd had the policy for many years, I was puzzled and asked our agent to check out what happened. It turned out that the inspector noticed we had installed an eye wash station, and assumed we were using hazardous materials (not true). The insurance company used his inspection report to decide not to renew our policy.
Business insurance is a weird world, and it gets stranger all the time. Don't assume anyone is your friend or ally, no matter what their brochure might say.
Edw>>the first place, then they won't be looking for reasons to dump it. But
I think if that were my dad he would have "installed" the coffee pot into the OSHA guy's windshield.
Thanks everyone for responding! You guys provided many comments which never occurred to me.
The insurance inspector came earlier today. I was braced for the worst. He wanted to see the fire extinguisher (but didn't care that it didn't have a tag). He wanted to know how many gallons of cutting fluid I had, and how many welding cylinders (argon and C-25). He asked if I had any acetylene (I don't use it). Then we chatted for a while and he took a picture of the outside of the building. Then he left. The whole thing took less than 5 minutes.
As far as I know, cutting fluid is relatively inert (kind of like motor oil) so I was surprised that he cared. Obviously he would care about the welding cylinders. And he didn't care about the smoke detector or my nifty eye wash which attaches to the bathroom faucet aerator.
The holiday week inspection.
I've seen them.
Barry
Lamp oil burns - maybe cutting oil burns ? Martin
Or a contamination hazard if spilled?
Only if there's some sort of wick, or it's turned into a fine mist (perhaps by running it through a spray bottle) somehow. As a puddle of oil, it's only slightly more of a fire risk than water.
I'd expect it to burn just about as well as lamp oil - namely, with great difficulty in getting it ignited (unless some sort of wick or atomizing method is used) and even more difficulty sustaining a flame.
(Of course, someone dropping a rag into a puddle of the stuff would constitute a first-class wick...)
That would be the about only real reason to be concerned about it that I can think up. Otherwise, the stuff is, as Al said, "pretty much inert", at least in terms of fire hazard. Physical/chemical hazard is another question entirely - one that I haven't got a clue about. I imagine dropping concentrated chlorine into it would be a bad thing, as would letting it come in contact with other strong oxidizers, and of course, there's the classic "banana peel" scenario that a puddle of it on the floor could cause.
Albany Georgia, about 1996, the shiney new Lowes (Open for less than 8 months, if I remember things right) burned to the ground. Cause was later determined from witness testimony to be a customer managing to somehow combine pool chlorine from one side of the store with paint thinner on the other side of the store. Resulting mix went up more or less like napalm, taking the entire store with it. And I do mean the
*ENTIRE* store - The only thing left standing when the smoke cleared was a 20-ish foot long section of concrete block wall, and that was so warped out of shape that it could barely be called "standing". Either item by itself was a non-issue - Put em together, and you've got a multi-million dollar fire and a "Closed until we rebuild" sign in the parking lot...
Nah, he's already decided to deny any claims, so he didn't need to look much....
like a mist feed coolant system?
Wouldn't a modern store like Lowes have a sprinkler system to prevent the building from burning to the ground?
I noticed around here that Home Depot even has sprinklers in the shelving units in the paint department.
Brian Elfert
They had sprinklers. Clearly visible. Whether they were operational, or even had a chance to activate, is another question altogether.
From witness testimony, it sounds like essentially what happened was a fireball erupted in the paint department, and damn near the whole place was on fire within minutes. By the time I managed to navigate the 6-8 blocks from my home to a clear vantage point of what was burning (took all of about 5 minutes from the time I heard the series of explosions and noticed the smoke plume) the entire store was a mass of flames that I could feel the heat from on my face from roughly half a mile away, and chunks of burned foam and similar material the size of basketballs were starting to rain down in the downwind area. My home was in the "fallout pattern", and it took me literally DAYS to get all of that crap cleaned out of the landlord's swimming pool. It drifted around the area like weird black snow for weeks afterwards, reeking of "burnt" and leaving streaks of soot on everything it came in contact with. Not certain exactly what it was, but I suspect probably quite a bit of stacked styrofoam or similar insulation board was the source.
I've never heard whether anyone died in that fire, though I expect that if anyone had, it would have been front-page news in the local fish-wrap. Not a peep on that score, despite some heavy coverage of the fire itself during the following days, so I can only assume everyone who was inside somehow made it out OK.
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