Five Emergency Maintenance Best Practices All Plant Employees Should Follow A well-thought-out and well-organized emergency response plan will help prevent fatalities, reduce equipment maintenance costs and help mitigate potential environmental hazards. By Bryan ChristiansenNov 30, 2020 Have you encountered a sudden machine failure of a critical asset that needs instant repair? That is what we call emergency maintenance, an unplanned event of repair or maintenance to make the equipment operational again. Here are a few examples of emergency maintenance: sudden replacement of a gasket of a pump replacement of conveyor belts repair of electrical wirings due to short circuit troubleshooting of an elevator stoppage … and the list goes on. Emergency maintenance doesn’t have a schedule and always happens without warnings, but it can be successfully managed with proper safety measures. Importance of emergency maintenance safety Every facility must have a plan and available resources to deal with emergency maintenance. Those plans have to incorporate certain safety guidelines. Since it’s an emergency, pre-planning is essential. The lack of an emergency plan could lead to severe financial losses as well as human casualties. A well-thought-out and well-organized emergency response plan will help to eliminate these issues. It will prevent fatalities, reduce equipment maintenance costs, improve asset reliability and help mitigate potential environmental hazards. The following are the safety measures all employees should keep in mind during emergency maintenance. 1. Providing and Following Written Safety Guidelines Emergency maintenance happens when there is an issue with a critical piece of equipment or when a malfunction leads to a (potential) safety hazard. In both cases, this causes a lot of nervousness on the plant floor as everybody knows that this hurts the company's bottom line. Since there is a lot of pressure to deal with these situations as fast as possible, it is paramount to have written safety guidelines that are properly communicated to all affected employees. Machine operators, maintenance techs and safety managers all have different tasks and responsibilities they are supposed to follow. Let's block ads! (Why?)