NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Ira Janowitz, University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley, Ergonomics
MR. JANOWITZ: Thanks very much. I would like to spend about five minutes going over some material from other utilities. But taking a cue from Tom Cook this morning, why don't you all stand up and stretch real quick, because we don't want to be hypocrites and put you in a static position for the whole afternoon.
We will have time for questions, but as I say, let me take five minutes. You know, we have overlooked water and sewer treatment, sewage treatment and some other utility issues. So I want to show some slides from those real quickly.
I'll introduce us by saying that most of these slides are from the Union Sanitary District which serves the Freemont, California area. But that they are analogies to other utilities as well, such as water treatment. And the material we're working on with regard to looking at valves is actually taken from work I did in an oil refinery with a joint labor management project at the Tasco Refinery at Concord, California.
This is advertisement for a microscope. And it's interesting that the pitch of this ad is how this microscope supposedly has superior ergonomics. Now, I'm not going to make any comment about any particular manufacturer, but I am going to say that I never thought I'd live to see the day when microscopes, and for that matter, forklift trucks were advertised on the basis of the ergonomics of the device.
Now, this is a lab that has a shared microscope, and people of sizes ranging from 5 foot tall to 5 foot 10 have to use the same microscope. She's 5 foot 10, and so we put the microscope on a monitor lift. And now, she can be comfortable. And the 5 foot tall woman using the same microscope can be comfortable, because it's on an easily adjustable monitor lift.
Another task they have to perform is mixing and shaking mixtures in these funny shaped containers. And this is a little home-made device they worked out so they didn't have to group the vessels so tightly. They could just shake it up this way, and eventually, this was replaced by a piece of equipment that does the same sort of thing. So there were problems with upper extremity pain as a result of statically holding this container and containers like this for long periods of time, and those have been eliminated.
In the treatment plant, we had problems with valves located frequently at seven foot heights and lots of awkward postures to reach them. And so, we replaced them. Near the top, I think you can probably just about make out a rocker arm that has a loop of chain hanging from it. And we've, of course, improved his posture here. We also had large knife valves, and it actually takes 15 to 20 minutes of turning this chain fall for the valve to be opened or closed, because the mechanical advantage is so great.
So the force is low, but the repetition is very high, 15 minutes of repetitive pulling. We built a platform like this, and now people can stand on the platform and just use a hand wheel. Since the force is low, there's no problem doing this by hand.
We had also awkward postures as a result of other valves in the plant cranking repeatedly. There's no reason why this has to be operated by a crank. In fact, this can be replaced by a hand wheel as well, because the force was low in this case.
We also looked at truck design and the way things were stored on the trucks and found lots of awkward postures. For instance, there are large jobs where they're taking 50 safety cones on and off the truck. And so, we put a hinge at the base of the cone stack and allowed the cones to be taken off from the side instead.
This is a photograph of the same device that Fran talked about. And the point I'm making here is that one division of PG&E had a worker who developed this lift for the pneumatic tamper, but some other divisions didn't know about it. So we need to proliferate good ideas. We put it on the front page of the PG&E newsletter and sent it all around the corporation so people elsewhere could find out about this success story.
In making connections in sewer collection systems, these kind of hose clamps are in common use. And to make connections with this simple hand-held nut driver actually might take 200, 300 or 400 turns of the nut driver to make one connection at one junction. And so, we replaced that with an electrically driven nut driver. And, you know, there were concerns about sparks here, but, you're sending down a sniffer to check for methane and other gases that could burn. You're not sending a person down into the trench unless that's checked for ahead of time. So this turned out to be a good way to go, and it reduced the repetitive motion considerably.
Any utility is going to have a fleet of trucks, and truck maintenance was another issue that we looked at. In this case, we suspended the impact wrench on here that he's using to take wheels on and off from a cable. And when he's finished using it, he can just roll it away. So this was a big success.
The bottom line is if you can have ergonomic dog dishes, then we should certainly have better working conditions for our employees. And we should tap their intelligence as the speakers here have said today and get their ideas. This is a joint management labor meeting, a problem-solving meeting that we held at the sewage treatment plant to come up with good ideas.
There were six issues that we identified as high priority, and in five of the six cases, the employees and managers came up with the best strategy. Only in one of the six cases did I have a better idea. So that, I think, puts it into perspective: you're going to get the best ideas from the people doing the work. And with that attitude, I think we can have some success in ergonomics.
Why don't we close the formal part now, and if we can have the lights turned up where we can have some questions from the audience, there are microphones here, in the aisle, in the center, and you can direct your questions to any of us. Yes.
