Workshop Risk Assessment

A fabrication or engineering workshop packs many high-risk activities into one building: heavy lifting and mobile plant, cutting and forming machinery, welding and hot work, abrasive blasting and spray painting, loading trucks, and maintenance on all of the above. A single-page workshop checklist cannot cover that, and a stack of unrelated templates leaves gaps between them.

The reliable way is to follow the material through the building and assess each stage as its own section, with each activity assessed in three parts: general safety, fire and explosion, and occupational hygiene.

• Receiving, storage and materials handling. Trucks and forklifts sharing space with people on foot; unloading coil, sheet and plate; containers opened with the load against the doors; racking; overhead cranes and slinging; gas cylinders and chemical storage.
• Cutting and forming. Guillotines, press brakes, plate rolls, punches, drills, saws, grinders and plasma cutting – amputation and entanglement risks, plus noise, fume and vibration.
• Welding and fabrication. Welding fume including hexavalent chromium from stainless steel, UV, electric shock, hot-work fire, and pickling pastes.
• Surface preparation and coating. Abrasive blasting dust and breathing-air quality, isocyanates in two-pack coatings, flammable vapour, powder cloud ignition and curing ovens.
• Testing and assembly. Pressure testing, non-destructive testing, trial assembly and work at height.
• Dispatch. Crating and strapping, loading and load restraint, work on truck decks, oversize loads and overhead power lines.
• Maintenance and workshop support. Isolation and lock-out, stored energy, compressed air, extraction system maintenance, electrical work, housekeeping, waste, the yard and contractors.

Steel does not burn, which is why workshop fire risk is underestimated. The fuel is everything around it:

• Hot work – welding, cutting and grinding sparks that travel several metres and smoulder for hours in cardboard, rags, timber dunnage and dust.
• Flammable liquids and gases – paints, thinners, degreasers, LPG, acetylene and oxygen.
• Combustible dust – powder coating overspray, and fine aluminium or titanium dust from grinding, which can explode as a cloud.
• Electrical faults, battery charging and overloaded boards.
• Spray booths and curing ovens.

Controls start with separation and housekeeping, then hot work permits outside designated bays, correct storage of flammables and cylinders, earthing and extraction in powder booths, and emergency arrangements that people have actually practised.

The hazards that lead to the largest claims and the most serious enforcement action in workshops are chronic health exposures, and they are invisible on a walk-through:

• Welding and cutting fume, including carcinogens from stainless and galvanised steel.
• Crystalline silica and metal dust from blasting and grinding.
• Isocyanates in polyurethane paints – a cause of permanent occupational asthma.
• Noise above the exposure standard from most cutting, forming and grinding.
• Hand-arm vibration and hazardous manual tasks.

For these, an open door, a rule and a dust mask are not adequate controls. They need capture at the source, and often measurement by an occupational hygienist. A workshop assessment that does not deal with them is only half an assessment.

A risk assessment tells you where you stand. Some of what it finds must then be done by someone qualified:

• Air monitoring and noise assessments – an occupational hygienist.
• Health monitoring – a registered medical practitioner with experience in health monitoring.
• Detailed machine guarding assessments – an engineer or machinery safety specialist.
• Racking inspections – a competent person, to the manufacturer's specification.
• Crane and lifting gear inspections – a competent person, at the required intervals.
• Electrical work and testing – a licensed electrician.
• Pressure equipment inspections – a competent inspector.

A good assessment names these where they apply, so they become actions with owners and dates instead of assumptions.

Walk each area with a supervisor who knows it and at least one worker who does the task, or your Health and Safety Representative. Consulting workers is a legal requirement, and they will tell you which guard comes off on Friday afternoons. Record who took part.

We built this for a bolted steel tank manufacturer and it suits any steel fabrication workshop: nine sections, 60 activities, 350 hazards and 1,491 controls, with every hazard's consequence and inherent risk rated by a Certified Industrial Hygienist. You untick the activities you do not carry out, answer Yes, No or N/A for each control on the floor, and the online calculator works out the residual risk, builds the action plan and produces a finished Word report for each section.

Sections are sold separately, so a workshop that only cuts, forms and welds buys those two. It currently carries the New South Wales legal references. If you need another state, or a workshop type we have not covered, tell us – that is how the next edition gets built.