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RoboticsRemoving your own lock
The cell is clear and everyone is in a safe place. Now each lock or tag comes off its energy isolating device, and only the employee who put it on removes it. If that person has left the facility, the employer follows a written procedure to remove it and makes sure the person knows before returning to work. It is the device removal step of the federal lockout/tagout rule.
Free to startScenarios
- You put your own lock on and you take it off at the end of the work.
- The employee who applied a lock has gone home and is not at the facility.
- The shift changes before the servicing is finished.
The steps
- Each employee removes the lock or tag that they applied, from each energy isolating device.
- In a group lockout, each authorized employee removes their personal lock from the group lockbox when they stop working on the robot.
- If the employee who applied a lock is not available, the employer first verifies that this person is not at the facility.
- The employer makes all reasonable efforts to reach the person and say that their lock or tag has been removed.
- The employer makes sure the person knows it before they resume work at the facility.
- At a shift change, transfer the lockout protection in order from the off-going to the oncoming employees, so the protection never stops.
Safety rules that stop the station
- Nobody removes another person's lock or tag outside the employer's written procedure for it.
- A tag is never removed without the authorization of the authorized person responsible for it, and is never bypassed, ignored or defeated.
To pass
- Every lock or tag was removed by the employee who applied it, or under the employer's specific procedure.
- The procedure for removing another employee's lock was developed, documented, trained and included in the energy control program, with equal safety.
- The written procedure has specific steps for placing, removing and transferring the locks and tags and who is responsible for them.
Official source
Federal · OSHA, 29 CFR 1910.147(e)(3)
29 CFR 1910.147, The control of hazardous energy (lockout/tagout)
GovInfo publishes 29 CFR 1910.147 free: paragraph (e)(3) says each lock is removed by the employee who applied it, and sets the only exception.
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