With the unfortunate forklift accident that claimed the life of a 27-year-old brewer this past Saturday at Stone, brewery safety is on the forefront of the industry’s consciousness.
It may come as a surprise to some consumers that brewing is a hazardous occupation. With that in mind, Hess Brewing posted this message on their Facebook page Sunday morning: “We don’t often think of them this way, but breweries are industrial factories, just like any other factory making any other kind of product.” They went on to list hazards as well as offer condolences to the family of the brewer, who has not yet been named by Stone, and the team at the Escondido-based brewing company.
Dan Drown of Drown Consulting, LLC, is an occupational safety professional with 27 years of experience, five of those in the craft brewing industry. In a phone call and follow-up e-mail Sunday he noted that forklifts, as well as other moving parts and machinery such as conveyors, packaging lines, pumps, motors and scissor lifts, are just a small part of several critical categories of safety consideration in craft brewery operations. Others include hot liquids and surfaces (hot water just under boiling temperature, boiling wort, direct fire or boiler/steam heated vessels), pressurized systems (keg wash/fill, hot liquids, compressed gases, boilers, air compressors and air receivers), confined spaces in tanks and vessels (some breweries still have employees who enter to clean tanks; others rarely do, instead using pressurized, recirculating cleaning solutions), chemical safety (handling acidic or caustic cleaning solutions and sanitizers), and ergonomics and manual material/equipment handling (moving kegs, lifting cases of product; connecting, disconnecting, and moving hoses, piping, and portable equipment).
Yet while injuries such as burns, trips and falls are relatively common, fatalities are not very prevalent. According to a Reuters report published in July, “at least four people died in craft brewery accidents in the United States” between 2009 and 2012. Under federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) guidelines, each instance had to be reported within eight hours; in California, OSHA must also be notified when an injury requires hospitalization, or if there is a disfigurement, loss of body part, or a serious or debilitating injury. While there have been serious injuries locally that were reported to Cal OSHA, to our knowledge no fatalities had occurred in San Diego’s brewing industry until Saturday’s accident.
“As the craft brewing industry matures and as breweries expand there is more recognition that safety needs to be a core value among owners and employees,” Drown added. “Stone has an excellent safety and health program with many best practices and is the only craft brewer in SoCal that has a full-time Environmental, Safety and Health Manager. In the end, when the facts are all sorted out, let’s hope we can all learn something from this tragedy so it never happens again.”