Safety Knights

Are you talking about from a fall protection standpoint?

What do you guys do? Looks like an interesting facility

Is this a water treatment plant?

People were recently pulled out of a Hershey Chocolate facility vat after workers fell in.

I agree, you got lots of hazards here, and no where close to being safely guarded!

Fitz's First Rule of Safety, "If it Looks UNSAFE, Sounds UNSAFE, Smells Unsafe, Feels Unsafe, and/or givers you and inclination it is UNSAFE, Guess What? It is UNSAFE!

No this is not safe at all😡 Not only the unguarded vat tanks, no fall prevention systems, no visual danger signage, do they work alone or in teams for emergency situations/communication/alarm, do they need more than one E-Stop location on mezzanine and poor housekeeping with hoses that this worker could have tripped on falling backwards into the Vat! And that’s just what we can observe from the picture at the one angle. I would call him blessed to have clocked out to go home safe which is our goal every shift. Why don’t employees speak up more about their workplace unsafe exposure? They are the ones that should be asked to help provide input to SOPs since they are performing the task daily and probably have experienced a few near misses in this area! Just my opinion anyway.

By definition that’s is not a confined space.
It meets some but not all of the requirements.
But I would treat any entry as such depending on configuration, contents or other hazards like mixers, steam, high pressures or chemicals.

As far as fall prevention. Abso freaking lutely.
I have worked in similar faculties and water treatment facilities that have vats/tanks like these. Personnel used theses elevated areas to sample the contents. Which is fine. But fixed engineered anchor points need to be installed. Then fixed length lanyards or SRLs would be attached to a full body harnessed employee. Who has been completely trained. This type of system would never allow a person to even come close to falling into that. I would go further and say that no one should be in that area alone at any time. If someone has to go up there to sample send two people.
Obviously PPE and Monitoring depends on contents