Tire Servicing Safety: Don't reinvent the wheel with Andy Wood - Part 1

Tire Servicing Safety is often overlooked unless it’s your full-time job. Hazards from lifting and repositioning a heavy tire in an awkward position or being struck by a falling or exploding tire are all common exposures for workers serving tires in the shop or in the field. In part-one of this two-part episode, I speak with Andy Wood, MEMIC’s Forest Products Programs Manager about the hazards of servicing tires, how to control them, and what standards apply. 0065 -Tire Servicing Safety - Don’t reinvent the wheel with Andy Wood - Part 1.mp3 Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter Koch, manager of digital technology for loss control and safety management consultant here at MEMIC. It's hard to believe that we've just celebrated our two year anniversary in November. We've covered topics from ergonomics and chainsaws to lockout tag out and fall protection. At first, you might think there's only a limited number of things that you can talk about regarding workplace safety. Well, that's just not the case. The number of situations, equipment and tools in any given workplace that can contribute to an injury is enormous. Add to that human behavior and the number of safety related topics. Well, it's near limitless. I think the hard part is to make the topic interesting and relevant and well, that's what we strive to do here on the podcast. And it's really an offshoot of what drives our lost control team here at MEMIC anyway. We have a team of experts that have worked in the industries that they serve, and I've had the [00:01:00] honor of working with each of them, and I know that they all share a passion for safety and assisting our policyholders with the workplace safety equation. Beyond the traditional look at the losses and focusing only on the reactive data, they like to get involved because it's where the worker meets, the hazard is where the injury occurs. And more often than not, this can help spot exposures before they cause injury or identify situations that can thwart even the best laid exposure control plan. That lost control person's curiosity for why injuries happen can extend beyond the workplace. So, for example, a few weeks back, I was getting the tractor ready for winter plowing and the last thing to service. We're checking and inflating the tires. As I was adding air while I noticed that the front tires were starting to show wear and signs of age, and I'd probably need to replace them soon. So it got me wondering how much air pressure would it take to blow one of these up? And how much force would the exploding tire create? [00:02:00] That got me thinking even more about how the tires got serviced. What happens when I drop it off at the service center? What do they do? What are the exposures? We never really think about it unless you're doing the servicing yourself. And it turns out that there are way more injuries to service technicians while working on tires that you would think to help us look more closely at the hazards of servicing tires is Andy Wood, manager of Forest Product Safety Services here at MEMIC. Before coming to MEMIC in the mid 1990s, Andy worked full time as a logger in the main North Woods and Canada. He's an instructor for the game of logging and currently manages the safety programs for MEMICs forest products policyholders beyond working with our policyholders. Andy brings many years of professional experience dealing with hand and mechanical logging operations and servicing his own equipment. This episode is going to be a two-parter because as Andy and I were preparing for recording and then discussing the various exposures when servicing [00:03:00] tires, we realized that there was way more than we could pack into one episode. So in part one, we will address the regulations how more than just big rig service centers are covered by the regs? And then we'll begin to discuss the different injuries that can be caused when servicing the tires. So let's just dig right in. Andy, welcome back to the podcast.   Andy Wood: [00:03:21] Well, thanks Pete. It's great to be back. Our topic is a little different this time, but I do. Having done a little research to prepare for this, I realize I have a lot of a lot of history with this particular topic, both personally and with my consulting here at MEMIC in the forest products industry.   Peter Koch: [00:03:38] Yeah, and it's really not that far jump from like dealing with forest products, logging and chainsaws to tire safety. And we were talking last week as we were kind of mulling through the parts of the podcast and found that you do have quite a history with tire safety, not just here at MEMIC, but from your own past experience. And I think we'll get into some of [00:04:00] those. We'll get into some of those interesting stories as we go. So before we jump into the whole thing, let's set the stage. Who does this topic apply to? So like, who should be listening to this particular podcast?   Andy Wood: [00:04:14] First and foremost, I guess it's not really designed for folks in the tire industry tires that folks that work in a tire shop because the people I deal with are all occasional people that service tires occasionally. And the standards, we'll talk a little bit about the OSHA, the federal motor carrier guidelines. But you don't have to be actually servicing the tire as far as mounting or dismounting if you just take a tire off a piece of equipment and put another one back on. You've performed a service that falls under these guidelines, the OSHA guidelines, for example, very specific guidelines in there and how that works when you do that. Again, you don't have to be doing brakes or bearings on the or taking the hub off or mounting and dismounting tires. Just changing that tire puts you into these standards.   Peter Koch: [00:04:59] All right. So that that [00:05:00] really broadens the scope. So it's not just the guy in the service shop, but it might be the guy out in the woods who's taken the tire off his skitter or somebody on the side of the road actually managing a flat tire who's working for a company. So it's not just the service guys, it's anybody who is doing anything with a tire can fall under the regulations that we'll talk about here in a bit, right?   Andy Wood: [00:05:25] Sure. And in fact, all the comments I'm going to make today don't come out of the tire industry. They're all for the folks with the small shops mechanics that do multiple things and servicing tires is just one of the things they do occasionally.   Peter Koch: [00:05:39] Well, and I think that's a good lead into this next comment, and we have to add a disclaimer here. So this is a podcast around the hazards for servicing tires and where some of the regulations are, how they affect you. Some of the challenges that you might find surprising or exposures that you might find surprising [00:06:00] when servicing a tire. We're not giving advice on how to service tires. It's not a practice or we're not providing information about what you should be doing to service a tire. No. No. Processes and procedures. And if you have any questions about those things or even some of the legality of it, you go to the federal DOT or your state regulations to find out what you're responsible for and what those procedures should be. And as with anything, if you are dealing with a particular hazard, you're dealing with a particular tire or a particular vehicle as an occasional servicing agent, then you should go back to the manufacturer to find out what the particular requirements are. So this is not about requirements, but this is to help us to identify where the hazards are. What are some of the controls and what regulations would be covering the occasional user?   Andy Wood: [00:06:53] Yeah, it's all really about peaking the interest of the listener. If anything, we talk about you've seen in your shop or, you know, your folks are doing. Hopefully, [00:07:00] it'll incentivize you to go and ask them more questions and get the details as well. I would note that I'm going to mention some of the guidelines that we use here in Maine. Every state can have different guidelines. I mean, the federal DOT and the OSHA standards are similar in that you can follow the federal program or you can have state run programs. So there's going to be little variation. So as far as the legal part, you need to go to your specific jurisdiction and find out what the specifics are.   Peter Koch: [00:07:28] Good. And you bring up a great point. You know, if you're a safety person listening to this or you're an owner, or even if you're working in a shop with a bunch of guys who manage or serviced the tires occasionally for the vehicles that come into your, your shop or your business. This hopefully will pique some of your interests. Like, I saw this happen in the shop and really, you should go back and look more into that because all the stories that we're going to talk about today have  happened. And the injuries that we're going to talk about today [00:08:00] have occurred because of these exposures. So there's some real pieces there, even though it may not yet have happened to you in your shop. It will happen sometime in the future if that behavior or practice is allowed to continue. And that's just statistically probable that what we have seen within the safety industry that the more frequently something happens, the more potential there is for that to become a more significant event or a significant injury. So with that, like we let's talk about some of the hazards Andy. So if we look at what  the hazards are for working with tires, you break it up into a couple of different segments so that we can look at it a little more thoroughly. So why don't you talk to me a little bit about what the hazards of working with tires?   Andy Wood: [00:08:47] Sure. As, of course, safety consultants and people that look at a lot of data. We're constantly trying to break down things into groups so we can, you know, manage them collectively and be a little more efficient. So one of the first breakdowns we often do [00:09:00] is frequency and severity. So I have I'm going to have several comments on the frequency, what injuries we see the most when handling tires and servicing tires. Then we're going to move on to the severity of the injuries that don't happen nearly as often and but are much more significant and more potential to be fatal. And then the last section, I'm going to comment on some of the on road issues for the DOT and federal motor carrier. And you have the risks there of not so much injuries to the person. This is when the truck is back on the road, the tires back on the vehicle and the truck is back on the road and something goes wrong with the tire. The rim assembly. Not so much a hazard to your employee driving the truck, but could create a serious hazard for someone else on the road. And when that happens, it creates a serious not just the injuries to the people or potential property damage, but the huge liability that you take on by having a truck that may have been out of service put back on the road. So kind of those three categories, I'm going to look a little more in-depth at right [00:10:00] on.   Peter Koch: [00:10:00] So let's just categorize like what type of injuries would end up being included in the frequency side, right? So we have the frequencies driving injuries, we have the severity driving injuries. So if we look at the type of injuries that are happening on the frequency side, what are those?   Andy Wood: [00:10:18] Yeah, the frequency is predominantly what we call comes from manual material handling, and it's pretty much a lot of soft tissue injuries, so that could be for my guys. It's back shoulders and arms, just handling the tires. They weigh a lot. We'll get into that a little more in a bit. You know, how are you going to handle that? How are you going to minimize the stress on your body during that process? So for frequency, it's soft tissue injuries.   Peter Koch: [00:10:42] Right on. And I bet you that some of our listeners, even if you've only ever managed your own tires, can see that happening because, like you said, tires and rim assemblies, even on passenger vehicles can get pretty heavy. So when we start getting to some more of the industrial tires that are out there, the weight goes up substantially [00:11:00] and you do it all the time or just a few times you're in the wrong position that awkward ergonomics could place you in a position for injury. So let's talk about severity too. And even though you can get some pretty severe injuries out of manual material handling or lifting and pushing and pulling, the majority of our severe injuries happen from a particular type of hazard. So let us know a little bit about that type of hazard.   Andy Wood: [00:11:25] Yeah. So for servicing the tires, what I put in a category of severity was the tire explosions, and we'll get into a little bit of detail about how tires come apart. And I use the term explosion for a bunch of different failures of the tire room assembly, and that's a catastrophic release of huge amounts of energy. And the injuries are multiple body parts. Injuries are usually trauma. There's usually going to be flying debris or just a concussive force of the air release is going to catapult people across the room if even if they only get hit by air. So those are usually larger, blunt force trauma, multiple body part type [00:12:00] injuries.   Peter Koch: [00:12:01] All right. Well, like you said, we're going to get we're going to go into detail in each of those bits and pieces and look at what's causing material handling injuries, what's substantially causing the severe injuries, the struck by tire explosion injuries. But let's first look at overall, since we know that there is injuries that are happening out there and there's more than we think there are regulations out there that cover servicing tires. So give us a little bit about what some of those regs are and some of those standard setting organizations. And maybe we can even talk some about some of the training that might be required or not required for people servicing tires.   Andy Wood: [00:12:40] I would start as with most of the things we do. You can look into the OSHA standards. Nineteen ten, one seventy seven. That's a general industry standard that I'm looking at. That applies to most of the people that I work with. The one seventy seven is specific to servicing tires and rims. So there's some specifics in there how that's managed. [00:13:00] There's some training requirements in there that's specified exactly what kind of equipment you need to service those tires when you're re inflating, when you're inflating. So OSHA's a big driver there, the federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or DOT people just use the term DOT that kind of synonymously with federal motor carrier. They have guidelines as well on how things are going to be serviced. There's a couple parts there on forty nine CFR, there's section three ninety three that's really about it's called parts and accessories necessary for safe operation. And that's really the part that of the whole commercial truck driving standard that focuses on the physical condition of the vehicle. So when you see people on these roadside inspections, they're pulling out that three ninety three the troopers are pulling out their three ninety three standard and looking at the equipment, and then there is three ninety six, which covers inspection of those vehicles. And that's everything from the pre trip inspection [00:14:00] from the driver, the post trip inspection, the regular inspections and then the annual inspections from a certified service center all the way up through. So how that's going to be monitored along the way with the inspection process is covered as well. The Tire Industry Association probably the most, the largest, I would say most active group of industry group that works with the tire manufacturers. They put out a lot of training, and so they don't have the regulatory authority to specifically tell you what to do. But because as far as what you do for training for your own employees, OSHA generally gives you the option to develop in-house training program to meet those needs. But most people that I work with again, they're not tire shops, so they don't want to take the time and effort to develop a whole standard for their guys. So they want to say, just give us a program, we'll send our guys to it. We'll call that good. So the Tire Industry Association is the group that they have all types of tire training, from entry level [00:15:00] tire training to multi piece greater tires off road tires, quite a variety of different depending on what your exposures are, and that can actually be incorporated by reference into an OSHA standard kind of like some information from an owner's manual could be as well. But I think the greatest tire regulatory. Or I should say, standard setting organization. If you don't fall under federal motor carrier guidelines because you're not a commercial motor vehicle operator, maybe you don't fall under the OSHA standards either. Somehow the laws of physics are going to apply to you regardless. So I'm not talking about, you know, at the quantum theory level, but just basic properties of matter and energy and the relationships between them. You know, if you take a tire that's rated for one hundred and ten pounds and it's been worn at all and you put one hundred and twenty pounds in it, things are not going to end well for you. So physics are going to be the overriding factor, you know, regardless of the legal standards that are set out there for you.   Peter Koch: [00:15:57] I think that's a really good point, because if someone jumps into [00:16:00] that OSHA 1910 177, you're going to find that excludes passenger and light truck tires for out of that particular piece. But. Even though if that's what you're touching, right, as part of your quote unquote shop, or even if you're just doing it at home, the laws of physics still apply. I mean, that's not an OSHA thing. So that's a really great thing to bring up all of these things that we're going to be talking about the hazards, the exposures and some of the controls that we're going to see here apply regardless. Just because of the laws of physics, you put more pressure than the vessel can handle the vessels going to deform, and it's probably going to fracture at some point in time. And the more pressure you put in it, the more force is going to be resultant from that explosion. So there's a lot, a lot to it. So I think that's a good point. So regardless, if you're thinking about checking out right now because none of this applies to you. Well stick around for a little bit longer because really, physics [00:17:00] is what's going to drive some of the causes of the injuries. And even on the manual material handling, it's all about physics. How far away, how much you can lift the mechanics of your body and how you grab on to something to pick something up. So stick around. We'll talk a little bit more about these going forward.   Andy Wood: [00:17:17] Why is that often comes up in my industry, of course, coming from the tree felling part or handling heavy machine components as people say, you know, gravity wins.   Peter Koch: [00:17:27] All the time.   Andy Wood: [00:17:27] It's all about physics, and gravity in the end is always going to win. So yeah, that's something we want to keep in mind.   Peter Koch: [00:17:32] Yeah, for sure. Now, something that anybody can do, regardless of what they're addressing or working on or servicing is have some personal protective equipment and we're jumping here first because it's ubiquitous. It should be something that you use regardless of what you're doing and when you're doing it, because there are certain hazards that we are just not able to manage well, whether you're [00:18:00] in the field or in the shop, there's just certain potential problems that PPE will help you. It's not the end all, be all. And as we know, it's really not what we want to rely on, but we should be using it. So if I'm going to service tires or be working in a shop that servicing tires, what PPE is required for me to work on those tires or maybe even work around those tires?   Andy Wood: [00:18:22] Yeah, it's pretty basic stuff, I would say. You know, tires are pretty heavy. You're going to be wearing steel toes, sturdy footwear with all the pressure and some of the power tools. You're going to be using eye protection gloves, of course, from the hand injuries, if you're working in a shop where there are compressors running and impact wrenches, you might add hearing protection to that because that level of noise might put you over the action level for the hearing conservation standard and OSHA's guidelines. And if you're depending again where you're working, if you're working in the field on a construction site, say where there's a lot of other equipment, high vis clothing would be part of the equation. [00:19:00] If you're working roadside, of course there's a D.O.T. standard you're creating work zone high vis clothing would be would be an issue there as well. So, yeah, those should be kind of default settings. You don't you don't always have all the equipment and all the stuff in the field that you want, but this stuff should be a given all the time.   Peter Koch: [00:19:16] Cool. Good. So good to know. So things to think about if you're going to be working on that steel toes, eye protection, gloves, hearing protection and high vis from a situational standpoint. So let's think about this from like, how do I know what I'm going to be getting into? So in order to know what exposures you have, you need to know a little bit about the tire itself, what type it is, maybe how much pressure it is and lots of that is given to us actually on the tire. So in order I think to know what we're exposed to, we need to know a little bit about the information on the tire. So let's talk a little bit about that. There's a ton of information on the stats on the sidewall. [00:20:00] So talk us if you can talk us through what information is on the sidewall, what might be important to someone who's servicing the tire and how that information might influence some of their decisions.   Andy Wood: [00:20:13] Sure. Well, of course, the training that's required is going to give you a lot of that information on what you should be able to what you should expect, but you're absolutely right. The specifics for any given tire are spelled right out on the sidewalk. DOT has a very specific sequence of numbers and letters on the sidewall information that has to be there. I think the last upgrade was two thousand. They specified just what need to be in there and how would it need to be formatted so anyone could get that information off the tire? It's going to be a little different depending on the tires that you have, whether you're looking at pick up tires or medium duty tires or heavy duty tires or off road heavy equipment tires. But some of the things that are going to be on there, the tire class will be listed. So on the low end of the spectrum, as far as tires designations that most people will [00:21:00] be familiar with would be the P that's for a passenger vehicle. LP is going to be your light trucks. They do have an ST that would be special trailer tires. MC is motorcycles, so there's a whole series there. And then the commercial motor vehicles, the bigger. Like the tractor trailers, they have designations for steer, axle tires for drive axle tires, trailer tires. Again, the separate designation. And if you're running the super singles, which a lot of the tractor trailers have, and that's when the dual tires traditionally on trailers or the drive axles of a tractor trailer are being replaced by larger single tires. Again, that's a separate designation, so that's the tire class that's on there. The tire size is spelled out on there. We're going to talk about that a little more, but that's something you need, obviously, to make sure that matches up with the rims or the wheels that you have. And there are some small differences there that little nuances that are very important. When you pressurize the tire, you'll need to know about when you're servicing the [00:22:00] tires on the commercial motor vehicles. We'll talk a little bit about the RIM charts in a minute that's specified in the OSHA standard, and you need the information off the dad off the sidewall, the tire to compare to the rims that you have, whether you have single piece rims or multi piece rims to make sure that they're all compatible and it's easy to mix and match those improperly so the tire size information, maximum inflation pressure is on the side of the tire, and this is one that gets really confusing. Having had some huge issues with tires failing on vans, the 15 passenger vans back quite a few years ago, they were inherently unstable and the tires weren't really large enough for the for the weight they were carrying. I found that it was people really struggle to understand that, and the pressure that's noted on the sidewall is the maximum inflation pressure for that tire when it's carrying the maximum load. So the tire pressure has to match the load. The manufacturer of the tire [00:23:00] has no idea what you're going to do with the tire. You might put it on a steer axle or a drive axle. You might put it on an SUV where all the tires are the same. You could put it in a dual tire application where it's different. You could use it on a trailer. They don't really know that. So on the lighter vehicles, you know, the half one, three quarter ton pickups going up through to the commercials, there will be a placard on the door or on the door jam and that'll in the manufacturer of the vehicle knows what the intended use of that vehicle is, and they've specified the tires that go on that. So if you're working within those design parameters, the manufacturer of the vehicle is going to give you the best indication of tire pressure. That's it's going to be on the placard on the door on the end of the door or on the door jam. And it's usually going to be lower than the maximum inflation pressure that's on the tire. And it has a huge difference in the way the tire is going to perform and how it's going to wear as well. If you take the, for example, I've had a, you know, I've [00:24:00] run into that myself and that we just drive half-ton pickups. So there are light duty vehicles. But because of the gravel roads that we travel on, we upgrade the tires to 10 ply tires. The maximum inflation pressure is 80 pounds on those. When I ran when I had a work truck, I ran the maximum deflation pressure was 80 pounds. I ran 80 pounds on this company truck. It's usually just me riding around in the truck with not a lot of weight in there. If you run 80 pounds, I can tell you what happens. The middle of your tread goes bald real quick, because only the center of the tire is being worn. The inflation pressure is so high and there's no weight to counteract that that it wears the tire un-uniformly. So you lose a lot of tire life out of that. So again, you've got to match the tire pressure to the weight that it's beat the application and the weight that it's being carried. So moving on from inflation pressure, the maximum load and the load index is on there, and that's a code that just relates. They have a number that correlates to the weight of the tire is designed to carry. You just need [00:25:00] to look up the chart for the manufacturer to tell what it's rated for. A speed rating is on the tire. Now here in the U.S., we don't really worry too much about the speed rating most people's vehicles unless you bought a high performance. Car, a Lamborghini or a Porsche or something where it's advertised to be able to go one hundred and fifty miles an hour. They might have put speed rated tires on it. For most applications, our speeds are, you know, sixty five seventy miles an hour. The speed rating is not so much. I understand that in Germany, on the autobahn, where there's an unlimited speed limit, speed limit, speed rated tires are important to have. There is one example, though one situation, and I kind of I ran into this myself as well. On the lower end of the spectrum, there are tires that are not rated that have no speed rating and are rated just for off road use. Not off road equipment. But I was looking for some tires for a trailer that I have on the farm and I got looking around for something, you know, it's very occasional use and I didn't want to spend a lot of money and it was on one of the agricultural [00:26:00] websites and they had these really nice tires and I thought, Well, they look pretty good and they're not that expensive. But when you look close, says not for a highway UCS on them, so they're rated for agricultural equipment, something around, you know, something you use in a gravel pit around the farm, but nothing that's rated for highway speed, so that as long as you don't get those into your into your service fleet, you should be all set with the speed rating. The data tire manufacturer is on there and you. Interesting. You mentioned your tires on your tractor are getting a little old, something that's fairly new and I just came across it researching for this, this discussion. We're having the month and year of the manufacturer of the tire is on there. And what the manufacturers are now recommending is that at five years, the tire be dismounted and be inspected inside and outside.   Peter Koch: [00:26:48] Really.   Andy Wood: [00:26:50] If you have a tire that last 10 years, it needs to be discarded regardless of the condition that it's in. So I have a plow truck at home and has almost no miles on [00:27:00] it per year, and but the tires are going to outdated 10 years, whether it's got good tread or not. So that's something that's relatively new, that's come along.   Peter Koch: [00:27:08] Yeah. And if you think about that too, it kind of makes sense. Like the longer the tire just sits out in the sunlight and sits out in the elements, the hot and cold, just from being outside or even inside, you're going to have air changes in temperature changes. The rubber is not going to last forever. So you figure as it degrades, it's going to have less opportunity or less capacity for the intended pressures and for the intended usage where that's going to happen to it. So it kind of makes sense to me that that that's there and certainly something that I'm going to have to budget for next winter.   Andy Wood: [00:27:41] It's kind of like your hard hat. It's got a manufacture date and the manufacturer gives you a maximum life. And at that point, they say it's no longer safe to work. I did have a situation with this. It was kind of a surprising one. I had a it was one of my company vehicles. It's on a three year lease. I got to the I was at the end of the lease. [00:28:00] It was lagging. The new vehicle was lagging a little bit. It was coming a little late. So I had to get the vehicle inspected one last time. And in three years the tires would not pass inspection, not for lack of tread, but for weather checks in the sidewall. And I've never had a tire failed for weather checks in the three year time frame. But you know, just the conditions that worked under or maybe it was an older tire when I got it, or maybe it wasn't that good of a tire, I don't know. But the conditions were such that even though I had tread left, it was out of service.   Peter Koch: [00:28:31] Interesting. It does seem that there's a combination of things that would cause a lot of that to or a tire to be taken out of service. But and I know we had it's something we talked about just prior to the podcast was it would have been interesting to know when those tires were manufactured. So if the age of the tire had been a large component of the weather checking that it had occurred, like are they truly at the end of that 10 year service life? Or is there something else going on with it? Because is it brand? [00:29:00] Is it? Is it cost? Is there something else or like you said, is it actually just use that's causing some of that check to happen? So interesting? And just I think the point there is to know that there are a lot of things that can go into causing that tire to fail. One of those is going to be age. So just because it's never happened before in the tires, been on the vehicle for quite a while doesn't mean that you can just forget about it as something that you need to check in on all the time.   Andy Wood: [00:29:26] Another thing is the manufacturer's plant code. So, you know, some people are getting sensitive about buying American, which is a good thing, but most people have no idea where their products come from. You can look on the sidewall, you can take two letters off the sidewall and you can you can go on the net or the website from that, and you can figure out what plant that was produced in, whether it was in the United States or Canada or Japan or wherever they came from. So again, there's a lot of information on there. Some tires will have more than that, but there's a lot of information to get you started with, for sure.   Peter Koch: [00:29:59] Good. So a good [00:30:00] place to go right on the tire itself to find out what kind of tire you have, what information you can get off of it and how will that or how can that change how you manage or address or service the tire itself?   Peter Koch: [00:30:14] Let's take a quick break. Did you know that MEMIC offers online instructor led OSHA 10 hour outreach courses for both the general industry and construction standards free to our policyholders? Each online 10 hour outreach class is a two day video conference training that provides instruction on key sections of OSHA's standards, instructing attendees about how to identify hazards and effectively implement appropriate safety procedures in the workplace. This program is a must for supervisors, lead persons and hourly employees. Our instructors have spent decades in the construction and general industry fields and are authorized by the OSHA Training Institute to conduct these safety outreach training [00:31:00] programs. Seats are limited, so check out the schedule and register today at www.MEMIC.com/WorkplaceSafety Not a MEMIC policyholder yet well reach out to your independent insurance agent and ask about us or go to www.MEMIC.com To learn more. Now let's get back to today's episode.   Peter Koch: [00:31:25] So let's start talking through more of the injuries and all, we broke it out before where you've got manual material handling or overexertion injuries that are causing frequent injuries out there. So let's start with that. Let's talk about the frequency type of injuries, the manual material handling injuries and what's causing them and what are some of the controls that we see out there?   Andy Wood: [00:31:50] An interesting thing that I do again, trying to manage my statistics a little bit to figure out where I want to put my effort at the close of every year. I get a chance, maybe in January [00:32:00] or February, and I'll pull all my injuries from the previous year and I'll break them down into the categories that you know, the exertions and the slips, trips and falls. And if there's enough information in the injury report, I try and figure out what was the cause of that overexertion injury. So overexertion is one of my top three. I think every year since I've been doing this, so I pull out the overexertion injuries. I read the description of the injury and I try to say, Well, what? What was the person doing when that happened? And an interesting thing. Sometimes I can go to one particular product, one component, and it's in that year that one thing generated more soft tissue injuries than anything else. And several years it's been tires handling tires. So handling hydraulic cylinders is another big one that I have. But handling tires in several years, that one item and it has generated the majority of the soft tissue injuries. And it's been everything from pickup tires all the way up to light duty, medium duty [00:33:00] on road truck tires and then off road heavy equipment tires as well. So it can be it can cover the full range.   Peter Koch: [00:33:07] So interestingly, I think everyone has a sort of a grasp of how heavy a tire is like especially a passenger rated tire or even a light truck tire. But there's some pretty vast difference, even in a tire that would be on your normal half ton or three quarter ton pickup truck. There can be some substantial weight differences even there, so let's talk a little bit about how heavy the tires are. And I'm just going to preface this with if we talk to Al Brown, who's our director of ergonomics here at MEMIC, he's going to tell you that the NIOSH lifting equation is going to say that you can only lift like 50 pounds and 50 pounds is if it has handles and you're only can lift it between like mid thigh and mid chest. And you can't twist with it and you can't walk with it. And if you do any of those things, the weight starts [00:34:00] to go down. So we start looking at what a safe weight is to lift. They're talking like thirty five pounds. There are very few tires that are going to weigh thirty five pounds, and if you get into that, you're going to kind of get into a four wheeler tire or a lawn tractor tire. But anything that's going to be on a vehicle is going to weigh way more than that. So really, we need to be paying attention when we're picking up these tires all the time and knowing how heavy something is can clue you in to how much caution you should be taking. So talk to me a little bit about the difference between maybe the weight of a normal light truck tire that you might find on like a Ford F-150 right out of the showroom versus something that you might be putting on your truck to drive off road or to be putting equipment into to go into the forest with.   Andy Wood: [00:34:50] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the thing is the size of the tire, the physical size or the statistical size, you know, by the numbers, if you don't [00:35:00] read a little more into it, that in itself is not going to give you an indication. You mentioned the F-150, that's a good example. Your average F-150, actually, the almost all year half ton pickups today are specced out as passenger vehicles. A lot of them come with the P tires on them, which is a passenger tire intended to carry, you know, for adults and some garbage on the way to the dump, but not a whole lot more than that. That's why we have to upgrade to the LT tires and go to a heavier and heavier ply construction. I went out to the garage, I took the scale from the bathroom and went out and weighed my tires. Eighty four pounds for one tire. That's the tire and rim assembly. I went online, specced out a 16 inch tire with a standard load, which would be the low end of the spectrum. And then I specced it out as a 10 ply tire, which is what we run with a heavy rim. So if you take the lighter version of that, the standard load and you put it on a lightweight aluminum rim, you can have a tire and rim assembly for a 16 inch tire that weighs forty four pounds.   Peter Koch: [00:35:58] Wow.   Andy Wood: [00:35:59] On the other end of the spectrum, [00:36:00] the same tire, same 16 inch tires backed at a ten ply rating and a standard steel rim is one hundred and twenty eight pounds.   Peter Koch: [00:36:08] Holy cow! Three times.   Andy Wood: [00:36:10] From the same size tire from forty four pounds up to a one hundred and twenty eight pounds, depending on how its the components and how you've put it together. Well, that's huge. And that's one of the reasons that the vehicle, the tires that go on the cars. The light trucks, they have three quarter ton pickups don't get a lot of respect, but one hundred and twenty eight pounds can go back to Al Brown's equation. The only thing you can do with a one hundred twenty eight pound tire is roll it across the shop floor. That's about it. You don't want to   Peter Koch: [00:36:37] Get a hernia, right?   Andy Wood: [00:36:38] So, yeah, yeah.   Peter Koch: [00:36:40] Yeah, no doubt. So that's pretty interesting when if you're thinking about it, if that's what you're used to like that maybe there's 40 to 60 pounds, right? So that's my range of that light truck tie or the passenger tire that I'm used to managing. And then all of a sudden you have a different vehicle that comes in or you've ordered these new tires [00:37:00] they got put on at the shop. You've never touched them before. Now you've got them out in the woods or you got them out in the road and one goes flat on and you've got to change it out. You're going from something that you're used to of 40 to 60 pounds and you're going to double or triple that weight. So without knowing that you're going to go into that thinking, I can manage that, where really you probably can't or really you shouldn't, regardless of if you can or you can't.   Andy Wood: [00:37:26] And one of the problems is not just the sheer weight of the tire, you know, going back to Al's handles good posture and all that. That's a best case scenario. But if the depending on the configuration of the truck that it's going on, or if it's a trailer, it's a very awkward posture, sometimes getting a tire back on the studs. So it's not just the weight of it, it's the awkward posture that you're getting going in that's going to cause problems for your back or your shoulders or your arms. The small vehicle or I say small, you know, the pickup tires 16 18. Even the 20 inch tires [00:38:00] don't get a lot of respect, but the bigger tires. The tires on the tractor trailer are still such that a lot of people are still going to try and handle them, which is going to put, you know again at a greater risk the off road tires for the front end loaders and the skitters and all the off road equipment, you know, nobody tries. When we have the discussion, everyone will say, Well, we, you know, we're not going to handle those anyways because you can't begin to. But even if you have a piece of equipment to lift the tire up, we have a lot of injuries when people are trying to wrestle the tires to get the studs, to line up with the holes on the rim. If you've got a disk type rim and you're just. So even if asked for it stood up and it's right in front of the tire, you still have to get the holes line up. We have a lot of injuries then, and in the case that you have chains on the tires, there's a lot of the off road equipment does. Sometimes the tires will come back with the chains on them and sometimes they'll be off. So you've got to manage the chains which are going to put add quite a few hundred pounds. Some of the tires have ballast [00:39:00] in them. You know, they're weighted with liquids inside. That's just going to increase the tire, the weight of the tire that much more.   Peter Koch: [00:39:07] So what are the options out there for lifting or moving or positioning a tire? What are some of the different options that a shop has or an individual has that that can help them manage the size because you can't change the weight or the size of the tire if that's what you need for the vehicle and that's what you need for the job that you're doing. There's got to be something else out there. You just can't hire a stronger person to lift the tire up. There's going to be something else that you have to do. So what are the options?   Andy Wood: [00:39:35] Sure, in a shop, you do have several options that work pretty good. They do make tire dollies just designed, very convenient. You do have to keep your shop floor clean so you can roll them around, take the lug nuts off slide and right up on there, they'll lift the weight up. They'll pull them directly off the studs. That works pretty well. Some handle are designed for single tires. If you're you, run your tractor trailers, [00:40:00] they have those that are designed to take the wheels off at the same time. You know, those are really slick if you're in a garage. The thing about most of these, I find that if you look at a mechanic who's worked with that particular accessory for a while, he's so smooth. You look at that and it's kind of jaw dropping. You say, Well, that is awesome. You try that yourself and you'll be swearing. You'll think this is terrible. I could do it. I could do it easier just by manually lifting it. But you have to work on your technique a little bit. These things actually work really well. And one of the one of the things that has come out of this, truckers are running the aluminum rims now, so they're putting aluminum rims, which is obviously a softer steel on a on a hardened steel stud on the hub. And the force of the tires sliding on and off over the steel stud wears off the whole of the aluminum rim. So some of the tires have been taken out of service over time because every time you take it in, you've got a dusting of aluminum filings on there. When you're just wrestling the tire [00:41:00] on and forcing it up and down and trying to get it to line up. You get a lot more of that. If you use the tire dollar, you can get it to the right level and you can just slide it effortlessly right straight on and then right straight back out if you're taking it off with no damage to the aluminum rims at all. So that was one of kind of the byproducts, the benefits that until you've done that a while, you don't really realize, you know, might come your way. So in the shop, there's certainly the wheel dollies are good just for lifting a tire that's laying flat on the floor just to get it stood upright so you can roll it along if you have to lift, reach down and lift the whole tire up by the tread. That's again, going to be kind of a tough lift. They have tire bars, some of the tire irons that you put the bar right down in the hole where the stud would come through and you just bend it in. It stands the tire right up. So now all you have to do with your getting mechanical advantage there, so you stand the tire up in no effort and you just roll it along. Then all you have to do is worry about getting it in the back of a vehicle. When you get to that point for the bigger tires, there's going to [00:42:00] be a variety of things. What I have in the garages that I work with, most folks will have a forklift. Sometimes there's a small tractor, a four wheel drive tractor. Skid steers are often available. They do have forks for those, but they do have a really slick attachment. That's it's a tire dolly that goes on the front end of a skid steer or on the front end of a small tractor. It goes on the equipment, quick attach. It's got rollers on it. It looks like forks, but they're rollers. So you come up, you pick up the tire. It's adjustable in and out. When you lift the tire up and you hold it, line it up with your piece of heavy equipment. It'll roll right around so you can line up the stud, the holes that are on the rim with the studs on the hub without having to restless just effortlessly and again. When you see that happen and you see those mechanics putting that on smoothly and efficiently, and they don't even sweat or grunt. And once you're thinking, wow, that's the way to go right there. Unfortunately, the lift aids that we have with the lighter trucks, [00:43:00] the tires, you know, 16, 18, 20 inch tires on the pickups, most people don't bother with them. That's why they're they continue to cause injuries because they still do away a lot, but they don't get the respect at the bigger tires do. And then in the field, what I see where I'm changing tires on a back road, on a logging landing or on a construction site, the newer mechanics, trucks, service trucks all have small cranes on them, which can be used to carry a tire. There's other equipment you might have a front end loader, you might have a Limber or a log loader that you can use to lift up a tire that's certainly going to help. The one thing I would caution against is that you have a secure system to hold the tire up. So one of the things that commonly happens is there's always a chain or a lifting sling around. Usually you run the lifting sling right through the open center of the tire and you choke it and you set that up where it needs to go. But you can't work it on the studs because the sling gets in the way or the chain gets in the way. They actually make tire slings [00:44:00] that go around the outside diameter of the tire so that they're not. They don't get in the way of the hub or when you're trying to line the studs. Up and they have straps that go across so that the tires can't fall out of them. So and we have had a few situations where tires have fallen out of the slings that they were being lifted with. So getting either making or buying a tire sling, whether it's chain or synthetic, that's made for a tire and can be used all the way on and doesn't interfere with the bolt pattern is really the investment worth having.   Peter Koch: [00:44:31] You mentioned that the bigger tires weigh a lot more. We didn't really talk about how much those weigh. We talked about the light truck tires going to like one hundred and twenty eight pounds with the complete assembly. But when we get beyond the light truck tires, you get to some of the off road or the equipment, tires or even a ballast tire. What are we talking about for weight? Because the next injury type that we're going to talk about are struck by, and when you think about a tire falling over like, you know, a passenger tire fallen on [00:45:00] on your foot. Yeah, it may hurt a little bit. If it catches you wrong, it might sprain your ankle or you might break a toe if you've got sneakers on which you shouldn't, should have. That's why we're talking about steel toed shoes. But when you get into some of the larger tires well over a hundred pounds, what are we? What are we talking about there for weight?   Andy Wood: [00:45:19] Yeah. Yeah, a hundred pounds is peanuts, you know, when you get the off road tires, I picked a tire that I see frequently on a skitter thirty five point five by thirty two inch tire. The tire is going to weigh 13 hundred and eighteen pounds. The rim is going to be about five hundred and fifty pounds, so you're going to be at eighteen hundred and sixty eight pounds, so a thousand over a thousand eight hundred pounds. That's no ballast and the chains that have been removed. Wow. So when that tire falls over on you, that's as much as a small car. Eighteen hundred pounds. So that's a lot of weight.   Peter Koch: [00:45:53] Yeah, that's substantial. Do you mind telling the story when you were working in the woods because you had a situation [00:46:00] and this kind of comes in in positioning like, you know, making sure that you have the right tools with you and having a good plan. But sometimes even those plans, the best laid plans don't always work well, and I think you've got a pretty good story that sort of outlines the challenge of having a heavy tire and maybe not having it in the right position when you want it.   Andy Wood: [00:46:21] Yeah, this story ticks off every failure you know along the way that every control that was put in and, you know, both mental and physical. For me, I did. I worked in the woods and I had a scitter and I had had a flat tire during the week and had gone out and repaired the tire. They had the tire fixed and on Sunday I was back in the woods to put the spare tire off and put the regular tire back on. The challenge is when you have a tire that big, if you get it upright, you can move it around a little bit. But if it falls to the ground, you can't get it stood back up again, so you have to be very careful getting it out of the back of the truck. First, you have to find a good spot and these are just gravel roads. [00:47:00] You have to find a good spot where the scitter can be on the side of the road and you can have a place to take the one tire off and roll it out of the way and then back up your truck to unload the tire you're putting back on. Slide it out of the back of the truck, get it stood up, and then work it over to the to the hub of the scooter to put it back on. I had taken the tire off and I had moved it out of the way. I back the truck up. I stood the tire up. I was working it up to the head leaning against the studs, but I couldn't quite get the holes to line up the studs in the in the holes and the rim. So with a skitter, you work the blade in the winch alternately. So the tire was leaning against the hub and I go back to move that up a little bit down and in the process of moving that just a fraction of an inch. The tire fell over and landed on the ground. Oh, and I was I was just ugly about that and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, the tires laying flat on the ground, but how am I going to get that back upright? It took me. I bet, of course, as every self-respecting woodcutter would have. The only tool [00:48:00] is the high lift Jack. I went and got the high lift jack. I couldn't get it under the tire to get started, so I had to use a pry bar and I would put a fulcrum in there and pry it up and throw some rocks underneath it to create a little opening. And I kept working it up and up. And finally, I got the high lift under it and lifted it up a few feet. And then it was out of alignment and I had to block it. There I had I had two five gallon pails of automatic transmission fluid because I was also going to change the automatic transmission fluid. So I'd worked the tire up a little bit. I, I block it, repositioned the jack, go up a little more. I got it up high enough to get the two five gallon pails underneath it, so I thought that was a pretty good way to hold it. I jacked it up a little bit more and I finally, after it was like an hour, I got it stood up straight, got it tipped over back against the hub and again in the process of trying to line up the studs with the holes in the rim, the tire again fell over onto the ground. Only it didn't make it all the way to the ground. It landed on the two five gallon pails and it was like, just stomp it on a paper cup. Those five [00:49:00] gallon pails just blew up and the oil went flying everywhere. And now I've, you know, I'm getting pretty ugly at this point, so I've had a complete failure. I didn't secure the tire, you know, in the opposition like I should have. I've lost a lot of time, mentally I'm getting frustrated. I just lost two five gallon bales, a transmission fluid. I go over to the tire. I reached down, I grabbed the tire. I give you one mighty heave and I stand the tire up. And for just a second, I thought there I've won this time. And then I felt a little a little twinge in my back and I didn't. I didn't think a whole lot about it at the time. But as the repair went on, it kept getting worse and worse. I finished what I was doing. Obviously, I couldn't change the hydraulic the transmission fluid because I lost. You know, that was a frustrating. I hop in the truck to go back to camp. When I got back to camp, it was all I could do to stand up and get out of the pickup. So the in the effort of that awkward posture lifting that tire up, which weighed, you know, it wasn't one of those 18 hundred pound tires, [00:50:00] but it was way more than a person should have lifted. I tweaked my back and I don't know. I've had a lifetime of back issues, and I think that might have been the beginning of it right there. And it's, you know, a person who suffers with back injuries, you know, it's a lifetime condition and you just kind of dread it when it when it cycles around again. So, you know, I like I said, I had all the elements I didn't plan quite as well. Tire needs to be secured when it's in the upright position. I didn't take care of that. I got frustrated. I tried to cut a corner. All those things end up catching up with me and coming back and bite me in a big way.   Peter Koch: [00:50:31] When I hear you tell that story, I've known you for years and you're one of the most patient and forward thinking guys that I know, so you've always got a plan. All the training that we do together, whether it's chainsaw training or whether it's fall protection training, you always are two or three steps ahead in thinking of where things need to be positioned, where people need to be, how things need to work. And as I hear that story, I can just see you getting more and more and more frustrated. [00:51:00] And had I asked you at the beginning, like if I had been there when that was happening, at the beginning when you drove up to replace that tire and the transmission fluid? And I asked you, Would you ever lift this tire, Andy? You'd look right at me. Go, there's no way I'd lift that tire. There's no way I left that tire. I've got everything in place going to do it right. And I think that just the story of stop and think because you may be able to physically do it, but the consequences of you physically doing it could have life changing or life altering or some sort of challenge in your life later on. So, you know, had you not been that frustrated with all those little things going wrong, you may not have ever chosen to do that, but every little thing conspired against you that day, and I could just, you know, I can put your myself in your shoes. And probably a half an hour before that, I would have been lifting the tire and blowing my back.   Andy Wood: [00:52:00] It's [00:52:00] interesting that, you know, we always look at the physical conditions on the job site and what leads to an injury, and certainly employers try and do the same. But, you know, ultimately we come back to the mental conditions. Distraction, fatigue, anger and frustration. Those are contributing factors, I would say, in the vast majority of injuries that we see. So if you can keep your mind clear and focus to know, you can certainly do a lot better, particularly when you don't have ideal conditions for sure.   Peter Koch: [00:52:27] And you know, we talked about one particular situation that occurred to you. But if you go back into the statistics in those the injury stats that you look at every year or even beyond what we see at MEMIC, there are plenty more examples of people being injured because a tire has been unsecured and fallen over or something has happened and the person has been trapped underneath it or something's occurred. So lots of opportunities to be struck by a tire that's not secured, that's being trying to be placed [00:53:00] without the right tools. And you know, they're heavy and you're not always going to be able to catch them. And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, when that tire comes over, there's going to be some substantial injury.   Andy Wood: [00:53:12] One that we had it was it was a tire bigger than the one I had. We were actually didn't happen. This was an injury that I had in my in my employment with MEMIC that I was had to deal with. They were using a log loader to hold the tire up. I mentioned this should be secured well, the log, the grapple of a log loader is not the way you secure that. And the mechanic can't remember if was the mechanic or the operator was trying to line up the studs and the holes. And in the process, the tire was dropped and it fell over on him and it broke his pelvis. So that's a pretty big injury. When a tire, you know, that again, might not have been the 1800 pound tire, but if it was even the thousand pound tire, that's enough to break a pelvis and that's a long term injury, even if it goes well for you.   Peter Koch: [00:53:54] Yeah, very true. That person's not coming back to work anytime soon, and there's probably [00:54:00] significant challenges to mobility and other issues down the road to. It's not something that you're going to kind of quickly come back from and be 100 hundred percent in just a few weeks. Sure. We're going to stop right there. The conversation about tire safety with Andy Wood will continue in the next episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, and that's where Andy and I will cover other tire related injuries. Different ways tires fail, such as bead or rim failure. And then strategies around preventing injuries when servicing tires, so be sure to subscribe and get notified when the episode drops. So thanks again to everyone for joining us. And Today on Safety Experts podcast, we've been discussing the hazards of servicing tires with Andy Wood, manager of our Forest Product Safety Services here at MEMIC. The MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is written, hosted and produced by me, Peter Koch. If you have any questions about tire safety or I'd like to hear more about a particular topic on our podcast. Email me at [email protected]. Also, [00:55:00] check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/Podcast, where you can find more about tire safety and tire safety resources, links to other podcasts with Andy, as well as our entire podcast archive. While you're there, sign up for our safety net blog so you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you would subscribe to the podcast and then take a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, thank you because it truly helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing the show with a business associate friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.