70 Auto Fundamentals
This chapter covers the importance of
safety. You will learn how to dress for safety,
work safely, and maintain a safe shop. The safety
precautions given here are intended to help you
avoid accidents as you perform laboratory jobs
under your instructor’s supervision. Learning
good safety practices now will help you develop
a habit of working safely at all jobs in the future.
This chapter examines various types of unsafe
shop conditions and work practices, and dis-
cusses ways to correct or avoid them.
Preventing Accidents
Safe working conditions and safety pro-
cedures protect the automotive technician, the
vehicle, and the shop. Accidents are unplanned
events that can occur without anyone intend-
ing for them to happen. Also unintended are
the consequences of accidents, such as property
damage or injury. The following sections show
how a little foresight and common sense can
eliminate the causes of most accidents.
Types of Accidents
There are many kinds of accidents. The most
common accidents in the automotive shop include:
• Falls from slipping on a wet or oily fl oor.
• Fires and explosions caused by
fl ammable substances contacting a
heat source.
• Asphyxiation (lack of oxygen to the
lungs) caused by exhaust fumes or
refrigerants building up in a closed space.
• Injury to body parts, such as hands, arms,
face, head, or feet, from moving parts or
from being caught under heavy parts.
• Strains and sprains from lifting heavy
parts improperly.
• Thermal (heat) burns from contacting
hot coolant, oil, or metal.
• Chemical burns from battery acid or
parts cleaner.
• Electrical shocks from ungrounded
electrical tools or outlets.
In addition to the above accidents, the care-
less technician can be exposed to substances that
cause long-term health problems, including:
• Emphysema and lung cancer from
inhaling brake dust over a period
of years.
• Skin cancer from prolonged exposure
to used motor oil and some cleaners.
As you can see, there are many ways to be
injured or killed when working in an automotive
shop. Therefore, it is good practice to fi nd out how
accidents happen and how to avoid them.
How Accidents Happen
Some of the accidents described earlier are
caused when technicians try to take shortcuts
instead of following proper repair procedures.
Other accidents are caused when shop person-
nel fail to correct dangerous conditions in the
work area. Accidents are often caused by a series
of unsafe acts or unsafe conditions.
An example of an unsafe act is leaving spilled
gasoline on the shop fl oor. In some shops, this spill
might remain unattended indefinitely because
everybody is too busy to clean it up. Another
unsafe act is using a standard lightbulb in a drop-
light, which many technicians do because it is too
much trouble to obtain a rough service bulb.
Neither of these unsafe acts becomes an acci-
dent until someone drops the light to the shop
fl oor. It breaks, and the spark ignites the gaso-
line. This causes a large fi re, which could result
in severe damage to the shop and any vehicles in
the shop. It may also severely burn or even kill
someone in the shop. In this example, no one
deliberately set out to cause an accident. Instead,
it was just a series of things that seemed to be too
much trouble to do correctly. The end result of
this chain of unsafe acts was a fi re, Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1.
Spilled fuel and a stray spark or fl ame can cause a
fi re. Never leave spilled fuel or any other substance for
someone else to clean. Clean it up immediately. This
shop caught fi re when an incandescent droplight broke,
igniting a gasoline spill.
Goodheart-Willcox Publisher