What Happens When You Get Complacent....

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480sparky

480sparky

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... or just don't care:

Dont Care.jpg

Currently working on an LED replacement in a warehouse. Finding lots of "I don't care" work. Here it is in the extreme. Screw 2 simply holds the cover to the top of the old HID light. Screw 1 keeps the cover flat. But screw # 3, which is directly opposite #2, was never threaded into the top of the light, and that's the one that really holds the whole light to the box. Result: The light over the years started to slide out.

A busted light and/or a tripped breaker would be the least of the owners' worries. This is a bonded warehouse that houses a lot of commercial food materials. Everything from salt and ascorbic acid to flour and seeds. Pretty much everything you see here will eventually end up in something someone eats:

Warehouse.jpg



A light falling off the ceiling might make them liable for thousands of dollars of product that might be contaminated by broken glass, plastic, metal or just plain dust.


All because some Sparky got lazy.
 
480sparky said:
... or just don't care:

View attachment 2554889

Currently working on an LED replacement in a warehouse. Finding lots of "I don't care" work. Here it is in the extreme. Screw 2 simply holds the cover to the top of the old HID light. Screw 1 keeps the cover flat. But screw # 3, which is directly opposite #2, was never threaded into the top of the light, and that's the one that really holds the whole light to the box. Result: The light over the years started to slide out.

A busted light and/or a tripped breaker would be the least of the owners' worries. This is a bonded warehouse that houses a lot of commercial food materials. Everything from salt and ascorbic acid to flour and seeds. Pretty much everything you see here will eventually end up in something someone eats:

View attachment 2554890



A light falling off the ceiling might make them liable for thousands of dollars of product that might be contaminated by broken glass, plastic, metal or just plain dust.


All because some Sparky got lazy.
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True, but warehouse management is still responsible for sending out effected product. How likely is it that light falls and nobody knows about it?

This is packaged product and may not even get into product. If it happens in production area and exposed product is involved it may effect just a tiny amount of product, or it could mean shut down, clean the entire effected product line and dispose whatever product was in the line at the time. Or again production management can turn their head and do nothing and potentially effect lots of outgoing product.

I've worked in food production facilities, things do happen, some could be from laziness. They still have GMP's (good manufacturing procedures) that all employees as well as any authorized outsiders need to follow. Some places are much more strict than others. They don't even want you bringing in much for outside tools/equipment without sanitizing somehow them in some places. Nor do they want you wearing clothing that was outside the plant, including you shoes. Might be a way to introduce undesired bacteria that can find a way into the product.
 
kwired said:
True, but warehouse management is still responsible for sending out effected product. How likely is it that light falls and nobody knows about it?

This is packaged product and may not even get into product. If it happens in production area and exposed product is involved it may effect just a tiny amount of product, or it could mean shut down, clean the entire effected product line and dispose whatever product was in the line at the time. Or again production management can turn their head and do nothing and potentially effect lots of outgoing product.

I've worked in food production facilities, things do happen, some could be from laziness. They still have GMP's (good manufacturing procedures) that all employees as well as any authorized outsiders need to follow. Some places are much more strict than others. They don't even want you bringing in much for outside tools/equipment without sanitizing somehow them in some places. Nor do they want you wearing clothing that was outside the plant, including you shoes. Might be a way to introduce undesired bacteria that can find a way into the product.
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If I drop a screw off the lift, I have to find it before I can proceed. If I can't find it on the floor, the forklift operators have to start moving product around until it's found. I even take my metal detector with my to scan the tops of some of the packages. As you can see, some of them are simply folded and gathered up, so there's lots of nooks and crannies it could hide in.

So far, I've only dropped one screw on the floor and was able to find it quickly as I was out in an open area.
 
I live in a major frozen French fry producing area. Multiple factories each produce around 1,000 tons per day of fries. That's close to 2 semi loads per hours. A few years ago I drilled a new after supply well for a French fry plant. Had to sign multiple non disclosure statements. Hot work permits required. No wire brushes or grinders with wire wheels allowed on the property anywhere. We were at least 100 yards from the production building, but it still applied to us.

We used to own a potato storage building it held 8500-10,000 tons of potatoes. Basically the size of a football field. After my dad retired from farming, we leased it to a frenchh fry company. All the lighting inside had to be protected so that any bulb breakage be contained in the fixture.

In the apple orchards here, any apple that falls on the ground, stays on the ground. It cannot be put into a bin and and go into the food chain.
 
Nope not even juice. Not in Washington anyways. Used to be that's where people gleaned apples to juice themselves. Here the juicers are the culls that get graded out in sorting at the warehouse. Of course there whole blocks of trees that don't get picked at all for one reason or another every year. Can't hardly give a yellow or common delicious away. Within a 15 mile radius of my house at least 1,000 acres of apples either get replanted to new varieties or complete new plantings go in every year.
 
The totes are folded and gathered up. Product is still protected pretty well.

The bags on pallets are protected pretty well alone, but they also put that "slip" on top before wrapping the pallet and that helps keep anything from getting inside the wrapped pallet.

They have likely well exceeded USDA/FDA requirements. Third party certifications and self regulation by some companies is where you see the strictest product safety procedures.

Appears to be ADM logos on products - I'd bet they do have pretty strict product safety requirements of their own regardless of how much less restrictions by regulatory organizations may be.

Most if not all that you have there is not consumer product but rather ingredients for other food producers. So it does get another chance of contamination before going into consumer products. But at same time many those other companies will take samples of these products and examine them for different things. If lucky and they find a problem before it gets sent out in consumer products they may be just asked to replace it. If there is product recall on the consumer grade product and they can trace it all the way back to this warehouse and those ingredients, the damage amounts only get larger.

Lost screw, yes they may want to find it just because. Chances are if it gets into product, another company finds it with a metal detector in their process and some portion of product involved is rejected from continued process or shipping out, but your client still doesn't want such things to happen and potentially be discovered it came from them as much as possible.

A place I work for we were having trouble with calibrating a metal detector one time. Kind of came to conclusion we were trying to detect too small of a metal piece in a 50 pound bag of product. A product that would be ingredient for someone else and their consumer product would be much smaller packages and easier to detect that small of a metal particle. They decided to go with detecting larger particle, but also installing magnets in product lines just before product gets bagged to attempt to collect any metal that may be in there.

Believe it or not, for some reason even stainless drillings and shavings will stick to this magnet. Most of what does stick to is is like a dust and not a drilling/shaving though, and much smaller than what we were trying to detect in the first place.
 
kwired said:
.........Appears to be ADM logos on products - I'd bet they do have pretty strict product safety requirements of their own regardless of how much less restrictions by regulatory organizations may be.......
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At any moment, a rabbi can show up for an inspection. If there's something there he doesn't like, then everything in the warehouse that's destined for kosher food is not usable for it. Plus they may lose their certification.
 
480sparky said:
At any moment, a rabbi can show up for an inspection. If there's something there he doesn't like, then everything in the warehouse that's destined for kosher food is not usable for it. Plus they may lose their certification.
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I know all about that as well.

Depending on the operation having non kosher ingredients on hand can be a no-no. That might mean those ingredients get used in machines that are used to process kosher product, which they won't allow. It may be possible to cleanse the machines for kosher use again, but sounds like not that easy to do in accordance to their standards.

I remember being there one day when they were making a product that he knew had non kosher ingredients in it and the production manager was freaking out because the rabbi was there and they were certainly going to have problems with it. The rabbi never figured it out and never said a word about it.
 
I've worked in a food processing plant and any time a foreign object was found in the processing pre packaging or worse found in finished product pre shipping the hole batch or could be several days worth was recalled or held for review. If you were the one that dropped it in and didn't say anything and it was found out, you would be immediately terminated. They tried to encourage you to report it as soon as you discovered you dropped an item that might have landed in the product, they wouldn't be happy but they felt it better than loosing a whole shift of product. Or worse, having to make a public recall.
 
kwired said:
Believe it or not, for some reason even stainless drillings and shavings will stick to this magnet. Most of what does stick to is is like a dust and not a drilling/shaving though, and much smaller than what we were trying to detect in the first place.
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Some kinds of stainless steel are mildly magnetic. For some reason very small particles of stainless steel are attracted to magnets if I recall correctly.
 
There are 3 types of stainless steels. They are austeitic, ferritic and martensitic. Only the first type is non-magnetic.
 
jimbom7859 said:
There are 3 types of stainless steels. They are austenitic, ferritic and martensitic. Only the first type is non-magnetic.
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Cold worked austenitic is more than just slightly magnetic. Likely the shavings have been cold worked to some degree.

Years back, I used cold rolled 301 (least expensive austenitic) strip at work. It was easily held by a magnet. For a science project for one of my children, I took a 6" long piece of it ) about 1mm thick, 8 mm wide), heated one end of it to bright red then quenched in water. A little Scotch Brite and it looked uniform. A magnet would pick up one end but not the other. Nobody understood :)
 
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