In a context of lack of clear and exhaustive definitions and consolidated risk prevention practices in confined and/or suspected polluted environments, accompanied by ever-increasing numbers of mostly fatal accidents, a tool is born that aims to overcome the gaps regulations and provide practical and simple support for the identification and recognition of these environments.
This tool is the Confined Space App (CSA), whose purpose is, precisely, to help employers define the likelihood of the environments in which their workers, or they themselves, find themselves having to enter to carry out work tasks. maintenance, cleaning, inspection, or more, may be considered confined or suspected of pollution and present problems relating to recovery in the event of an accident.
The app was created by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Bologna, with the support of the Banca delle Soluzioni – Ambienti Confinati group (https://www.bancadellesoluzioni.org/it/sezione/10/ambienti-confinati), thanks to the co-financing obtained from INAIL Emilia Romagna Region, through the 2016 Regional Call.
CSA therefore does not want to be a tool for risk assessment, nor does it want to replace it, but represents an aid in identifying the presence of a confined environment and the related critical issues due to its characteristics, in terms of Geometry, Access, Configuration Internal, Atmosphere, which, according to the OSHA classification, represent the four main confinement categories.
The app can be downloaded for free but has two levels of access: one open and freely accessible, which presents the demo version and an archive of evaluations to consult; the second instead presents the complete functionality with the possibility of obtaining the final result.
For each category, the user is asked several questions to identify the characteristics of the place. The final result is a numerical value, the result of a calculation algorithm based on the different user responses, which identifies the possibility of being in a confined environment and/or suspected pollution or not.
The application informs the user about the presence of confinement for each category analyzed.
For each confinement category, the respective critical issues and warnings to take into account before entering the environment being analyzed are also highlighted, also with respect to the difficulty of recovery and rescue.