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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
advances to an attentive and expectant audience. Some of the advances included the design
of a welder gun to increase welder comfort and ergonomic chairs that were designed for
postural stabilisation when working in difficult access positions such as overhead welding.
The increasing use of robotisation to increase productivity also served to make life for the
welder much easier and to counter the shortfall in the occupation rates for welders that had
previously been declining significantly.
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In 2008 some Member Societies asked, via their delegates on C-VIII,
for a means of supporting the welding industry and the inspection and
insurance organisations in the identification of criteria for risk assessment
and management. Costa and Lundin were to respond to these requests by
producing a definitive document on the
Health and Safety Risks in Welding
at the IIW Annual Conference in Chennai, India in 2011.
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One of the other
considered routes for advising the welding public and industry involved the
issue of guidelines through ISOTechnical Reports. The process of translating
the work of C-VIII into the form of international standards and technical
reports, though, was inevitably subject to headwinds due to consequential
delays in their approval before final publication. Instances of this included
the draft ISO TR
Health and safety aspects of welding – Non-consumable
thoriated tungsten electrodes
, a publication that still had not seen the light
of day by the year 2011. The other instance was the ballot for the draft ISO
TR
Health and safety aspects of welding – Arc welding: Fume components
related to welding processes and base metals
that was also delayed since it
failed to receive sufficient votes at ballot because of perceived conflict with
ISO 15011-4. The thoriated tungsten electrode ISO TR document was left to
wither on the vine for many years until it was eventually decided to publish
this, as an IIW best practice document instead, at the Essen, Germany
meeting of C-VIII in September 2013.
Consequently, the
Health and safety aspects of welding – Arc welding
document
required further revision and approval through a new ballot process and it was published
after much delay as an ISO Technical Report, ISO TR 13392, in 2014. At the same time,
a working draft of ISO TR
Health and safety in welding – Guidance to risk assessment of
welding fabrication activities
also underwent the tortuous process of review and further
approval as the process entered its third year. This work was headed by Mr Chris Abert
(Switzerland) who devoted considerable time and effort to developing these guidelines and
in the issue of the final Technical Report. Like ISO 13392 it was then finally published
as ISO TR 18786
Health and safety in welding – Guideline to risk assessment of welding
fabrication activities
in 2014.
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