MANUAL HANDLING - 18.05.2020

A guide to handling gas cylinders

The European Industrial Gases Association (EIGA) has published guidance to assist in the safe manoeuvring of gas cylinders. What’s covered and is it a document you should be using in your training etc.?

Managing the risks

Gas cylinders are generally heavy and unwieldy. There’s not only a risk of strains, sprains and injury to hands and feet when manually handling them, the cylinder head is vulnerable to damage. Dropping a cylinder can result in far worse than a crushed bone in the foot. If the cylinder head is struck, the gas can release under pressure, shooting the heavy cylinder in the opposite direction.

New guidance

Guidance for Manual Handling Activities of Cylinders has been published by the European Industrial Gases Association (EIGA) with the aim of improving the safety practices of those who use pressurised gases (see The next step ). It covers general principles of ergonomics, health effects and risk assessments. It also runs through the types of risk control measure you might implement, beginning with mechanisation to avoid manual handling through to personal protective clothing and training for staff.

Is it useful?

The information in the main part of the document is very brief and not especially helpful. Most sites handling gas cylinders would find that there’s nothing new here. For example, the section on risk assessment simply bullet points the four areas to consider - the task, individual, load and environment - with a few words describing the considerations. Although there’s a useful table giving indicative cylinder weights, the same table is provided in the British Compressed Gases Association (BCGA) guidance published in 2016.

Tip. If you need a comprehensive guide on this subject a better option is the BCGA’s. It’s free to download and full of detailed explanations and handy tips (see The next step ).

Method statements

The one part of the EIGA guide which looks very useful is Annex 1. This is a series of method statements supported with pictures. These cover:

  • lifting, lowering and carrying a small standing cylinder
  • lifting a cylinder from horizontal (fallen/laying on a pallet)
  • strapping pallets
  • pushing a cylinder with trolleys
  • cylinder rolling
  • handling cylinders on pallet ramps; and
  • loading and unloading wine racks (“wine rack” is the term used for a rack for storing horizontally stored cylinders).

Tip 1. Use the information given in Annex 1 for material to supplement your practical manual handling training. By using this staff are able to see what position they should be in to avoid injury and how to interact with equipment such as ramps, pallets and trolleys.

Tip 2. The BCGA guidance also has photo illustrations in Appendix 1. These provide a different dimension, showing both good and bad practices. Using these in combination with the EIGA method statements will be highly beneficial to staff.

for the EIGA guidance and the BCGA’s guidance on manual handling of cylinders, visit http://tipsandadvice-healthandsafety.co.uk/download (HS 18.18.05).

The EIGA guidance touches on the risk of injury, manual handling risk assessments and methods of risk control but we find that the British Compressed Gases Association’s equivalent document is a better alternative. However, do make use of the method statements which you’ll find in Annex 1 of the EIGA guide.

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