Countless coil storage safety incidents are reported each year.  Incidents of this magnitude often result in destruction to the coil(s) or property and can even cause injury or death.  These occurrences are usually caused by employee failure to follow the correct storage protocol, central malfunctions of wood storage blocks or chains, and the need for corporations to double and triple stack coils when they require increased floor space.  Without a well thought out, implemented and maintained coil storage system, an operator is gambling against the odds that a tragic incident will not occur.

For a worldwide steel service company’s branches throughout the world, excellence in safe operational practices is an option!  Its national parent corporation instituted a regulatory standard of “safety first,” which permeates through to each employee and activity throughout the corporation.  This firm’s internal processes require that they not only report safety failures , they are also required to report all “near miss events” to a very strict safety committee.  Their Branch safety committee conducts an extensive root cause research for each situation from which a safety improvement blueprint is developed, implemented and routinely monitored.  The safety program statistics, ability to learn from previous failures and best practices implementation are supervised closely by company superiors.  Company wide everyone is sensitive to the corporation’s global “zero tolerance safe practices” requirements.  Therefore, corporate management requires the same high safety standards to be employed in every one of their internal practices!

Safe steel coil storage is no excuse in the customer’s “safety first” program.  Making in excess of 30,000 tons of steel monthly in just one of their domestic assets, the operation is continuously moving coils to and from storage facilities throughout its warehouse.  This high volume of activity statistically increases the likelihood of an incident, thus requiring greater levels of attention to detail.  The company’s culture of requiring continuous safety program improvement was reinforced when the company recently experienced a non-injury “near miss” safety issue when a chain bracing system broke and resulted in a coil to displace from its wood storage timbers.  The corporation’s safety program required that this matter be corrected, and immediately! The customer expressed a need to optimize valuable floor space. He also recognized that using wooden blocks and chain bracing was creating safety hazards while creating a negative impact operation on personnel performance efficiency.  With these problems in mind, the facility operations team embarked on a detailed research study to determine how to implement a coil storage system to meet the company’s “gold-standard” safety requirements.Through their industry-wide investigation process, the safety and operations teams sought help from The Philpott Rubber Company, an internationally recognized leader in providing polymeric solutions for industrial applications.  Philpott’s project team had numerous meetings with the operator’s group and, together, came up with criteria for satisfying the appropriate storage solution requirements.

Philpott recommended a system made of an advanced polymer design, called RollStop™, which employs an easy to install, modular design. The RollStop blocks, whose location can be changed at any time based on the diameter of the stored coils, are put over the rails, four blocks per coil.  The blocks fasten themselves to the rails via the custom designed “mating rib pattern,” which eliminates the need for separate mechanical fasteners. The angle of bevel on the RollStop blocks stops coils from rolling laterally as they can with wood timbers. 

Company executives commented that they could not have been more impressed with the RollStop system.  Local and corporate management were equally pleased with the safety features that the RollStop program has given them.  The operator commented, “Not only should this keep our coils where we put them, it will also reduce the strenuous task of chaining and unchaining our coils as well as chain related accidents.”  This manager told the Philpott’s team members that he was having his insurance company tour the facility in the near future.  He said that the obvious safety features and labor saving benefits given by the RollStop system should earn his company a reduction in its property and casualty insurance costs, which he said, “is a pleasant, unanticipated financial benefit!” Although safety was the operator’s main concern when they picked the RollStop system, it has also created a very visible improvement in the look and feel of the corporation’s coil storage areas. A company supervisor explained, “We have always considered our facility as a show place when our numerous customers come to visit.  This RollStop system has added a new luster on what we were already proud of!”