Five Ways to Prevent Winter Slips & Falls
Winter presents all sorts of challenges that other seasons do not – most notably ice and snow! When the weather outside is frightful, you must think of ways to proactively prevent slips and falls.
Creating a safe environment for your staff and customers is essential for keeping a healthy and efficiently running team but also protecting yourself from liability. We’re going to focus on five ways you can fight back against the icy grip of winter.
Ice Melt
Using an ice melt compound is a great place to start. These products can be used before it snows to prevent ice from bonding to the pavement. It also works after the fact when the compound forms a brine by attracting moisture from the ice and snow. This brine generates heat and melts the ice. To learn more about ice melt and how to use it most effectively, see our blog post Treading on Thin Ice.
Floor Mats
The last thing you want is for slush and snow to be tracked through your building making the floors wet and slippery. This is a dangerous risk for slips and falls.
A good floor mat at the entrance is essential to trapping as much of the moisture as possible. In fact, using a triple mat system can be an excellent line of defense. Our blog post Extend the Life of Your Floors contains lots of great info about mats and how you can best use them.
Clean Up
If the wet snow from outside does make it past the floor mat, it will need to be cleaned up. A wet/dry vacuum will definitely come in handy in this situation. Our Proteam Proguard is great for emergency spills, detail cleaning and portable jobsite maintenance.
In addition to the wet/dry vac, a floor squeegee like this one is a practical tool for dealing with wet floors. A floor squeegee can also be used to finish off the job of cleaning the floors so they are not wet and prone to slips.
Dry Floors
This may seem obvious, but keeping the floor dry will greatly decrease the risk for falls. Using a scrubber like this one not only cuts down on noise (it’s called STEALTH for a reason!) but water too. This machine has a rugged weighted squeegee assembly, which removes water when the cleaning is done. This is a big plus for companies with a lot of foot traffic. It’s not worth the risk of having people slipping and sliding down the halls.
Smaller operations may use a smaller machine such as this Betco Motomop. This small area scrubber cleans four times faster than a mop and bucket and is engineered to leave the floor dry!
Beware!
If a wet floor is unavoidable, you simply must put people on alert by using these wet floor signs. The bright yellow colour with the precautionary message will at least warn people to the possible danger of a slippery floor.
These five areas of focus will help to keep your floors safe this winter. If you have any questions about your particular organization’s needs, contact our Checkers team. We are your clean resource and happy to help.
