Roseburg Plywood Mill Adds Wireless Alerts To Improve Safety

The Roseburg Forest Products softwood plywood mill in Coquille, OR is a massive facility – 700,000 square feet –  with lots of moving parts. Logs entering one end of the plant are formed into finished plywood through a largely automated production process. Safety is a major concern – whether it is employee safety or the ever-present threat of fire. A new system of wireless alerting transmitters is enhancing safety and improving response times for electricians and millwrights, thus improving efficiency.

The Roseburg plant has long been a staple in the community. It is common for generations of family members to work here, creating a real sense of community. So safety isn’t just a buzzword. It’s personal. To speed the response to an emergency the company previously relied on a system of 4 hard-wired call buttons scattered throughout the plant.

These featured two separate buttons – one for “man down” – indicating an injury on the plant floor, or “fire” – for a fire. The hard-wired boxes provided a means of alerting radio-equipped personnel to emergencies – but only when they were operational, which as they aged was rather hit or miss. Clearly, something had to be done.

“We knew we had to make a change” said plant Technical Manager Pete Carter, “because if one of these boxes went down, then the whole system was down.” The outage might be minor, requiring only a few hours to fix, or it could be major, taking the system out of commission for two weeks or more. To complicate matters, the company that manufactured the original system, Murphy’s Law, has since gone out of business, and no longer supports the equipment.

From Woodworking Network: woodworkingnetwork.com.

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