Episode 131 - Hazard Prediction

This week's podcast is about the uncertainty of predicting interaction with hazards .

Links:
https://www.wsmv.com/2023/09/19/construction-worker-jumps-into-river-cool-off-dies/

https://www.ktnv.com/news/circular-saw-accident-leads-to-las-vegas-strip-construction-workers-death

Transcript

Announcer: 0:15

Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:12

Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hi, I am your host, Dr. Mark French. And I am so happy to have you joining me on this episode of the podcast as we talk about leadership, primarily leadership behaviors. And the most important thing as a leader, is it really without people, are you really a leader in the first place? And how do you assure your people are okay? Safety. It's all safety. And that's what I focus on the most here is leadership through safety and safety through leadership that all make sense in my head when I say it. And then here we are. So glad you're with me, I want to kick things off with an update to a new story where, you know, I I'm impressed. I complained about this. And now I go back and we see I see where things go actually got reported. It took some time but it came out. And I'm at least happy they fall it took it took around a week. So a couple of podcasts or more ago, I did a part about news media and how it feels like sometimes that an occupational fatality is just routine news. Like it doesn't get the exposure that it should. And it could be because of lack of information. It could be because it it loses whatever. I guess it just feels too common or it feels too normal. Or maybe there's vested interest. But personally when I think about journalism, and I think about news media, and I think about reporting, I feel that occupational fatalities or big events should be really thoroughly investigated like anything else where, you know, you see the the natural disasters hits, and they're interviewing everybody on the street about what did you see what happened? Send us your news tips. I mean, they're just all this information is coming in. And then when someone has a very unfortunate work event, we treat it as almost too normal. And that normalization demeans what that really is and what has happened. And again, that's all my opinion. But we were talking about the Grand Prix. They were building the grandstand for the Grand Prix coming up in Las Vegas. And it was basically like, yeah, there was someone who had a fatal injury right in front of the Bellagio. fountains, and that was it. That's all there was in the original article, which was back in late September when that first happened. And I when I read it, I was like, that is just way too common that feels that feels like a blurb out of any other news story, almost like a community affairs like oh, and next weekend, there'll be a picnic at this church. Everybody's in mind and it will it was just so felt stock in artificial. I'm very impressed. And I will actually retract some of that of like, hey, maybe there's more to it. There was actually a follow up story, but it was a week later. And what they said was that the the individual in the accident was using an electric circular saw on the Formula One grandstands right there from the Bellagio fountains. The witnesses confirmed that the worker had a piece of metal in the saw kickback and hit them in the neck. The people at the site did everything they could to preserve This person's life. And ultimately, they died from that injury, which that's a severe injury, you don't take a circular circular assault to the neck. And that's bad. And that's unfortunate. And there feels like so much wrong there. So I can speculate all day long on all the things that may have gone wrong with that from anywhere from tool usage to improper tool to medical response to being prepared to training, have did they know, in what they were doing, how they were doing it? At the end of the day, there was someone who lost their life at work. And it feels, and I know it has to be preventable, and should have been preventable could have been preventable, should have been preventable. But um, at least we know, we know that the news did more, they interviewed witnesses, they did something. Yeah, it was a few days later, at least it came out. And I'm happy that we have information, I'm happy that there was some due diligence that it was treated more than routine that there were people out there seeking information. And I mean, I'm, I'm not thinking that though, they heard my podcast, and they decided to go out there and do something about it. No, I doubt that. But I'm happy that maybe other people in the community were asking questions of, okay, you got to give us more. This was huge. This was a big deal. This was something large happened in a very prominent location. And this is the best you give us? No, there is more. It has to be investigated, talked about, prevented and prevented through education. We don't know how to fix unless we know what it is. And I think that's a that's a huge piece of understanding what happened, and how we prevent that through whatever intervention needs to happen.

Stinger: 7:11

You are listening to the leading a learning through safety podcast, with Dr. Mark French,

Mark French: 7:19

in that same realm of education and thinking about like, how do you educate? What do you prepare for how do you do a hazard assessment, there was a very interesting article that I came across. And again, if you want to see these links, I will post them as part of my Facebook page as part of my LinkedIn page, they will be posted. So you can click on them and read them yourself. This one here was back on September 19. I've been holding on to it. But it really struck me as you know, this is something I want to talk about this week as part of this trend. This was another little tiny blurb, but I'm sure there's probably not much more information to find. But a construction worker in Nashville, jumped into the Cumberland River to cool off. And later on, they found his body. I read that and I think whoa, what, what on earth is going on at this construction site, where someone goes, I'm gonna go swim in the Cumberland River to cool off, I'll be back and doesn't return. That is when I think about what all was happening in the dynamic of human nature, the dynamic of people the dynamic of a company. You wonder what happened here. And as a safety professional I, I admit, I'm a little stunned by that one. And there's a lot there too, that I think about and I walk through in my head with what little information we have, and again, very little information, of course, there will be an OSHA investigation, if that gets reported out. Who knows? I mean, I'm gonna wait and see and hopefully I can keep finding information on that one. Kind of like I did with a Grand Prix. Well, I'm gonna keep looking, keep digging, and hopefully something will come up to tell me more.

Unknown: 9:19

I don't know if there'll be a whole lot more because it seems that was very cut and dry with, Hey, I'm hot. I'm going for a swim and something happened. And with that, we have a lot to think about and I put myself in the situation if I were the safety manager, or if I was the leader in the situation where I get that phone and unfortunate notification of something happened to my what would I do? Where would my thoughts go? How would I prepare? How would I How would I be thoughtful about the A dia of what happened. Let's chat more about that coming up in the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, DSD, a consulting, learn you lead others, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. The problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr. Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more. Individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at T SDA consulting.com.

Mark French: 10:48

And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So we're talking about a news story from Nashville, a bout a construction worker who was hot, jumped into the government of the Cumberland River and didn't return. Unfortunate that there's a fatality from a construction site. I put myself knowing only at face value, what happened to you, I put myself in the situation of those of that safety manager of that leadership group. And I'm not sure I would have ever said anything about jumping into the river. I'm going to be perfectly frank and vulnerable and honest and open. And I would love to hear comments on this. I would love to hear your side of it. What do you do here? So there's a construction work that's really not, maybe it's right against the river, maybe it's not, maybe it's close enough or walking close enough or whatever, it's hot outside, maybe we look at our heat stress program to make sure that maybe there's cooling towels, maybe there's extra water, whatever we do, we make sure that maybe our heat stress program is shored up as part of that process of investigation and prevention. We take another step forward. And I go to myself and I think even just people I know, in other worlds that yeah, they work for smaller companies. But would they go hey, I'm a really great swimmer, I have been in the Cumberland before I'm from the area, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm burning up hot, we're close to the on the day, I'm gonna go go for a little swim come back. Cool off. Would I have thought is the safety professional safety manager leadership person that I needed to say don't go in the river as part of the safety program, maybe. And again, being vulnerable and honest here, I don't think I would, I don't think that would have been part of my safety training. I think as a construction, in my experience in construction, I definitely would have said a lot about the tools, working at heights, hot work, confined spaces for trenching rebar usage, all of the things that you think about in construction, in those worlds of construction, and I, unless we were on the river, like right on it, where there will be a chances by slipping and falling in or we were unloading. Unloading from a barge or unloading from the boat or using a boat on a crane crane on a boat, a boat on a crane, no, a crane on a boat. Something like that. Yeah, there would have been some water safety, about when you're doing those work practices, we're going to follow some rules there to be protected, such as life vests, etc, etc. Would I have thought about the idea of during the workday going for a swim. And I'm not blaming the worker here, either. Because that's there's, there's something in the system that is never one or the other in safety. And that is, I'm going to regress for one moment and get one of the greatest flaws. And one of the greatest problems we have in the safety world is sometimes management comes to us with the silver bullet approach. They want one answer that's going to fix all of their safety problems. They want that one answer that they're going to put 20% of effort to get 80% return, and they're excited and they're happy and they want it all done. Right then right there. And it's just one fix. And or we're going to get a whole bunch of gain from this one thing we're going to do. No, no. Sometimes you get some big push by doing something. But safety is multivariate, which means there's all it's more than one answer there's you're always going to have to attack a problem. You're always want to have to look for improvement with multiple things at once, it's not going to be one thing that's going to make the difference. Now, the one thing may be reporting, but you're going to get so much from that reporting that you're going to have a lot to do. So to really get to the point of where you're making the impact at the level of where the work is happening, it takes a lot of different items. And it's, it's all at the same time, not to say there's going to be 100 things you have to do, but it's going to be more than one, or it's going to be more than two, in most cases, you're going to have this various approaches, even at the most simple level, we're going to fix something, we're going to communicate it and we're going to add this something to our procedures. There's three things right there. There's doing training and standardizing just for one simple thing. And that's an engineering fix. Imagine if it's more complex. And so with any incident, it is multi, there's the there's the action, there's the people, there's the incident, there's the engineering, it's all there, and the prevention is a part of the whole, not just one piece of it. And so here, I think about all the things that could be done to prevent a drowning. And was there PPE available was the heat stress because they said he was hot? And did they No, not don't go. So that's going to be our rule. Don't go in the river. Whatever you do, don't go in the river. And I've done don't go into confined space. If you see the big sign that says danger, confined space. We don't do confined spaces don't go in there. I've done that training before. I've done the ones where we only do hot work in the area that says hot work approved. I've, I've done trainings where we say avoid this area because it stay within the green lines. Don't walk outside of those because that's where traffic, whether it be powered industrial truck or truck traffic or something. That's where we designate the traffic. So stay in the guardrail, stay in the tape, stay in the safe zone while you're working. We've done training like that I've done training like that, I know that there's a physical hazard there is less the physical hazard was interfering with the work. I'm not sure that my that I would have caught that. Or I would have thought to say, hey, there's something more built in here. And I think about weather conditions. Yeah. When the weather changes, I think about the times that we've done weather alerts with high winds, or there could be thunderstorms, or there could be excessive heat or excessive cold. Yep, that's a good communication tool, toolbox talk that can be used. But when I see that one, I really scratch my head and go, I don't know if I would have like, Where will this investigation go. And I'm very interested in trying to understand where that investigation is going to go and the outcome of it. Because that is one that we have to think about human behavior and the interaction of human behavior with whatever radius of day distance there is from the hazards. So you think about the workplace, and how far away are the other hazards from your workplace, or your open work system during your work hours? And how do you prepare for that? That's a whole new level of planning that I'm not sure I've ever considered and now I'm considering it because of that event. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Until next time we chat stay safe.

Announcer: 19:03

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