Episode 152: Choosing Words Wisely

French, delves into the theme of safety in the media, focusing on its portrayal and the importance of accurate reporting. Dr. French shares his background in journalism and expresses his frustration with the media's handling of workplace safety incidents. He highlights a specific example of a misleading news headline about a fatal machinery accident, emphasizing that the term "mishap" downplays the severity of such incidents. Dr. French stresses the need for proper safety measures, like lockout/tagout procedures, to prevent accidents.

In the second half of the podcast, Dr. French contrasts poor journalism with a well-researched article from the Wall Street Journal about a BP refinery explosion. He criticizes the handling of safety alarms at the refinery and the inadequate penalties imposed by OSHA, illustrating how companies prioritize profit over employee safety. He applauds managers who prioritize shutting down operations to address safety issues but laments that safety is still often compromised for economic reasons. Dr. French concludes by advocating for transparency and better safety practices to protect workers.

Transcript

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This week on the podcast. Once again, we're talking about safety in the media, how it's handled, how it creates perception. And what more can we do to really get to the truth this week on the podcast? 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. Hello, and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy you've joined me for another talk about safety. And my random thoughts about everything I see. So a little bit about me and my background. Very early I considered going into like broadcast media or journalism. I enjoyed doing it, I actually think back on it and probably thought I was better than what I really was. Oh, the great days when you're young, and you think that all what I'm what I'm doing is wonderful. But I had the opportunity to do a little bit of that work in college and kind of around my college time for local radio, did some of it for my high school back then the high school years, but didn't enjoy it and learned a lot about journalism and media and a lot of the control that they can hold. One of my frustrations as have entered the safety world is one just kind of the lack of passion sometimes. Now there's there's examples otherwise, of some fantastic examples of really good journalism. And I would love to talk about some of those, hopefully on the second half, if I get to that point. If I feel like I can get there on time. One of my other parts of it is that sometimes it's not so good, that we try to be too fancy, we try to call it what it really is, rather than trying to really describe it. And the news certainly wants to grab people's attention, bring people to it to be able to earn some sort of advertising revenue. So when they are putting out items talking about the things they're doing, in putting out that the word of whatever they're working on, it's supposed to grab attention. And in this case, it grabbed my attention very quickly. And a little bit frustrating, because I don't think they understood the word they used, as well as what they should. So this one is from an hour, we'll post a link on my LinkedIn and Facebook page. If you follow the podcast there, it'll have a link to this news story. Very short news story out of San Antonio. And it was the headline that blew my mind. Employee dies in machinery mishap at a food processing plant. The word mishap and occupational fatality, to me don't match up employee dies in machinery accident, maybe in machinery. There are all kinds of other words that you can use because I decided I wanted to take it one step further with my frustration and I looked up the word mishap and the word mishap according to the dictionary, is an unlucky an accident in their example is although there were a few minor mishaps none of the pancakes duck to the ceiling. You know it's almost a whimsical like oh my goodness, such a just an unlucky accident that happened. This is not an unlucky accident. This is a lack of control, a lack of culture. There were lack and I'm sure OSHA will find Those things that there were lack of protection in some form because so a maintenance worker died in a food processing facility after a tragic accident. Now, the first line of the news story captures it right there. That is true. It's not a mishap. According to the police reports, the employee had been trapped by machinery, they were able to remove the employee, but they died at the scene. The accident happened around 10am at the food processing plant located and they put actually the location of it, the investigation into the incident is ongoing. I would love to know more, I would love for them to have reached out to the organization and ask questions, and dove a little deeper into what happened. But the the headline frustrated me, because industrial accidents that lead to industrial fatalities, people who don't go home when they come in to go to work every day, because of either one, they believe they have to get it done faster than what they think they feel like they can they feel confident that they can cut the corners, they feel sure that someone understands what they're doing. There's a reason that this happens to people. And that's what it's not a mishap. It's not just an unfortunate, unlucky, coincidental accident, there were layers of protection that should have been in place to protect this person. The first one, of course, is lockout tagout, the control of hazardous energy, it's been a standard for a very long time. And even before the inaction of the standard, there were a lot of places that knew that they needed to signal not to turn things on. So it was usually a tag system with a zip tie, or you clipped your tag onto a starting switch that would say I'm in here don't don't operate it. i We don't know what happened here, there's very little detail, which bothers me a little bit that we don't know anything, my guess is in six to eight months or so OSHA will release something about it, we may or may not make the news. So it may or may not be very well found what happened. I am so certain though, that there will be at least a citation that hits the lockout tagout control of hazardous energy standard, because in this case, the equipment should not have operated with someone in it, if the proper controls had been put into place. Now whether the person knew it, I don't know where they ever trained. I couldn't say my guess is maybe because the training happens, usually automatic, usually some sort of online training about lockout tagout, how to go in and you should know to de energize and tested in the steps that you take to perform a lockout tagout turn off de energize, block it, lock it all these things and then begin you're done, test it and then begin your work. A lot of times that training gets pushed to the wayside because of a culture that says we have to get it done. Or it can't be that dangerous. Or we've done it so many times before, without someone getting hurt. We've done it so many times before without incident. And just because it happened for the first time, just because it happened to this person. Doesn't mean the risk wasn't there, the risk was always there. The risk was probably known by someone that there was a risk there and made the calculation to avoid the risk to avoid what could happen. And it was not a mishap. That wording I think it really stuck with me it hit me hard because the word mishap and someone dying at work. Do not put me in the same mindspace it does not convey to me the same connotation, the same demeanor, the same passion that should be there. When someone who went to work that day did not come home because of the work that they had to do as a normal process of what they do to earn money for their family. And to be able to have food, water and shelter and the basic needs of life. It's not a mishap a mishap is something small that oh my goodness that like like the example. Even though I had some mishaps, I didn't stick any pancakes to the ceiling. I love that definition. And all I did was Google it. And that's the definition that came up. And to me those two things are not the same. They mean, yeah, sure, in a very high view, probably real. No, not the same thing. You know, let's talk more about media. Let's talk more about safety and critical protections and culture. When we come back on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you are listening to the leading learning through safety podcast, with Dr. Mark French. D is da 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. And welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. So I want to switch topics a little bit. And I want to move over to good journalism, when something is looked at, reviewed, and the facts are put out the way they are. And that you see it for what it really is. In this case, it's from the Wall Street Journal. And this popped up, I just came across it again. And this one is about some information that came from a BP explosion ahead of the 2022 explosion that killed two brothers at a BP refinery. What it found this, the It cites a lot of the US Chemical Safety Board as some of the research but also there was some additional research that was done as part of this new story. And the company was there at the time, I can't even spit this out because it just bothers me. And it frustrates me too terribly. There were 3712 Safety alarms during that day of the incident, they knew things were bad. They knew things weren't right. If you read through this, that the alarms were reported over a 12 hour period. It's more than a human can effectively respond to so let's talk about that a little bit. That's what got me the most is at what point does a company go? That's more than a human can handle? Shut it down? We're done. We can't do this. Or what was the expectation? Let them run, get used to it. That's what we do. You just hear that alarm all the time. Let it let it go silent and occasionally keep going. Just keep silencing them. Don't Don't worry about it. Just keep going keep it going. Because for every week the refinery was shut down for maintenance. The plant lost what they can what they thought was$404 million during the first seven months of 22. That's more than BP had forecast for the shutdown of those seven months. And in what really kicks me in this is why I think a lot of companies don't worry about OSHA as the penalties are so small in comparison. So BP agreed to pay $125,000 to settle the violations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. So the fines added up to about 125,000. That sounds like a lot until you found out that BP sold the refinery to its partner for 300 million. I'm gonna be very facetious. I'm gonna be I'm gonna let my sarcastic and kind of angry side come out when I say this. That sounds like a great business deal. Let's run a really crappy thing that puts people at risk. Let's kill some people get a minuscule OSHA fine and sell it for 300 million. Wow. This happens still on the United States. And it's not the first time BP has blown up and had issues of the scale in What's bad is that the journalism went further to find more information. And it talked about how those who were working around there were even talking to their friends and family about me, I don't, I don't know how much longer I can handle all these alarms, and how bad it's getting, and in how much work is going to have to go into fixing it. Instead of just stopping. And I have to give some credit to some plant managers that I have worked with in places that make a lot of money when they're processing their chemicals correctly. We had an incident that we were investigating. And the first thing on the call, we had an immediate emergency call, kind of in the early morning hours, I remember it. And the plant manager told the superintendent on site that was kind of the head of the operation that night, shut it down. Until we figure out what we're doing. We will not produce, we will shut this down. We will figure out how we make how we fix this safety issue that we just now learned about that we might have known about and we had to investigate to figure it out and we did figure it out. But the immediate response was we shut this down, we stop, we figure it out. We do not continue. And it is scary. To think that as humans as living beings with consciousness, that we are given the choice of either doing it safely or not. Why is safety not just inherent to the choice we can make? The choice is do it or find another job. And that's okay. Evidently, I'm not saying it's okay. It just this is what it seems to be to make someone choose between their safety in their food, water and shelter, they will choose their food, water and shelter every time and they will forego safety, they will put it to the side, they will put it out of mind. They will continue to to overwork and overcompensate and do everything they can to protect themselves as the best they can. In hopes that nothing bad will happen so that they can continue to provide food, water and shelter. It is a sad thing to see that choice having to be made. And that is one of my greatest, probably modern day frustrations as a as an adult in the field of health and safety is knowing that there are still organizations out there that require people to make that choice. And that's been I know that has been around for a long, long time. They're all industrial revolutionary problems. But it feels that in the 21st century, we should be getting better. And it's frustrating. I love the new story hit me hard because it was well written. There's a lot of detail in there. And it really hits just how bad the problem was before it led to something really bad. It wasn't like oh no, we had one minor mishap it such a long chain of problems before they were able before something terrible happened. And preventable. Thank you for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Hopefully we see together the difference that when we find it, we understand it. It's reported to us we're given transparency into safety, what it can do the power it has to help us lead and to help us engage our teams. Again, thanks for joining me, I appreciate you. I appreciate what you do every day. And until next time we chat stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online@www.ts da consult thinking.com All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast