Do they? This is a mindset that some will argue prevents people from being as careful as they could. Your beliefs about the likelihood or outcome of a mishap affect how much, if any, precautions you take. At my office, we have many slip/trip/falls on campus and yet, people go be-bopping down stairs reading their iPhone and not using a handrail. As a safety professional, I will stop these scoundrels and ask them to modify that, but it’s never easy to have that conversation because you feel like a cop.
A while back, at one of our facilities, a sign at the front entrance blew over in a gust of wind. An employee tripped over the sign and fractured an ankle or wrist. When the site pulled the security camera footage, they discovered that 21 people walked by the fallen sign without mishap – or action -- and the 22nd fell and got hurt. So there were 21 times that injury could have been prevented. We used this as an example of why everyone should “See something. Say something. Do something.” It’s not easy or usually convenient to ‘get involved’ (I’m on my way out; It’s not my sign; I’m in a hurry; What sign?….) but if YOU could stop someone else from getting hurt, if you had the gift of foresight, wouldn’t you want to? Wouldn’t you want the Superman feeling that comes with that?
Accidents don’t just happen – there are usually quite a number of things that could have stopped the chain of events leading up to it. Most accident investigations reveal quite a few problems. Sometimes investigators stop when they get to the employee – ‘overtired employee’ for example. But they need to ask the next question…how come the employee was so tired? And then you find out he was forced by low seniority to work a double two days in a row. Retraining him on fork lift use isn’t going to prevent the next fork life accident. But maybe revisiting overtime policies would.
Just some food for thought today as I look at our safety incident records. Mark Twain once said, “It is better to be careful 100 times than to get killed once.”
A while back, at one of our facilities, a sign at the front entrance blew over in a gust of wind. An employee tripped over the sign and fractured an ankle or wrist. When the site pulled the security camera footage, they discovered that 21 people walked by the fallen sign without mishap – or action -- and the 22nd fell and got hurt. So there were 21 times that injury could have been prevented. We used this as an example of why everyone should “See something. Say something. Do something.” It’s not easy or usually convenient to ‘get involved’ (I’m on my way out; It’s not my sign; I’m in a hurry; What sign?….) but if YOU could stop someone else from getting hurt, if you had the gift of foresight, wouldn’t you want to? Wouldn’t you want the Superman feeling that comes with that?
Accidents don’t just happen – there are usually quite a number of things that could have stopped the chain of events leading up to it. Most accident investigations reveal quite a few problems. Sometimes investigators stop when they get to the employee – ‘overtired employee’ for example. But they need to ask the next question…how come the employee was so tired? And then you find out he was forced by low seniority to work a double two days in a row. Retraining him on fork lift use isn’t going to prevent the next fork life accident. But maybe revisiting overtime policies would.
Just some food for thought today as I look at our safety incident records. Mark Twain once said, “It is better to be careful 100 times than to get killed once.”