Out Loud Blog

If you read this blog, you’re probably familiar with Jason Townsell’s blog posts. Jason has written about construction safety, accident investigation, chemical safety, hazard control and more. He provides his expertise not only as a safety professional, but as the 2010 Future Leader in EHS scholarship recipient. Now, college students around the country have the chance to apply to become the next Future Leader.

The Future Leaders in EHS program, launched by PureSafety and EHS Today in 2010, was created to support and encourage EHS students as they respond to the challenges of the 21st century workplace and lead the way in keeping tomorrow’s workers safe, healthy and on the job. The Future Leader in EHS winner receives a $5,000 scholarship, access to PureSafety’s safety and health information solutions and the opportunity to serve on the EHS Today editorial advisory board for 2 years. The winner also will be featured in a forthcoming issue of EHS Today.

To qualify as a Future Leader in EHS, applicants must be enrolled as a junior, senior or graduate student in an EHS-related program at an accredited U.S. college or university; must be an American citizen; and must have a minimum GPA 0f 3.0 overall, with at least a 3.25 in EHS-related courses. Interested students must submit a completed application and provide three recommendations and three documented examples of outreach within their local or EHS communities.

The deadline for all Future Leaders applications is September 30. Visit the Future Leaders in EHS page for more information and to download the application.

If you’d like to follow in Jason’s footsteps and become the next Future Leader in EHS, please apply by the end of September. We look forward to receiving your application, and may the best leader win.

Yesterday afternoon, I was working as usual when I started to feel very strange: dizzy and disoriented, like my equilibrium was knocked out of whack. I actually held on to the edges of my desk for a moment because the floor seemed to be moving beneath me.

At first, I assumed I was coming down with a sudden, severe case of the flu. Then I wondered if something had happened to our office building. And while the possibility of an earthquake did float through my mind, I quickly pushed it away. After all, this is Cleveland — we aren’t exactly known for our earthquakes.

It wasn’t until my coworkers started getting up and commenting on the fact that the ground must have just moved that I took the earthquake idea seriously. (And let the record show that it was EHS Today’s very own Sandy Smith who was the first to announce: “That was an earthquake!”) It was the first time I’d ever felt an earthquake — I grew up in Pennsylvania and have lived in low-earthquake-risk areas ever since — and I was mostly just relieved to know I wasn’t coming down with a violent illness.

We now know, of course, that shortly before 2 p.m. on Aug. 23, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake centered near Mineral, Va., rattled the East coast. People felt the tremor as far away as North Carolina and Ottowa, Canada. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake was so widely felt because it was shallow, and because geologic conditions in the eastern states — namely, older rock — allow earthquakes to spread more efficiently than in the west.

While the nation’s more experienced earthquake veterans on the West Coast poked fun at us newbies to the east for our reactions to the quake, the fact that so many of us are unprepared is no laughing matter. Take my coworker, who had to leave the office early to head to the hospital because her mother-in-law was injured while evacuating a Cleveland office building during the quake. In her rush to leave, she missed a step, fell in the stairway and suffered a shattered wrist.

People in Washington, D.C., New York City and even Cleveland evacuated their buildings and went streaming into the streets when the quake hit, which is not exactly the safest earthquake behavior. According to FEMA, most earthquake-related injuries occur when people try to move to different locations inside buildings or attempt to evacuate. Clearly, this side of the country needs an introductory earthquake preparedness course.

FEMA offers the following earthquake safety tips:

>>During the earthquake, minimize your movements to a few steps to a nearby safe place.

>>If you are indoors, stay there until the shaking has stopped and you are sure exiting is safe.

>>Drop to the ground and take cover by getting under a sturdy table or piece of furniture. If you don’t have sturdy furniture nearby, cover your face and head with your arms and crouch in an inside corner of the building.

>>Stay away from glass, windows, outside doors and walls and anything that could fall.

>>Stay in bed if you are there when the earthquake strikes. Hold on and protect your head with a pillow, unless you are under a heavy light fixture that could fall. In that case, move to the nearest safe place.

>>Use a doorway for shelter only if it is in close proximity to you and if you know it is a strongly supported, load-bearing doorway.

>>Be aware that the electricity may go out or the sprinkler systems or fire alarms may turn on.

>>Do not use the elevators.

>>If you are outdoors when the earthquake strikes, remain outside but move away from buildings, streetlights and utility wires. The greatest danger exists directly outside buildings, at exits and alongside exterior walls.

>>If you’re in a moving vehicle when an earthquake hits, stop as quickly as is safely possibly and stay in the vehicle. Avoid stopping near or under buildings, trees, overpasses or utility wires.

Thankfully, it appears this side of the country emerged from the earthquake shaken but largely unscathed. The quake served as a reminder, however, that even the East Coast is not immune to damaging tremors. We need to play it safe and be prepared.

For more safety tips and earthquake information, visit FEMA’s Earthquake page.

A few weeks ago, I visited a small music shop here in Southern California called “Singer Music.” It wasn’t just a clever name. The Singer family has owned and operated this business for over 30 years, which is pretty impressive considering our current economic state.

So how did they do it? A great business plan and savvy business decisions, sure. Long hours, hard work and perhaps some sleepless nights. And while these attributes are important, I also like to think the Singers’ success can be attributed to how they stick to the basics by providing reliable, friendly service that results in positive customer relations. Keep your clientele happy and they’ll spread the word and keep coming back.

That seemed pretty simple to me, so I started thinking about the most basic purposes of occupational safety.

If you are involved with any part of safety in the workplace, you must adjust to constant changes. Over the past few years, OSHA has made a number of revisions to standards, including crane operations, PPE, hazard communications and electrical safety, just to name a few. Each change is backed by safety committees, numerous studies and surveys. All of these revisions are deemed necessary, and I tend to agree with most of them, even if safety updates can sometimes be a little confusing or time consuming.

But let’s put aside the “safety merry-go-round” for a moment and not lose sight of the basic goal of workplace safety: Returning home at the end of the day to your family and friends in one piece … or returning home at all.

Back to the Basics

I worked with a guy a few years ago who would be more than happy to testify the importance of going home at the end of your shift. He was climbing an interior access ladder in a warehouse to service the HVAC units on the roof – something he had done numerous times. When he reached the roof hatch, he unhooked the latch and locked it in place. As he started to ascend through the hatch, the lock gave way and slammed down, causing him to duck, let go of the ladder and fall 18 feet to the concrete floor below.

The bad news is he suffered multiple breaks in his right arm and sustained a pretty significant back injury. The good news is he suffered multiple breaks in his right arm and sustained a pretty significant back injury. He was lucky. A couple of surgeries fixed his arm and almost a year of not working helped allow the back injury to recover.

After the dust settled, I sat down with him and discussed what, exactly, happened. He has a wife and two little girls, so his emotions were pretty evident during our recap of the incident, but he said something interesting. He told me that the bottom line is he forgot to stick to the basic safety procedures that he had been trained multiple times on.

As safety professionals, we are charged with the responsibility of training and making our employees aware of all relevant safety changes, revisions and updates. Sometimes we might find ourselves getting caught up in the hype of the new standards, but we should always return to the basic principle of safety, which is sending everyone home at the end of the day. That might sound overly simplistic or cliché, but it’s true.

So go to work. Help protect yourself and coworkers from injury (or worse). Make some money. Head home to your family and friends. And who knows? Maybe take up a new hobby. I hear learning to play a musical instrument is a good one.

Guest blogger Aaron J. Morrow, CHST, works as a project HSE manager and is a safety consultant, an OSHA 500 trainer, a Cal/OSHA 5109 trainer and a construction risk insurance specialist.

The effects of chemicals on the body are, at best, unpredictable. Factors to consider when attempting to determine a chemical exposure’s impact include the dose; method of exposure; the receiver’s sensitivity to the chemical; and the additive, synergistic and potentiation effects, which I will explain later.

To protect workers from damaging chemical exposure, the person conducting the chemical hazard analysis must understand the specifics of the material being handled as well as the properties of materials (if any) that may be added to or mixed with the material. This includes common and expected effects of exposure, common methods of exposure, reactive properties of the material (including an analysis of conditions that will present a reaction), any flammable and combustible characteristics, biological effects and the effects created when the materials are mixed with others.

Exponential Hazards

Many people know that mixing materials can be a very dangerous practice. Many do not know, however, that depending upon the materials that are mixed and the conditions that are present, the negative effects can be multiplied exponentially. Several chemical material mixing effects include:

The Additive Effect – When the additive effect occurs, chemicals that are combined add their individual toxic effects together, thus producing a biological effect that is the sum of the two individual effects. This can be compared to being exposed to double the dose of either of the chemicals independently. Additive effects typically take place when two chemicals have the same effect on the body, such as consuming of two different types of chemical depressants (i.e. narcotics and alcohol).

The Synergistic Effect – When the synergistic effect occurs, the exposure to two different toxic chemicals that have been mixed together will produce a more severe effect than simply doubling the dose of either of the chemicals alone. In this case, the effect of exposure is essentially multiplied rather than added together. The specific multiplication factors depend on the chemical properties involved in the mixture. For example, mixing ammonia and bleach creates deadly chlorine gas, which is much more hazardous than either ammonia or bleach alone.

Potentiation – When potentiation takes place, an exposure with no known chemical effect acts together with a known toxic material to produce a reaction that is much more potent than the known chemical and, in turn, creates a greater hazard. A common industrial application of the potentiation phenomenon is the effect produced when employees are exposed to high noise levels and ototoxins (chemicals such as fuel that can produce hearing loss) simultaneously. When this occurs, the permanent hearing threshold shifts are much more powerful than when exposed to noise alone. Thus the noise (with no toxic effect) acts with the known toxin to produce a more potent effect.

These effects must be thoroughly considered and comprehensively examined during chemical hazard analyses. Assessments should consider chemical use and the possibility and consequences of these effects. Without doing so, chemical safety is just a shot in the dark.

EHS Today guest blogger Jason Townsell was named the 2010 Future Leader in EHS. He works as an assistant safety manager/trainer for LA World Airports (LAWA) Airport Development Group.

EHS Today wants to know – where were you on 9/11, and how did the events on that day affect you both then and now?

In a special issue of American Psychologist dedicated to the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, psychologists reveal just how influential these terrorist attacks have been on our country, our citizens and our psychology. The issue, “9/11: Ten Years Later,” focuses on the enduring impact of 9/11, including the social-psychological impact; post-traumatic stress disorder; how 9/11 shaped the past decade; how youth were affected by growing in a post-9/11 world; and more.

“The attacks of 9/11 did far more than destroy buildings and kill thousands of innocent people. They interrupted routine patterns and tugged at our social fabric, not simply in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, but across the country as well,” wrote Roxane Cohen Silver of the University of California, Irvine, in the journal’s introduction. “They shattered a sense of security and perceptions of invulnerability among residents of the United States and the Western world.”

When the terrorists attacked on 9/11, each person experienced that day and its aftermath in complex but unique ways. EHS Today recently asked readers to share their memories of that day (“Where Were You on Sept. 11, 2001?”). Editor Sandy Smith shared her experience – worrying for days over the fate of her friend in New York City – and now we want to hear from you. Where were you that day? How did 9/11 affect your family, your friends, your work? Finally, how are you different today, 10 years after the attacks?

To share your experience for inclusion in our special 9/11 coverage in the September issue of EHS Today, please email your experiences in 300 words or less to sandy.smith@penton.com with the subject line 9/11. We will publish your recollection anonymously, if you wish, but otherwise please include your name, city and state.

“Even those individuals who did not know anyone who died that day have been touched by the tragedy,” Silver wrote. “We are different now.”