Out Loud Blog

I would like to start this blog by splitting apart those two words in the phrase “pretty good.” Bear with me:

Pretty: Pleasing or attractive in a graceful or delicate way. That’s a pretty sunset, dress or picture. For all you horticulture fans: that’s a pretty flower, tree or plant. For some bonus points: my girlfriend, fiancé or wife is a very pretty woman. And for the sports fans: that was a pretty pass, catch or run. Each description is positive.

Good: Being positive or desirable in nature; not bad or poor: a good experience; good news; a good day; good at his/her job. Again, each description is positive.

But put these two words together and they begin to take on a negative connotation. When I hear the phrase “pretty good,” I immediately start thinking something or someone is mediocre, so-so, tolerable or just OK. I guess if the movie was pretty good, you would feel like you didn’t quite waste your money, but could’ve spent it better. You’re also probably not waiting for the DVD release date.

What about, “Our safety program is pretty good,” or “My guys/girls are pretty good at following safety procedures”? If this description of workplace safety doesn’t raise a bright red flag to us as safety professionals, then we’re in trouble. We cannot settle for a mediocre, so-so level of safety on the job.

I find this to be a problem when contractors, managers, owners, supervisors, etc., are trying to stay on schedule and under budget. Unfortunately, in our present economy, budgets and schedules are a priority and safety may suffer or risk becoming a backburner issue. Some leaders in this economy seem to be content with a “pretty good” safety plan.

I like to dare my contractors to stand up loud and proud to announce to all employees that their safety and well-being is second to schedule and making money. Ask anyone who has been involved or witnessed a work-related accident/fatality and tell me what that does to your schedule and profit.

I’d encourage everyone to take a look in the old proverbial mirror and check your company’s safety program, training and execution on the jobsite. Make sure it’s not “pretty good.” Go for pretty great or phenomenal. Better yet, drop the whole pretty thing and leave that term to describe the (fill in the blank) prettier things in life.

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.

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.

I spent the week talking to doctors about the many things we think of as “fun” that land us in the emergency room. Barbecues, fireworks, lawn work and gardening, pools, softball, boats and jet skis… You name the activity and they’ve seen someone come through the emergency room doors with an injury related to it.

As I spoke with them, I thought of the dumb things I’ve done during summertime activities: mowing the grass in flip flops; neglecting to clear the grass of sticks, toys and rocks before mowing (casualty: two basement windows); riding on the boat of sailors more inexperienced than me, and that’s saying something; reaching under bushes to clear debris without looking to see what else might be under there (hard to say who was more startled, me or the rather large snake I disturbed - I’d say me, since the snake did not run away screaming at the top of its lungs); allowing friends to barbecue while drinking; leaving a kiddie pool sitting full and unattended in my backyard for several days; unloading hundreds of pounds of dirt and stones on the very first nice day of spring…

Any one of these activities could have resulted in serious injury or death to myself or others. I know better; I write about safety every day. I can’t allow summer to lull me into a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. For me, the “Aha! moment” was the snake.

What about you? What “Aha! moment” have you experienced this summer?

Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Gulf of Mexico oil rig that exploded last year killing 11 workers and causing what has been called one of the worst environmental disasters ever, told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a recent filing that substantial bonuses and raises for top executives were based on the company’s “exemplary” safety performance last year.

Quickly backtracking in an effort to avoid public outcry, the company released a statement apologizing for the wording in the 2010 proxy statement, acknowledging, “Some of the wording … may have been insensitive in light of the incident that claimed the lives of 11 exceptional men last year and we deeply regret any pain that it may have caused.”

The company claimed that nothing in the proxy statement was intended to minimize the tragedy or “diminish the impact it has had on those who lost loved ones.”

In what has to be one of the worst cases of denial I’ve ever seen – or one of the most masterful attempts at whitewashing – the SEC statement submitted by the company said: “Notwithstanding the tragic loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico, we achieved an exemplary statistical safety record as measured by our total recordable incident rate and total potential severity rate. As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”

If the company considers 2010 to have been an “exemplary” safety performance, I’m horrified at the thought of previous and future years. I think that most employers would acknowledge that the loss of 11 lives hardly qualifies as “exemplary.” Here at EHS Today, we pride ourselves on our America’s Safest Companies awards program. I can guarantee that Transocean Ltd. won’t be winning it anytime soon.

To add insult to injury for the families of the 11 workers killed, Transocean President and CEO Steven L. Newman received a $200,000 salary increase and nearly $375,000 bonus in 2010. His base salary will increase from $900,000 to $1.1 million.

I’m certain Transocean calls it justified and well-deserved. I call it blood money.

If I wanted to sign up for a BP credit card, they’d run a credit check on me to ensure I’m a good risk.

I’d like to know who was running a credit check on BP when the company requested expedited permits for the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. (You know, the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and creating an environmental catastrophe that could be one of the worst our world has seen in modern times.)

There’s a process outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which was enacted following the 1969 Santa Barbara, Calif., oil spill and mandates that federal agencies like the Minerals Management Agency must complete a thorough environmental assessment before approving major projects like offshore drilling. Regulators at the Minerals Management Agency apparently believed BP officials who assured them that the company should be granted an exemption from the process required by NEPA because the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was at low-risk for things like explosions and fires and spills.

Had officials at the Minerals Management Agency run that credit check on BP, they would have discovered the $170 million in fines issued by other federals against BP for violations of safety and environmental regulations. I’d say those fines make BP a bad credit risk.

What do you think?

The Massey Energy Co., its CEO Don Blankenship and its board of directors have a lot of explaining to do.

Massey Energy operates the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia where 25 workers were killed and four are missing following an explosion on April 5. The mine, one of many operated by Massey Energy, received 53 citations from MSHA in March, many related to ventilation and build up of methane. In 2009, the mine received over 500 citations and was issued nearly $900,000 in penalties. These fines appear to be part of the cost of doing business for Blankenship and Massey Energy.

“Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process,” Blankenship said during an interview with the Metronews radio network in West Virginia. “There are violations at every coal mine in America, and U.B.B. was a mine that had violations,” he added, referring to Upper Big Branch.

Despite its reputation as a dirty, dangerous occupation, mining can be a safe industry; just ask the dozens of companies that operate hundreds of mines where no workers have been killed or seriously injured. These owners and operators do not consider violations to be a part of doing business, nor do they consider safety as something that only should be addressed when production quotas are met.

That can’t be said of Blankenship. A memo sent by him to his deep mine superintendents in 2005 indicated the value safety holds for him.

In the memo, Blankenship stated, “If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

Spoken like a man who would do anything – including knowingly operating an unsafe mine that had been evacuated three times in the past 2 months because of unsafe methane levels – to make a buck.

Criminal prosecutions of employers for negligently harming or killing workers are few and far between because overt negligence often is hard to prove. In this case, his own damning words might be just the evidence prosecutors need to make an example out of Blankenship, West Virginia’s own Nero, who fiddles while mines and miners burn.

ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) is a risk management control developed by the Health Physics community in the early days of research on radioactive substances.

The dose response effect from exposure to radioactive materials was not well known, as evidenced by the fact that so many of the early researchers died of radiation poisoning. Even as knowledge concerning the health effects of ionizing radiation grew, specific dose response correlations remained uncertain. Consequently, the approach to keep all exposures to radiation as low as reasonably achievable seemed to be prudent. more

Great American Insurance Group is a believer about using incentives to promote employee health. This year, the Cincinnati-based company’s parent, American Financial Group, held a AFGreat Health Challenge in which it promised to give away a car and other prizes if at least 70 percent of employees participated in health screenings and if the company’s overall health scores improved compared to the previous year.

The incentive program was a success. More than 75 percent of the company’s 5,500 employees participated in some aspect of the six-month program. About half of the employees purchased pedometers that allowed them to upload their steps to a company Web site, track their progress and compete against each other in walking clubs.

On December 9, the company held a ceremony in which it awarded a 2009 Saturn Sky as a grand prize to a San Diego employee. It also gave away $10,000 and $5,000 shopping sprees, and a $2,500 gas card. Other finalists received Wii game systems.

Scott Beeken, AFG’s vice president for benefits strategy and planning, made the case for health promotion incentives both for health and productivity reasons and as a good financial move. “If a single at-risk employee can avoid a triple by-pass procedure, we’ll save as much as $75,000 and enable that person to remain a happy and healthy member of the Great American family for years to come. A $30,000 car seems like a pretty small price to pay for a payoff like that.”

During the program, health risk assessments showed more employees with good scores and fewer with poor scores compared to 2008. Employees who participated in the weight loss program lost an average of 18 pounds. Employees who participated in the walking program averaged more than 8,200 steps per day, about 2 miles more than the typical office worker walks per day. Screenings identified two employees with early stage cancers.

AFG’s health care costs this year have been holding steady. In fact, the company declared a health premium holiday for employees on several of the company’s health plans because of lower than expected costs.

A safety consultant writes us: “I have a client that’s trying to convince all employees to stop wearing rings while working. Some employees are saying there are no facts and data to back up the ‘No Rings’ policy.” more