ILLINOIS WATER ENVIRONMENT ASSOCIATION NEWSLETTER
Volume 23, No. 3 - Fall 2002

Working Safely Is No Accident

I don't take any credit for the title. I have seen this title or a variation of it in many safety cartoons. I think there is a lot of truth in this title. It implies for one thing, if an action is thought out fully before being performed, the function can occur without a person being hurt or injured. That is, no accident. I am sure this is true because I can think of a number of occasions, when immediately after injuring an appendage, in the microsecond prior to the pain finding its way to my brain, I have thought to myself, “Man that was dumb. Why did you do that?” I realize each time that if I had thought out what I was doing a little more carefully (or had taken the time to check to see if the equipment was properly locked out to prevent me from being hurt) I would not have been hurt.

I know of a loss control agent who works for a workers' comp carrier who upon reading an accident report that we used at one time at the District, came across the cause of the accidents. One of the items listed under the cause of accident was, “The worker was careless”. This one statement sent the loss control agent into what only can be de-scribed as berserk, maniacal rantings regarding the uselessness of this statement. His point, however, after one sorted out the useful information from his tirade, was that nobody, with a few notable exceptions, wants to get hurt. He was right about this point. To say that the majority of the workers could care less about getting hurt, is incorrect. What one really should have in place of this statement, is something to the effect of, “Did the worker fail to plan out how he was going to do the job well enough in advance to prevent himself from being hurt?” In a vast majority of accidents, someone failed to take into account all of the precautions that needed to be taken and how to properly execute the tasks. The result was that someone got injured. To say that we don't think about how we could get hurt beforehand, is probably not correct either. I suspect most of us realize before we start the task where we could get hurt and how we could get hurt, but simply decided for expediency sake (call it what you want, laziness, etc.) to take a risk.

Now you are going to say to yourself, “Well, I take risks every day”, and I know that I do. I took a risk just walking out my front door and driving to work. I take a risk by getting out of my automobile at work and going to my office, or going to the plant. Someone might jump out of the bushes and attack me as I am going to the office. You do take risks. I take risks. We all take these risks, but if calculated beforehand, there is a very small likelihood that these things that may hurt us will occur. But in assessing a task at hand, many of us do not calculate the amount of risks that we may be taking in short cutting a procedure. Is the amount of risk to time gained worth the pain inflicted? Quite often after the accident, we know the real answer. It was not.

An acquaintance of mine, a safety consultant, says that safety in a work environment is a function of the culture of the work environment. The culture of the work environment, the attitudes of most of the fellow workers as well as you, is either one of low risk, moderate risk or high risk being acceptable in performing our daily duties. He maintains that to improve overall safety in any facility, one must change the culture, the attitudes of all individuals in such a way that they change their minds about the acceptability of taking high risks. I tend to think of this in terms of high risk equals large amounts of pain. And, conversely, low risk equals low frequency of pain, or low amounts of pain.

I guess where I am going with all of this, heading back to my original title that Working Safely Is No Accident, is for the most part accidents are poorly calculated risk assessments. For those of us who have been injured on the job, we normally took a risk that led to our injury. The only way we will prevent most of these injuries is to take the extra second to accurately assess the amount of pain and suffering potential in any job, and then take the extra two minutes to prevent the things that could happen from occurring and get the job done without the pain.