Podcast: Part 2 - Top 10 Dafety Issues

[00:00:00] We all face unique safety issues. No matter where we work, none of us are perfect. There's things that we're going to miss until an accident happens, but what I wanna focus on is that when we are faced with those safety issues. What did we learn from them? How did we face that challenge and what did we learn from them?

So today, that's what we're gonna dive into. This is part two, so if you have not listened to the previous episode, I would suggest that you do that. These are five top safety issues that I have faced. Let's get into it.

[00:01:00] Hello? Hello, hello, my safety friends. Thank you so much for coming back to another episode of the Safety Geek Podcast.

Now, today is actually part two. Last week I had told you that during our weekly masterclass, somebody had posed a couple of questions to me. One was. What are the top 10 safety issues that I have faced or seen? And the other was what was the worst case scenario. So I've answered a lot of those in the previous episode.

If you have not listened to it yet, then I would. Start there. These are in no particular order though, so I mean, you could listen to this one first and that would be perfectly fine. But my approach to this was not like [00:02:00] putting them in any order or saying this issue is worse and just talking about horror stories.

I really wanna discuss how I approach these issues and how I learned from them, so that way it didn't happen again in the future. Yeah, so that's what today's episode is about.

Before we get started, I just want to say thank you to everybody who has reached out and gave me their condolences and shared their kind words. It really means a lot to me. It really does. So thank you so much. I truly appreciate it. All right, so let's get on to today's episode, which is gonna be. Five of my top 10 that I kind of came up with.

And quite honestly, I could probably go on and on like in the future, I might do another episode on this, but I was trying to come up with lessons learned as well as , these issues that we typically all face in some way, shape or form.

And. Hopefully so that way you get something out of it. So it isn't just [00:03:00] me, indulging in my own horror stories. All right, so the first one I wanna chat about is one that everybody faces. Everybody I know faces this one. It is blocked exits. Or blocked eyewash stations, and in my case, they would block it with product, right?

Like they would put their storage product there and things like that. This is a constant struggle. And we as safety people, we understand the risk that they're putting themselves at, that like when an accident happens and you need to evacuate the building, this is really bad. And this is not as bad as the last episode where there were chains and locks on the doors, but.

It's still bad if people can't get to an exit or if they're tripping or falling during a fire to get to an exit or they have a chemical in their eye and they can't get to the eye wash station. We understand that there's always the risk of this and that it's so important to keep exits [00:04:00] free and eye wash stations free.

And what I've always faced is like people are just trying to get their job done and they need a place to put their supplies or their product, or they don't think it's a big deal that they're putting it here because nobody ever uses this exit. This eyewash station hasn't been used in years, right? So they don't see it as a problem.

In fact, this one company, it was a new acquisition I walked into. It was during my first. Inspection of it, and they had their eye wash station blocked. And honestly, it wouldn't have mattered if it wasn't blocked, because when I ran the water, it was a plumbed eye wash station. When I ran the water, it came out rusty.

Like they had never even done their regular inspections on their eye wash station. So somebody's eyes were flushed with that water. It would've been awful. But anyway, I digress,, I see it as a huge issue, and that if you could just create zones where , this is an absolute zero tolerance.

We do [00:05:00] not block these things, and you can create that culture where people have that same respect for these areas as we do, they would find another place to put this product. It's not like in front of the exit or the eyewash is the only place. It's the most convenient place. Because exits and eye washes are designed to be convenient, so you have to kind of really drill that into them.

But when we talk about changing beliefs and changing people's thinking, just telling them that is never going to be enough. We need them to experience. What it would be like. So one way that I did this to get them to really open up their eyes to what they were doing. And my goal was actually to get the supervisors to realize it because it wasn't just the problem that the employees were putting the products there.

It was that the supervisors were doing nothing about it. So they saw it and they still weren't doing it, and their [00:06:00] attitude was there was no other place to put it. And my attitude was if they had no other choice, they would've found some other place to put it. So what I did is I ran an evacuation drill, which I did these often anyway, but instead of just having all exits open, I blocked the main exits.

And I made it like, this is where the fire is. You can't exit here. So it kind of forced people to use these exits that don't necessarily get used that often. So I blocked all of the regular exits, and this is actually a great idea to do in fire drills just because people get used to one exit and they don't think about where all the other exits are.

So it's training that different muscle memory. To use other exits, but when I did this, it truly opened up their eyes as to why these other exits are important, and that kind of helped the situation and that kind of helped the situation. Now, another thing [00:07:00] that I did was I ran simulations about the need for using an eyewash.

So when I had, when I would catch an, a supervisor or somebody opening up a new chemical or doing something like that, or if somebody was using a chemical nearby, I would go to that supervisor and I would bring the situation, you know, what was going on to their attention, and I would go, okay.

You're here working. They're working with this chemical. Something unexpected happened and it splashes in your eyes. What are you gonna do? And I would make them think about it. Like, what are you gonna do? You now have a chemical burning your eyes. What are you gonna do? And that made them realize the importance of the eyewash station.

It also made them realize the importance of the location of the eyewash station because we were in a refrigerated environment. The eye wash station was actually too [00:08:00] far away for somebody who had chemicals in their eyes, and this opened up the need and the justification for us to put eye wash fixtures in the sinks that were in the room that were just attached to plumbing right in the room.

So we fixed the whole problem, but that's how I really. Brought it to their attention.

So another, those are the. So those are the two ways that I truly got them to change their internal thinking about it. Things I had tried before that, which kind of worked, but, and they generally work in some situations, but they take longer to work.

Is getting them to fix it themselves. Meaning that a lot of times when we walk through a facility or we're doing an inspection, we fix things ourselves. Like we see the IWA station is blocked, we unblock it, or maybe we grab an employee and we have them unblock it, right? But the [00:09:00] true fix is grabbing the supervisor and getting the supervisor to fix it.

And then another way that I fixed it in one situation was they insisted on blocking. Another way to fix this is to put something that they need on this path, ? Let's say that they have a tool that they're regularly using and their tool storage is in one area. If you can move that tool storage to be within in the path of the eyewash or the exit, not blocking it, but like on that path, then they are less likely to block that path.

Because they know they have to go down that path to grab their tools or their tool storage. So that worked in one situation. It's a way of engineering it out, I guess you could say, because they wouldn't wanna block their own stuff because they knew that was stuff they were using. The reason they were blocking the exits and the eye washes 'cause they were never using them.

If it was something that got used regularly, they would never [00:10:00] block it. But you still wanna have it there for emergencies. So hopefully those will give you some ideas. 'cause I know this is an issue everybody faces and those are different ways that I would approach it to fix it in the future. All right, the next safety issue was drivers CDL drivers that were on the road for 90 plus hours.

In a seven day period, they were literally running dual logs, and obviously this was a new acquisition, which I think is so funny. When corporations buy new companies, they do their due diligence financially, but they never do their due diligence on things like safety. They always have us come in after the fact and fix it like.

But the, they won't give the resources to fix it and then they get mad at safety 'cause it costs so much to fix everything. It's well, if you'd brought us in the beginning and had us audit their safety before you bought it, then we could have given you some dollar [00:11:00] figures on how to fix it. But anyway, this company was running dual logs. Their drivers were working like 90 hours a week. Yes. Their drivers were complaining about this. They had very high driver turnover. Nobody had really reported them to DOT though. And management didn't see that there was a problem. The, because what was happening was the transportation manager was covering it all.

So the upper management just saw that the job was getting done and because of their pay structure, they weren't paid by the hour. Nobody saw the hours that they were actually working, and a lot of it ended up getting hidden. And I came in and I immediately was like, if you, now, this company now has deeper pockets because before you were a mom and pop, and now you're owned by this large organization.

You have very deep pockets. This cannot be tolerated. And luckily the management team agreed with me, they [00:12:00] just didn't know that it was happening because this transportation manager was hiding it all. And basically telling people to run dual logs. Now, I did not tell them to fire anybody. I told them that we just needed to fix it.

And in order to fix it, we had to identify the problem routes, and we needed to know how many drivers to hire because obviously we had to hire more drivers. We started the hiring process and at the same time, I forced the current drivers to be putting in accurate logs. Now, this was before electronic onboard recorders were mandated, so like now I think it's.

I don't think it's impossible because I'm sure there's some drivers being tricky out there, but it's a lot harder. Like I don't think you'd see this as much. But my whole point is like when there is a noncompliance issue like this, sometimes you have to get them to actually be doing it compliant, even if it shows.

Huge liability and huge issues in [00:13:00] being compliant because they were running these dual logs and nobody could have seen that they were doing this unless they, they went deeper into it. So sometimes you have to shine light on the problem and open yourself up for that liability in order to fix it. And this was something that we easily were able to identify our problem route.

Hire more drivers, get them trained, and within a short period of time, I believe we fixed this problem in three or four months. It was stopped and we did not interrupt deliveries. That was the big thing because they were making their deliveries and they had, we didn't wanna risk customer satisfaction.

If we just all of a sudden stop delivering. And not making those deliveries. Our customers would've been angry. We would've lost sales, right? So we did things to mitigate it in the meantime, hiring third parties, bringing in other companies until we could have enough people trained and [00:14:00] everything fixed.

But just keep that in mind that when you have a non-compliance, like this is 100%. If OSHA or DOT or some regulatory body came in, they would shut us down for this. Sometimes you just gotta shine light on it. Create a plan to fix it and start working that plan and mitigate it out as quick as possible.

Maybe using third parties for short periods of time. But we were really lucky that no accidents happened during our fix and that we were able to fix it quickly. I was also lucky that their current pay structure. Was like, they were paid by the load and by the trip type thing. I can't remember. It was like the, they were paid by the deliveries, so the drivers suffered because the drivers lost pay but at the same time, they were no longer working 90 hours, they were working, the 70 hours and eight days as opposed to 90 hours and 70 days.

But the company, it didn't [00:15:00] cost them too much money because. The pay structure stayed the same. Which quite honestly, I'll tell you an A, B, C type of pay structure. I can't remember what, A, B, C, activity based compensation, A, B, C. Thank you. A b, C pay structure I think is awful when it comes to a safety standpoint, I don't think anybody should be using an A, b, C pay structure because it actually.

Promotes people to take an unsafe action to get the job done quicker so that way they could make more money, which is probably why this wasn't place to begin with. It probably didn't start with the transportation manager. It probably started with a driver trying to get in more loads and just lying about their logs.

All right. Safety issue number three that I wanna share is lack of fall protection or lack of lockout tagout or just poor forklift operations. Like just poor compliance on highly [00:16:00] hazardous items. And I've actually seen this multiple times. I have dealt with several deaths. I actually a location within our company.

Had a supervisor who trained people on fall protection, not use his fall protection and monkey climb the warehouse racking and then he fell to his death. This was when I was a regional, it was not my location, but like the, these are the things that can happen. Had another driver that was driving unsafely.

He was driving to driving his forklift. Too fast. And he hit something. And when he did the controller of the, because it was a standup forklift, so I had a little controller, went into his chest and killed him. And then obviously I've also seen where people didn't lock out and they've lost hands and fingers and limbs.

So to me, these are high hazard things that we need [00:17:00] to have a zero. Tolerance policy for that. You have to follow them no matter what. And the issue a lot of times is that the management team doesn't see it as hazardous as we do. They see it as, well, if they got injured doing it, it's their own fault.

It's that whole attribution error where they're not looking at the situation, they're looking at the person and they're blaming the person for. Climbing the racks Well, if we had a zero tolerance policy. 'cause I'll tell you right now, that was not the first time that supervisor climbed those racks, but it was allowed until he fell and died.

And now all of a sudden it's not allowed. And that's what ends up happening, is that companies don't take action until the awful thing happens. And you have to change their thinking of we don't want the awful thing happening and changing it from [00:18:00] being, if going back to that attribution error, what happens is that when an accident happens, people blame the person over the situation.

When if they were in that same situation, they would likely take the same actions. So you have to get them to realize, like if you were in this situation, how would you handle it? And when you're getting pressured to get the job done, , so the way that I address these issues,

so the way that I address these issues whenever I. Come in to an organization and I see that they have very high hazard compliance issues is I do assessments on safety, obviously. And an assessment in my world is where I don't have names. It's like doing an observation of a department with no names.

So it's not observing a person, it's observing a department. A great example would be forklift operation. I would break that down into all the different pieces of forklift [00:19:00] operation and then I would assess how compliant they are with those pieces. And if there's 10 forklift operators, I'm assessing all 10.

So obviously on my safety assessments. But on top of that, I would also compare it to other aspects of that department because a lot of times people would wanna blame. The employee for getting injured when really it's how that department is being run. So I would also get data on the quality, the expenses, the theft, the damage, the efficiency of that department.

And I would compare it to other departments that were, had a good safety record. And typically what you see is that when you departments are failing in safety. They're also failing in other areas. So then it becomes easier for me to my executives to say, look, I'm seeing a lot of like lack of enforcement of our high hazard safety issues, and how can I convince them that this is like important, not just because an accident is gonna happen.

Because if you're relying on that [00:20:00] moral issue of they need to be doing this because an accident may happen. There is always a piece of an executive's or manager's mind of will it really happen? What's the likelihood of it happening? So instead I try to look at the department as a whole and show that it's systemic.

It's bleeding into other areas. They're not enforcing safety. They're also not enforcing quality. They're also not enforcing efficiency. They have bad employee morale. That's leading to turnover, that's leading to theft, that's leading to poor quality. So I can show that this is just one indicator that is showing as a department as a whole.

So it needs to, we need to really ramp up something in this. Whole department, and I mean, I say like safety can be this indicator for all other areas, but really you can take any of those areas. If a department has poor quality, then they likely have poor safety as [00:21:00] well. If they have high theft or high damage, then they likely have poor quality and poor safety as well.

All righty. So the next one was kind of scary. I will be honest with you. This one took me by surprise and I really blame myself for it. And that was a CO2 leak in our production room that caused us to evacuate and stop production for the rest of the day.

And luckily. It was caught in time that nobody got sick and we didn't have to send anybody to the hospital. So what happened, give you the background, is there was this production room always had this one piece of machinery. And they replaced it. It was an older piece of machinery, so they replaced it with this new version and.

This new version pumped CO2 into the product. And as they were [00:22:00] installing it, this was one of those things where they did not include me in the pre-planning and as they were installed it and they had it installed and they told me what this thing did, and I even said to them, I was like, does it have an oxygen sensor?

If you're pumping CO2, we have to make sure the CO two's not leaking, that we have an oxygen sensor. And they pointed to this box on the wall and they said, yes, that's our oxygen sensor, and I trusted them on that. And quite honestly, I was very busy at the time, you know how our jobs are and I trusted that they had it in place.

I did not test it, so my fault on that. So that machine had been in place for a couple of months and it had been going pretty strong. And then one day I was in the break room, an employee came out of the production room and they said how nauseous they were.

And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. You know, and, and I mean, that's the thing about working in colder environments too, is we get a lot of illness too. It's like. [00:23:00] I think it's just the cold or the change of temperature all the time. Like every flu season we always had to deal with that and if, and everybody was in close quarters, so we were always on the lookout for people being sick 'cause we didn't want it to spread to everybody else.

So we were assisting that person and shortly after another person came out, said, I have a really bad headache. I'm feeling a little nauseous. And I was like. Yeah, that's weird. And they were both from the same area. So your first thinking is that maybe there's a flu or an illness that's being spread in that department.

But then a third person came out who is not from that department, and I was like, wait a minute, this is two close together. , This was like within a very short period of time. Not, we're not talking days, we're talking like within an hour. And. I was like, something weird's going on. So we did an inspection of the room and obviously CO2 is odorless you, you couldn't tell what was going on.

We looked, we [00:24:00] couldn't figure it out and we did not have a handheld oxygen sensor. So finally I was like I pushed the maintenance team. I said, I'm sorry something is wrong. And honestly, the CO2 did not even come to mind at the time. We called like an all hands on from the maintenance team, from the supervisors.

And I was like, this is just too unusual. Can you guys just do an inspection of the equipment, make sure. Is anybody using a new chemical? Like we knew that it had to be something more than just a virus. And one of the maintenance people brought up the CO2 going into this one machine, and they went up into the ceiling, and that is where they found the CO2 leak.

And then obviously, so it'd been leaking up into the ceiling and then it went down into the production room. So I would say my lesson learned on this was not just checking. That what they told me was true because this actually happened twice. Like [00:25:00] I had some arc flash issues where I wanted everybody to go through arc flash training and wear fire resistant clothing, and they were like, no, we never open up the electrical panels.

And I came in on a weekend and electrical panels are wide open and maintenance is doing things that they told me that they would never do. Two lessons there is just not really believing what people tell you and just double checking that what you're told is true and then making sure that you have ways on hand to test what they're telling you.

Because I've also had maintenance people like tell me the machine is doing one thing when it wasn't when I actually looked at the instruction manual myself. 'Cause they're trying to get around safety. You see this a lot, especially when companies don't have safety programs to begin with and they're just seeing safety as a burden or something extra instead of Hey, we're that's here.

So that way we run more efficiently, like literally the CO2 leak shut us down for a day. [00:26:00] Where if they had just had the equipment in place, they would've found it. They wouldn't have had to shut down. They could have fixed it while they were still working, but there was so much CO2 leak that it shut us down for an entire day.

So that's my lesson learned on that one. It's a sad one. I think that it's one of those stories that in my mind I see where I failed. You know, 'cause it was an, it was a hazard I recognized, but it was one I didn't mitigate well enough. Alright, so my last one that I wanna share with you goes back to that muscle memory type of incident that I shared in the last episode, but more so like a lot of times we put controls in place and things are readily available to people and they still don't use them. So what happened was we had a maintenance worker on our roof and we had an ammonia refrigeration system, and he was on the roof working on the ammonia refrigeration system.

This maintenance worker was actually a supervisor. He was trained. How he should have been trained. [00:27:00] We had eye wash stations readily available. He was well aware of everything and he was working on the ammonia, refrigeration on the roof. I can't remember how it happened, but there was a leak and he got sprayed in the face with ammonia and he went on to.

Like finish his work and stop the leak before taking care of himself. And yes, when he went inside, he went to the hours station, he washed his and flushed his eyes out. But by that time it was too late because even though he felt like, yes, I know I'm injured, he didn't realize the extent of his injuries and he luckily, his lungs were not.

Too badly damaged. He did have permanent damage to his lungs, but worse he went blind. [00:28:00] He is completely blind now from this incident, and my lesson learned on that is really expressing the same thing that. Firefighters do. , I know a lot of safety people have been in the fire service, so I'm probably preaching to the choir to a lot of people here.

But the way that firefighters approach a scene is that they're always valuing human life over the building, over the equipment, right? Like they're going to rescue the people who are alive first, and then they're gonna determine. Is it worth the risk to send our people in to put the fire out, to save the building?

So if they can go into the building and put the fire out without putting their people's lives at risk, then they'll do it. If not, they'll stay on the outside and then they'll just stop it from spreading to other buildings. So our maintenance worker put the building [00:29:00] over his own life. His immediate response should have been to stop and go to the eyewash station, but because he delayed getting to the eyewash station, he ended up blind.

So the way that we fix this in the future was yes, expressing, you know, life over a building, but then we also made them carry eyewash bottles in their toolbox. So we had a, we had several eyewash stations. They were within use and it never made any sense to like, have them put a bottle in their toolbox too.

Like it's just taking up space because like I could just go over there, it's 25 feet away. So it just didn't make sense to make them do that. But I honestly think that if he could have very quickly sprayed his eyes with something and then he might have at least cleaned his eyes out and, 'cause I can't stop somebody putting from, putting, building over their own life.

I [00:30:00] don't know how to change that motivation other than to drill it into them that their life is not worth the building, so the thing that I really think companies need to do and corporations need to do is punishing any acts that put people's lives at risk. . If we punish the acts that people do that are putting their lives at risk, then they are less likely to put their lives at risk. But what I see corporations do is celebrate it, that when somebody puts the company over their own life or puts the company first. They celebrate it. Like I worked for this organization there was a couple of years ago where there was this snowstorm up in the northern US that was so bad.

People were dying in their vehicles. Like it was so [00:31:00] cold. And the snows the so bad. If you went out to go to the store, you got stuck in this white house. You might've died in a snow drift. And there were stories of people being, dug out and things like that. It was awful. And it was not just in one area, it was in multiple areas.

So one of our drivers was sent out into the snowstorm to make deliveries because they're delivering food products, which are considered important in emergencies. Yes. So he went so first, so he went out into. This weather that was reportedly so bad that even emergency vehicles were not going out to make deliveries.

And he got stuck and he ended up sleeping in his truck. So the company celebrated his dedication to, to get the groceries out, is the way that they like to put it at this company. And we employees not just [00:32:00] safety like employees across the board, were like. You should be punishing the person that put his life at risk.

Like why was he out there in the first place? And then they celebrated this at like a town hall that got televised through the OR whole organization. And I was so happy to see the comments against it. There were also comments of people being like, good job. So great. You know, and it, what got me upset too, was that you should be angry at yourself.

If you put your employee in that type of situation, you should be angry at yourself. I think that if we, in order to stop, like to learn from this accident where this employee put building over his own eyesight I think that if we punish acts or people are putting their lives at risk, that people will stop putting their lives at risk over the product, over production, over the building.

And I've seen people put their lives at risks many times. The story earlier of climbing the racking, I've seen people stand on uneasy things [00:33:00] just to change a light bulb, basically, you know, like that's them putting their lives at risk and that's what needs to be punished, whether the accident happens or not.

And then you tend to get people to stop putting their lives at risk and. You also get better morale. 'cause then your employees know that the company cares about them more than the widgets, more than the groceries. So that concludes like my top 10 in answering I think it was his name was Alex, answering Alex's question about the top 10 that I have.

Safety issues that I have experienced. I hope that over these two episodes you've gotten a lot out of it. I would love to hear your comments and if you have anything that you want me to talk about on the podcast, be sure to reach out to us. Just email support@thesafetygeek.com [00:34:00] 'cause I would love to hear your ideas and I would love to just kind of riff on different safety issues out there.

All righty, my safety friend. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next one. Bye for now.