Have you ever found yourself reading an
incident report concerning an injury to a
worker or damage to equipment and wondered,
“How in the world did that happen?”
More than likely it happened because
someone didn’t recognize a hazard. Hazards
are the source of personal injuries and
damage to vehicles, equipment, and property.
Hazards abound at home, work and
play. The problem is we often don’t see
them until someone gets hurt.
It’s no joke when someone says, “I didn’t
see it coming!”
Recognizing a hazard requires a trained
brain that quickly analyzes the risk and the
consequences posed by the situation. It’s
not unusual to find that a worker involved
in an incident was trained to control hazards
associated with his or her work, but had not
been specifically trained to see the hazards.
This is all a part of the gap
between knowing and doing: People know what to do when they
recognize the hazard, they just don’t see it.
Hazard control is the
key to preventing injuries and damage, yet to control the hazard,
employees at all levels must be trained to recognize them. When you
consider this, you’ll start to see the problem in many places. Carl
shares the following event that occurred while he was on a trip:
I
was on a business trip to Dallas and happened to look out of my
hotel room window. I observed a group of workers cleaning the side
of a building across the parking lot. It was obvious the workers
were clueless to the danger they had placed themselves in. The
challenge for these workers was the distance between the parking lot
and the building to be cleaned with a pressure washer. Add to this the need to raise
and lower the worker operating the pressurewashing
wand. We often talk about human
ingenuity. Well, workers can be quite innovative
and get the job done, but sometimes
they put themselves in a precarious
situation without even recognizing it.
These workers had parked a mobile scissor
lift in the parking spaces parallel to the
sidewalk and the building. The building
was approximately twelve feet from the
scissor lift. Employing a two by twelve
wood board about sixteen feet long, they
lashed one end to the floor of the scissor lift.
This resembled a diving board, if you can
imagine. Being astute innovators of equipment,
they positioned three large workers as
counter balances to hang on the outside of
the guardrail of the lift.
Being safety minded,
the employee with the wand in his hand was
standing at the end of the “diving board”
wearing fall protection that was clipped onto
the basket of the lift twelve feet away (and
yes, I am sure the lanyard employed a deaccelerator).
Got the picture?
Being a studious safety professional, I
quickly went downstairs and walked toward
these hard working, creative gentlemen. As
I approached, I said, “I am not with OSHA,
but as a certified safety professional it is my
duty to stop your operation.”
They all got wide-eyed. It was obvious
that they heard, “OSHA” and misinterpreted.
They stopped working abruptly so I
assume they knew their behavior was unsafe.
When I asked who was in charge, one
of the workers ran through a door and
quickly produced the supervisor who was
very cooperative. The supervisor explained
that it was his idea to use the innovated contraption
until the rental company delivered
the snorkel lift (expected to arrive on site in
the next two hours). After a few minutes of
discussion with the supervisor and the workers
they realized the consequences of their
behavior could have been serious. We all
shook hands and agreed that they would
wait until the rental company showed up
with the proper equipment and I promised
to not write them a citation (they still
thought I was with OSHA). It was just another
day in the life of a safety professional.
Without the ability to see hazards, people
will put themselves in positions that can
lead to personal or co-worker injury or
damage equipment.
Train Yourself to See
We humans often think that we are above reproach and know that we have been
well trained. Sometimes that can turn
into pride and that will get us into trouble.
So many times we face unknown or unseen
hazards in the workplace. One of
the first things you can do is to consider
your overall perception of safety.
Do you consider that you can have little
influence over what happens – that external
forces are the primary cause of injuries? Or
do you have an internal focus that lets you
know that you have a great deal of control
over the environment or situation? The degree
to which you perceive that you have
control over the consequences of a situation
is known as the locus of control or LOC.
People generally have a strong internal or
external safety LOC1. One of the first things
you can do to train yourself to see hazards is
to consider your LOC. If you have a strong
external LOC, you are likely to think you
have little control and therefore may not
look for or consider the hazards.
This calls for some deep introspection.
Think about the times that you’ve been able
to avoid injury by wearing your personal
protective equipment or by following a procedure.
You can even look back on incidents
that occurred because you, or someone
else, didn’t follow safe work practices.
Challenge yourself to look for the things
that you can control. If you have a strong
internal LOC, you may go too far in thinking
that you personally can control hazards
and may not use all of the tools and
technology at your disposal. It’s simply a
good idea – you’ll be surprised how much
better you ‘see’ hazards with this personal
insight.
Five Steps to See the Unseen Hazards
It’s important to recognize that we all
have trouble seeing hazards sometimes, yet
there are several things you can do to improve
your ‘hazard vision”:
• Recognize your own perception of your
ability to control hazards;
• Discuss and list the typical hazards associated
with your industry or your job;
• Work with more experienced people from
time to time and ask them what hazards
they see – then determine if you see the
same ones;
• Take another look around a new work site with the intent of finding hazards that you
missed the first time;
• Read incident reports or investigation reports
from others to continuously learn
about new hazards.
Perhaps the most important thing you can
do to train yourself is to recognize hazards is
to learn everything you can about controlling
various hazards. From that perspective,
you’ll discover information that you can apply
to keep yourself and others injury-free
at work and at home.
