These two categories of accidents are sadly too common and quite often leave lasting tragedies.
By Darrel Canada
With Oct. 1 having marked the beginning of a new year on the “accident counts and fatalities” that have been reported to the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics), we here in Region 6 come into the new year having not done so well in the previous 12 months.
Region 6, which consists of 72 counties in an area running roughly from El Paso to Abilene and north to Amarillo, had 20 fatalities, total. Sixteen of them were attributed to Oil and Gas Operations and Services while four of the fatalities were counted as construction-related losses. We are still working to lower the fatalities and accidents in the oil fields. Some of our STEPS networks have joined with National STEPS and will be doing a national stand down for the oil and gas industry soon.
We are still fighting the main “focus four,” which are Struck-by, Caught-between, Falls, and Electrocutions. These four comprise 90 percent of the fatalities that OSHA investigates. In this month’s installment I will concentrate on the categories of Struck-by and Caught-between heavy equipment or machinery.
Any fatality is one too many for any company or family to suffer through. I’m at a loss to understand how any companies can put making money before the safety of their most valuable assets, their employees. Those employees are the ones that make the bottom line happen in the first place! Too many times we start to help a company out with getting things right and where they need to be to stay out of trouble with violations, and the employer will tell me that it will slow down production or cost too much! That tells me that management is not committed to safety—only to making the money.
When my company is doing site safety on rig locations, my safety techs will always stop a job, tell the crews what needs to be corrected, and then we go back to work. I could tell you situation after situation where the jobs have been stopped and an accident avoided because of that time out. I am proud to say that one of our operators (clients) has a TRIR (Total Recordable Incident Rate) of only .025! They are doing things right and spending a little extra money and time to make sure their employees and contractors follow the rules and regulations that are in place, not just because it’s the law, but because it is the right thing to do!
And yet I hear guys tell me in training classes all the time that “This is the way we have always done it” and if it works they don’t want to change a procedure. They don’t feel like it’s broken, so why should they fix it?
Only after a catastrophe or a fatality do they understand how much it will cost. Let me give you an example.
I was driving to Snyder one Sunday afternoon and I got a phone call from a customer. I pulled over to the side of the road, stopped and answered the phone. The voice on the other line was shaky and the speaker told me that one of their heavy equipment operators had run over a guy and they needed me there as soon as possible. I immediately headed to the location several hours away. When I got there, I met with their safety director and he filled me in on the details of what he knew had happened. The young man was under the age of 18 and should not have even been on a location. He was riding in a bucket of a front end loader with two other people, one of whom was also under age, the other being a 27-year-old. The bucket doesn’t have seat belts, so the two companies were given citations under 1926.602 construction standards. Nobody saw this act as a hazard and stopped the job!
The loader was coming down a 16-degree-grade hillside and the brakes didn’t hold as the air was pumped out of them. All the young men were thrown from the bucket of the loader and the young man in the middle was “struck-by” it and “caught-between” it and the ground. It took an ambulance about 50 to 55 minutes to get there. The young man was pronounced dead. It turned out that he was working for a subcontractor and the subcontractor had a supervisor on location. It was this supervisor who told the operator of the front end loader to let the young men ride in the bucket.
A well trained operator of 20 years made the mistake of letting them ride in the bucket at the direction of a subcontractor supervisor. He should have refused to let that happen, but he didn’t, so now he has to live the rest of his life with that on his mind every single day. I know how it affected him. I took his statement and watched him cry when I told him the young man was under age to be there in the first place.
I watched the companies try to deal with what I call the ripple effect. These extend to the other employees that are affected, as well as to the families, the operator, the other contractors, and the subcontractor. Work grinds to a halt and now OSHA has six months to finish their investigation. The fines and penalties are assessed and sent out to the contractor and subcontractor. The grief that is all around is almost unbearable as they bury the young man. His hopes and dreams are shattered for eternity. I thought the subcontractor would do the right thing, but it was back to business and making money as soon as possible.
Then the lawsuits started and the insurance companies got their attorneys involved, while the family grieves and longs for justice for a senseless death. Another struck-by and caught-between that could have been easily prevented. It takes guts to speak up, but nobody wanted to rock the boat.
The main contractor survived this fatality and the lawsuits that ensued, but the subcontracting firm went out of business in less than a year, their reputation sullied. Many other actions were mishandled. The gate guards didn’t catch the under-age young men at the entry gate in the first place. The subcontractor supervisor didn’t hesitate to take the under-age youths out there with him. Bad decisions that were made by the middle management of both companies to get the job done on schedule and within budget. It cost both companies a lot more in the long run.
We can’t put a price on safety or on someone’s life! Do the right thing every day!
Darrel Canada is president and Master Trainer at Canada and Associates Safety Training LLC, based in Abilene, Texas, with offices also in Snyder, Midland, and Carrizo Springs, Texas. Find them at canada-associates.com.