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W EEKLY EDITION AUGUST 21, 2019 Building a Culture of Safety Part I: Precursors to Seri ous Inc id ents By Karleen Kos, PSAI Executive Director In ot her words, there are generally identifiable factors in workplace accidents. Time pressure that is more dom inant in an employee's mind than safety is one of them. But as Corcoran observed, plenty of precursors have been misunderstood, discounted or dismisse d in the past, and that has only made the situation favorable for more accidents. Predicting accidents by identifying precursors. Dr. Matthew Hallowell is a Presidential Teaching Scholar and Endowed Professor of Construction Engineering at the University of Colorado - Boulder. He and his colleagues recently spent three years studying serious injury and fatality incidents around the world. They looked at Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) data from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health or NIOSH – a division of the US Centers for Disease Control. They also combed through safety reports from more than 70 large construction - industry companies around the world, finding ways to categorize the things that had happened. The research ers developed some of their own data from interviews and observations on work sites at many more companies as well. With this data in hand, the researchers started looking for patterns and crunching numbers. Starting with between 40 and 50 possible safet y incident precursors, the team had a couple of goals: • Reduce the number of variables to only those that could meaningfully be associated with an eventual accident or safety incident • Develop an equation for the probability that a serious safety event woul d occur. When they finally finished their work, they had a list of statistically likely accident or incident precursors and an equation that looks like this: Now, in case you don't have your graphing calculator handy, you'll be glad to know that you don 't really need to do math to understand accident precursors and what to do about them. Let's look at the short list of statistically verified accident precursors that Dr. Hallowell and his team discovered. Though they pertain to construction sites, most ar e applicable to companies in the portable sanitation industry as well. P AGE 9 CONTINUED ON PAGE 10