Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/910300
W EEKLY EDITION NOV 29, 2017 Building a Culture of Safety Part I: Precursors to Serious Incidents …continued By PSAI Exec utive Director Karleen Kos Precursors. They say, "prevention is the best cure." So let's start there. Who wouldn't prevent an accident or incident if they could? Nobody wants to get hurt or killed – and employers certainly have a vested interest in protec ting employees and the bottom line. Yet these accidents and fatalities happen. When they do, often you can look back and "see the stupid." For example, one portable sanitation company leader told me about an employee who the very day after a safety meeting focused on safe work behavior was seen ducking under a train stopped on a railroad track and walking between the cars. When the appalled employer asked why the employee did it the response was, "I had to get to the other side and it was just sitting there ." Digging deeper, the employee felt time pressure and wanted to get back to work. She knew she had to get a certain amount of things done by the end of the day and that was more real to her than the possibility of getting crushed by a moving freight train . Now, time pressure doesn't necessarily cause accidents, but when accidents happen, time pressure was often a factor. That's what we mean by precursor in this context. It's not something that causes the accident, but it is something that – in hindsight – was a factor. Identifying accident precursors. Can you predict when accidents will happen? William R. Corcoran, writing for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine explains how precursors affect accidents. […] a precursor is an ev ent or situation that, if a small set of behaviors or conditions had been slightly different, would have led to a consequential adverse event. Has there ever been a consequential event, near miss, or infraction/deviation that did not have a precursor? In s ome sense of the word, probably not. Have there been consequential events with precursors that have been discounted, dismissed, not recognized, or not understood? Most certainly. In other words, there are generally identifiable factors in workplace accide nts. Time pressure that is more dominant in an employee's mind that safety is one of them. But as Corcoran observed, plenty of precursors have been misunderstood, discounted or dismissed 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 s tudying 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 researchers developed some of their own data from interviews and observations o n work sites at many more companies as well. PAGE 2 CONTINUED ON PAGE 3