Got to see this video by Mike Rowe again today while catching up on Reddit. It really says clearly what we should all think about safety at DMS. I’m not saying that we should be as free wheeling as a crab boat on the ocean. But, we should always instill in our membership that safety is our own responsibility first and foremost.
Just the other night a spot on the news covered some dangerous things that folks do in thei
home garages One of them was storing a long ladder vertically instead of hanging on the wall
Horizontally I thought about ours It is o with the rolling ladder in place
We might think about a safer way to store in
Man,
I’m 8 minutes in and nothing has really been said. While the production value looks high, there hasn’t been any real substance.
Yeah, it’s a long video, maybe watch it at 1.5x speed… or skip to about 17 min
tl:dw Put safety back into the hands of the people who will actually be hurt if proper procedures are not:
- in place
- followed
Great idea.
I’m not sure it’s applicable to DMS since the folks who will actually be hurt often appear to be oblivious to this fact (and to be fair, ignorance is bliss; if you don’t know what you’re doing could get you hurt, you will blissfully go on your way).
Two words “Remember Charlie”. People don’t think about the detrimental effects of potential safety accidents. Charlie for those of you that don’t know was burned over a large percentage of his body. He had cut the sleeves off his FR shirt, he left his truck running, ignored some protocols. As a result he got chemicals in his eyes. He ran to a shower/eye wash station only to pass his running truck, That’s when the chemicals ignited causing an inferno & burning him badly. As a result to those injuries his Dad had a stroke, his marriage failed, his daughters lives changed. Eventually his daughter succumbed to addiction of alcohol & drugs. All that because he didn’t want to follow some simple safety protocol. He did manage to survive, He owns a company of Phoenix safety.
Not that I’m advocating that we need hard hats at DMS, but a colleague recently passed along this video of a construction project jobsite weekly safety meeting in Austin in which the GC pretty succinctly demonstrated why you should always wear your hard hat on an active construction site. Enjoy:
Seems like Charlie is blaming too much stuff on only one of his F-Ups.
I still think Mike Rowe says it best, Safety is up to YOU! Don’t rely on everyone else to keep you safe. Do it yourself.
As for teaching safety, talking at people doesn’t work. Because you are often telling people the highlights of lessons they haven’t learned. Instead, demonstrate the situations that you can find yourself in and show the difference between doing it the wrong way and doing it the right way.
When I worked at an oil company we always had pre-job safety meetings. Within 10 minutes of the completion of a safety meeting, we had a guy walk right off a set of stairs that were being repaired. They were barricaded with safety tape?! It was 20 feet down to the next deck of a oil platform, broke his ankle. He was very lucky it was not another location on the platform where the drop would have been 80 feet into the ocean.
Now that is how you demonstrate the need to be safe.