In the video, Shirley tells the story of the loss of her son Tim in 1996, as a result of a workplace accident while he was working in the Silverwood Arena in London, Ontario.  Since that time Shirley has been on a mission to help other families come to grips with their workplace losses.  Shirley is now the Executive Director of a much needed family advocacy and support association called Threads of Life.  Please take the time to watch the video.  It’s about 10 minutes in length but I think you’ll find Shirley’s story and message compelling.

Shirley’s story is a personal one for me.  I was working at the City of London in Occupational Health and Safety at the time of Tim’s accident and I led the internal investigation into its causes and required corrective actions. I have since moved on to other roles, other organizations and other communities. I’ve even had the opportunity to collaborate with Shirley through my work at the IAPA and the CSSE. I still fondly remember the day I spent with her at a safety conference in Chatham, Ontario.  On the drive there and back we reflected on the years that had passed since Tim’s death and what we had learned and how we had grown; each in our own way.

I have a deep respect for Shirley and her organization, Threads of Life. Every year during NAOSH Week, Threads of Life works with communities across Canada to raise awareness of the human cost of workplace injuries and illness through the run/walk event “Steps for Life”.  Find out if your community is hosting a Steps for Life event during 2011′s NAOSH Week and please get involved. Families in your hometown need your help to get their loved ones back home from work safely at the end of the day.

Cause Safety to Happen Today in Your Workplace….Andrew….a Canadian Safety Guy

Thank you again for this wonderful opportunity to share the US Launch of NAOSH Week with you.  This is my fourth year as part of these celebrations and I’m always humbled by the commitment of the Safety Poster Contest entrants and their families.  You are truly the next generation of safety advocates and workplace leaders who will bring about much needed change so that all workers will return home at the end of the work day to their friends and families.

During this brief time that we have together, I’d like to share with you some of my first experiences in the world of work and workplace safety.  I’d like to take you back to my first real summer job when I was a younger man of only 20 years of age.

I had been going to school in Ottawa, our nations’ capital, and had made plans to stay in Ottawa versus going back to my hometown of Sarnia in Ontario.  I was going to sublet an apartment and work in the convenience store at the campus residence centre and was excited about spending the summer in the beautiful city of Ottawa.  Five dollars an hour was good pay compared to the same money sweating at the restaurant at home that I normally worked at.

While I was busy making these plans my father was too. You see my father worked at one of the large petrochemical plants in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley.  At one time the Chemical Valley was the largest collection of gasoline, rubber, plastics and specialty chemicals industries in Canada.  It was my father’s hope that I could get a summer job at his plant to make some real money for school.  So he had me put in an application.

It was John Lennon who said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans.”

My plans to stay in Ottawa were going to have to change.  I’d gotten that job at my father’s plant and I’d be making the huge wage of $11 per hour.  $11 dollars per hour…I liked the sound of that…just imagine….more money than I had ever made before.  I’d be able to pay for school and have money left over.  It really wasn’t a hard decision to make.  5 bucks vs. 11 bucks…easy.

So the school year was finished.  My dad drove to Ottawa, picked me up and drove me back home to Sarnia.  Time to start earning that money.

The new workplace was big, complex and like nothing I’d ever seen before.

I’d heard stories about it from my dad.  He’d tell me about his work and how safety was his number one priority.  He’d tell me about his responsibilities as a maintenance supervisor and his work on the plant fire team.  I even remember the story about the time he had to kick some contractors offsite for not following safety rules.  My dad was the first safety leader I knew and he’d become one due to the culture that was part of the plant.  All good stuff, but man was this place big…and serious.

The first few days was orientation….safety orientation.  Three days…we met the safety pros, the hygienists, and even got to learn how to put out real fires with fire extinguishers.  We also heard about how important safety was at the company. It was a real eye opener.

While the orientation was going on, we were also starting to get dribs and drabs of information about our jobs…what we’d be doing.  I was good to do anything…afterall what kind of hard stuff could they give me…I didn’t really have any skills…it would have to be something simple.  So…I’d be working at the Inspection Lab for the refinery side of the business, where they did quality checks on the different gasoline and chemical products.  OK…but what would I be doing there?

Later in the day…more details…it looked like I’d be a Truck Driver.  I know, you’re thinking, wow that’d be a nice job…driving around the plant picking up samples and dropping them off…no problem…well just one…I did have a drivers license but it was for a motorcycle….the only car, or truck, I’d ever driven had been in a video game…

So being a young man of little experience…what did I do…I said nothing and started to get more and more nervous as the orientation continued.

I was even starting to have scary thoughts and dreams of driving the truck and getting into accidents and hurting myself and others.  By the end of day 3 that was enough, I fessed up and told them I couldn’t drive but I would get my license as soon as I could.  They were a little miffed as my admission meant they needed to change their plans to accommodate me.  The crazy thing was they’d never asked on the application or before giving me the job if I could drive a truck.  Being my first real job I already thought that I wasn’t making a very good impression.

So to work…I ended up working in the Inspection Lab testing samples of gasoline and diesel fuel.  Not a bad job.  After about a month I finally did get my drivers licence so I could drive around the plant as the need arose.  Good thing as I was to be given a project that would take me all over.

So the summer passed…I’d been working for a few months and it was time to start the new project.  I was toured around by one of the staff techs, a nice fellow who took the time to show me around the plant and show me the ropes.  I liked working with him – he wasn’t mad at me like my regular supervisor was over the driving thing.  The new project was great.  In the afternoon, after I’d done my lab checks, I’d have to go to every place in the plant that had a sample point to stick a metal sample point identification tag to it.  It was great…I got to go all over…climb huge oil tanks…butane spheres…you name it I saw it.  I thought it was really cool…until I got to the big bunker oil tank…my problem was with the signs…they scared me.

The big bunker oil tank was huge.  You had to climb up a large winding metal staircase to get to the top where it was sampled from.  What did the signs say that got me all concerned?  Danger…H2S…could be fatal if inhaled.  Not only did the signs scare me but I was also starting to think back to one of the sessions from the safety orientation where they talked about the dangers of hydrogen sulfide…it smells like rotten eggs and in large amounts it would shut down your ability to smell it and then if concentrations got higher it would kill you.  This stuff is nasty and it is known for killing in groups.  Normally, the first person would go down and then someone would see that they were in need of help and they would go to help them and themselves be overcome.  I realized that before I went up those stairs I needed to talk to someone.  I went to see my supervisor.

So we had a chat – him and I.  I told him about the signs, the tank and my concerns about my safety.  He was good.  He listened.  Then he came up with a solution.  Here’s what we would do…the truck driver would come with me when I went to the tank the next time.

The driver would have a respirator to supply air ready and if I collapsed on the stairs he would put it on and come and get me.

It was now that I realized that being a truck driver was a good thing.  I also realized that I didn’t really like the plan that much.  I had a much better, safer solution.  That tank wasn’t going to get a sample tag.  I also realized that at the end of the day it was my life and I really didn’t like someone else making these important decisions for me.  I had to be responsible for myself.

It was a good job with some good lessons learned.  I’d gotten excited about safety and decided not to go back to University but instead to take the safety program at the local community college.  This is where I got my start.

I learned that even though we set high expectations on employers to exercise care, ultimately we are responsible for our own lives and need to make our own decisions about the risks that we accept.

Individually, we have the most to lose and the most to gain.  I also learned to speak up and ask the difficult question or say the difficult thing.  Sometimes things have to be hard before they can get any better.

The work that I do and that many in this room do is vitally important to our fellow workers and their families.  Businesses and other organizations have a duty of care to protect their people.  The efforts of the safety professional are the expression of that duty.  We save lives and make working conditions better so that we can all share in the dream of a prosperous life.

Thanks for listening and hopefully learning from my experiences.  I’ve really enjoyed sharing this day with you.  Please accept my thanks and the appreciation of the Canadian Society of Safety Engineering for this amazing NAOSH Week celebration.

As you know, I started up a new private safety consulting business – Safety Forge Consulting – in December of last year.  It had been my hope to start off on my own in a new venture for 2010.  I took the plunge and soon Safety Forge Consulting was born.

The first few months of 2010 were exciting and new.  I was very busy with my marketing plan and the creation of my personal brand.  I was active on the web and started to dabble with social media.  I even posted a few articles about the creation of my business on this blog. Not only was I blogging, but I was also tweeting.  I also spent some time expanding my local (Edmonton) network by joining a terrific Meetup Group here in the city.  I was really enjoying this change in my career, but alas was finding that playing with the web and going out for networking lunches wasn’t paying off for me in the short term.

I was having a speed to revenue issue which was resulting in a lack of eating issue.

Fortunately, while I was starting up the business I was also keeping my options open.  I had a few job interviews and finally in March I landed a wonderful job with a large post secondary education institution in Edmonton.  The role is terrific – with a focus on workplace safety, security and emergency management.  The organization is quite large in the community, its stable and has a wonderful diversity in terms of facilities, operations and people.  Since the end of March I’ve been getting the lay of the land and looking forward to making an exciting contribution to my new team.

My hope is to keep the Safety Forge brand alive, through this blog and other social web avenues, but I am not actively seeking external occupational health and safety consulting opportunities.  My business website (www.safetyforge.com) has been shelved and the url now is redirected to this blog.

On reflection, I think the lessons learned and the experiences from Safety Forge are incredibly valuable to me and may help others considering the life of a private health and safety consultant. I’ll be posting soon about some of those valuable lessons.

Thanks for listening!

Cause safety to happen today in your workplace…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

1. WorkSafeBC ladder safety posters to download and print – excellent resources on a basic but vitally important topic!
2. Alberta Workplace Health and Safety – Explanation Guide to the AB OHS Code – I recently showed this to a colleague from Ontario and he liked how Alberta has provided additional detail to describe how to comply with the requirements of the OHS Code.
3. Alberta Where’s the line? video related to powerline safety – Even Godzilla is not immune to this hazard!
4. Alberta Best Practice Guideline for Workplace Health and Safety During Pandemic Influenza – another excellent doc from AB Workplace Health and Safety.
5. Association of Worker’s Compensation Boards of Canada Key Statistical Measures for 2008.
6. H1N1 Update from WHO – Feb. 23, 2009.
7. Information about Threads of Life Steps for Life Run Walk events being held across Canada on the Sunday of NAOSH Week.
8. COS Magazine video with Norm Keith about OHS regulatory trends in 2010. Norm is really plugged-in to the legal side of OHS in Canada and you need to hear what he’s saying!
9. You can now follow NAOSH Week on Twitter at @NAOSHWeek.
10. You can also download a copy of the Canadian NAOSH Week Resource Guide in PDF form.

If you’re a health and safety professional you really need to be using Twitter to keep up to date with what’s going on.  You can find up to the minute news and some incredible resources that you didn’t know were available.

You can sign up for Twitter here.  For more information about how to use Twitter check out this online FAQ.  I’ve only been using Twitter for about a month or so and find it invaluable!

Please take the time to check out the links above.  If you like you can follow me on Twitter at @safetyforge.

Cause safety to happen today in your workplace…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

I like to say that, “Boring is good in the safety business”, because the opposite, “Exciting”, generally means that there’s an event that has resulted in a workplace injury and therefore individual pain and suffering as well as organizational disruption.  As many of us know, when an injury or loss occurs there’s a mad rush to get help to the person hurt or to repair the damage and then to gather the facts of what occurred.   Normally it’s the safety person that tries to bring calm to the exercise of the initial response and investigation.

So a good safety day, in my opinion, is the “boring” one without any of the events that cause “excitement”.  I know quite a few emergency personnel who get excited about responding to a fire or other emergency.  In my world I would be much happier if there were less emergency events.

The other side to the safety boredom thing is a real challenge and that is engaging people in the conversation about safety.  Safety is a vital human need, yet in our society there is so much going on it’s hard to get and hold people’s attention.  If you do wake someone up long enough for them to listen to you, you only have seconds to capture them and keep their attention on the importance of your message.   In safety training or discussions I call this “the Hook”.  What are the first 10-20 words that will excite people so that you can get them the information they need to be safe.

In my experience the worst training that I have ever done has to be WHMIS – the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System.  When I started out in safety over 20 years ago, WHMIS was the new thing.  It was about chemical safety information in the form of container labelling, material safety data sheets and worker education.  Back in the beginning we spent 8 hours on the generic side of WHMIS training and then another 8+ hours doing WHMIS specific training.  I did so many of these sessions that I had to get the participants to wake me up at the end of the session…and I was the instructor.  Today, WHMIS training has been incorporated into computer based learning and is predominantly a refresher for most workers, but you’d be amazed at how many workers still have not received this training; even after being mandatory in Canadian workplaces since 1989.

Today, I realize that there are many ways that people learn and it’s important to mix and match your training style to the learners in your session.  Adults learn best when they are engaged in the content and allowed to come to the learning of their own accord.  The mandatory nature of most safety training can place an immediate barrier between you and the learner.  You’ve heard it before…”Do I have to be here.  Yes…this is safety training.”  A training colleague of mine advised me many years ago that it’s important to recognize  the “mandatoryness” of the training and then quickly get into the why and personal relevance of it’s importance.

I’ve learned some other tricks over the years about modulating my voice, using questions and exercises to engage the participants and how to use my own style of self deprecating humour to keep people awake.  It still is an effort to take the serious nature of safety and make it fun and engaging.

I’ve heard the stories of how people make WHMIS training fun and I’m sure they think it is, but I have trouble envisioning it.  I still have flashbacks to my WHMIS-induced bouts of narcolepsy from the 90′s.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m considered by many to be a great speaker and trainer.  At least that’s what some very nice people tell me.  I have to search for that spark of creativity each time that will hook my audience.

So what about you?  When you’re not trying to experience the bliss of safety boredom, how do you make safety or training fun?

Cause safety fun to happen today in your workplace…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

Sure there were some things that didn’t quite work to plan, but that’s life.  The organizers and participants just kept going.  I was moved by the athletes entering the stadium and by the history and beauty of Canada as it unfolded for the world to see.

I got a kick out of the spoken word poet, Shane Koyczan.  I really liked what he had to say about our land and our people.  I couldn’t find his olympic performance on YouTube, but here he is in another venue with the same message.  Enjoy!

I do have to bring up a safety issue that I had some concern about.  The stage where many of the speeches and some of the performances occurred had an unguarded edge with a significant fall hazard – at least from what I could see.  I did notice that the edge was marked with lighting to raise the awareness of the fall hazard.  The dignitaries and performers were also probably advised of the use of control zone fall protection as well.  Here’s some information on Control Zone Fall Protection from an Alberta perspective.

We’re all saddened by the death of the Georgian luge athlete.  We know that there are risks in sport and that deaths and injuries do occur.  Athletes accept those risks, to a degree, and work their miracles.  Unfortunately, we know that speed thrills, but it also kills.  The investigators will be doing their best to identify contributing factors, causes and required corrective actions to minimize risks to the athletes.  The reality is that the athletes are the best at what they do in the world and their work places them at risk.  Their tireless training, skill, practice and physical conditioning allow them to perform the risky work that most of us would never even consider.  These efforts though will never reduce the risk to zero.  That is the reality that we experienced on Friday.

Good luck to all of the athletes over the next few weeks.  Cause safety to happen as you amaze yourselves and the world!

Andrew…a proud Canadian Safety Guy

Apparently a crane toppled over into an excavation and crushed a worker.  The crane operator, the crane owner and the crane rental firm have been charged under the CCC.

More information can be found here.

Check out my previous post on C-45 6 Years In.

Cause safety to happen today in your workplace…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

In addition to reading his book, I’ve discovered some other web-based resources in support of his message.  I thought I’d share them with you.  Firstly, if you’re interested in Dan’s work you can find his website here and he also has a blog at the Ottawa Citizen. There are also a few YouTube videos where Dan is delivering presentations on his book.

Dan Gardner, author of Risk: the Science and Politics of Fear, describes the evolution of the human mind and our risk-based thinking processes (7 minutes)

If you’re in the safety field – workplace safety, public safety, etc. – you really need to learn more from Dan.  He helps us to understand the psychology of the human mind and how we make decisions about risk.

Another great resource on Risk is from the CSSE.

Back quite a few years ago, I had the great pleasure to work with Kirby James.  Kirby is one of those rare individuals who is both brilliant and engaging.  In the early 90′s, Kirby spent much time investigating our communications related to Risk and how our perceptions influenced our judgment.  Kirby went on to study the work of Peter Sandman and started to share his learnings with safety colleagues through public speaking engagements at a variety of conferences.  When the CSSE was in the process of developing the Certified Health and Safety Consultant (CHSC) designation, Kirby was asked to author one of the CSSE’s key professional development courses – Applied Risk Communication.  This two day training session is one of the most important educational experiences I have had in my entire career as a safety professional.  Kirby stretched my understanding of how to effectively communicate about risk and left me with vital tools that I continue to use today.

I can’t say this too strongly, if you’re a safety professional in Canada today, you need to ensure that the CSSE’s Applied Risk Communication course is on the top of your list for professional development.

I think it was Howard the Duck who said, “When the world is out to get you, paranoia is just good thinking”.  We don’t need to be obsessed with risks in our professional practice of safety, but we do need to be able to understand the psychology of risk and effectively communicate with our customers.  It’s vitally important that we worry about the right things and apply the right resources to deal with real issues in our workplaces.  Do check out both of these terrific resources – you owe it to yourself and your people!

Cause safety to happen today in your workplace…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

When you think about it, Toyota’s hallmark has been quality.  Toyota is almost a synonym for the concept.  I’ve had quite a few Toyota vehicles over the years and they’ve been great cars that have provided great ride quality and few trips to the shop for unplanned maintenance.

With the recent safety issues and recalls for the gas pedal defect and now suggestions of braking/acceleration problems with the Prius, Toyota is under seige.  It’s amazing how quickly a good reputation can be placed in doubt.

Here are a few references related to the Toyota recalls and the Prius issue:

http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/static/business/article1455496.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10445564-64.html

http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2010/02/report-toyota-admits-new-prius-did-have-brake-problems.html

Safety like quality is an important need for consumers.  Over the last few years safety has been leveraged by automotive marketers but not to the same degree as quality.  I think it’s because we take safety for granted.  We all know in our heart of hearts that driving is one of the most risky things we do everyday.  In some cases it’s more dangerous than the hazards we’re exposed to in our work, unless of course you drive for a living.  It will be interesting to see if there’s an uptake on the OHS side from the public product safety focus we’re experiencing today.

As to Toyota’s workplace health and safety record I’ve only seen and heard good things.  I understand that they have systems and resources in place to manage the workplace health and safety function.  They’ve also reportedly been a good corporate citizen.

Only time will tell how Toyota bounces back from this crisis of public concern.  I’m waiting for the next car advertisement where Safety is the prime focus.

…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy

…Andrew…a Canadian Safety Guy