Be Safe - Growing Safety Awareness for Accident Prevention in Dangerous Occupations: Safety Through Mindfulness, #1

Preface

Be Safe! Those two words are used as a parting exchange as skilled craftsmen, who work in dangerous environments, say goodbye. They say Be Safe in hopes they will see each other again unscathed from the dangers they face every day. When people work within dangerous environments, seeing their friends and co-workers again unharmed is not to be taken for granted.

Every day hard-working people are injured or killed while they are trying to provide for their families and serving their communities. Accepting this risk is like playing with fire, and far too often someone gets burned. These workplace accidents carry devastating results for themselves, their families, co-workers, and communities.

The book Be Safe is the culmination of over twenty years of research to find the missing links in the chain of events that lead to accidents. Understanding what creates the human errors within our actions will allow everyone to work accident-free. This understanding is nonexistent within the defensive strategies commonly used in safety programs today. Defensive strategies are the best techniques currently available for preventing accidents; however, the fact that good people continue to suffer accidents demonstrates that there is something missing in our abilities to keep each other safe.

The programs already in place are well thought out, but these programs fail to cover some common aspects of human behavior and sensory restrictions we all possess. These human limitations create accidents every year within a cloak of anonymity, while we focus on more visible actions that led up to each accident. We choose to focus on the actions, because they are easily analyzed and critiqued. After the investigation, action steps are then suggested for preventing future accidents.

What if our actions are not really the weakest link in the chain of events causing accidents? What if the weakest links are hidden within various obstructions created by our biology, evolution, and held beliefs. When the sources of our most debilitating weaknesses, goes unrecognized, they are free to interrupt and distort delicate mental processes that control all of our actions. However; when we shine the light of understanding on these self-imposed obstacles they lose their power to create careless actions. We become able to use compensation strategies and corrections to produce the actions that results in safer outcomes.

Medical science is just beginning to realize that the best strategy to fight many varieties of cancer is not from some defensive outside source, but by utilizing the body’s own immune system to go on the offensive and fight the cancer. They have devised ways to make cancers highly visible to the immune system, and as a result, the immune system attacks the cancer with a vengeance.

What if there are offensive ways to grow a craftsman’s understanding of his own inherent obstructions and build compensation strategies that can be used every day. This training could heighten their awareness for hazards within their work environment and give them the self-control to ensure behaviors that foster teamwork, and emotional stability. It is my contention that these abilities can be improved just like any other skillset, but they can also atrophy from nonuse. Our level of awareness determines if we are taking deliberate cognitive actions, or merely robotically moving within thought-induced daydreams.

The need to teach new information in order to develop greater levels of safety awareness is long overdue. Implementing new training techniques, like the ones contained in this book, would protect people from the terrible pain of workplace accidents. However, this new offensive information, is currently not even a part of the discussion for workplace safety.

This omission is hard to believe given that everything we do, every action we take, every thought we think, every result we obtain must pass through our minds to become a part of our known experiences. Every OSHA rule or guideline can be disregarded and ignored by holding some of the most common misleading ideas. The relationships between our mental activities and the actions that produce accidents are not always clear, because the complexity of the mind creates avoidance of the topic all-together.

It is difficult to diagnose accidents as resulting from biological, evolutionary, or mental errors when we don’t routinely have enough understanding of the mind to diagnose anything with any accuracy. This lack of knowledge allows problems within our mental processes to manifest into physical reality through our actions. We may realize that if we act more wisely our outcomes will be more palatable, but these snippets of conventional wisdom come to us so randomly. Gaining the best set of wise ideals to utilize this information is often just the luck of the draw for the hands we have been dealt.

We need to understand the inner workings of our minds to know how wisdom or the lack of wisdom effects self-awareness, our actions, and the results we inevitably produce. We will understand the power contained within a single false belief, and the human dysfunctions caused when we hold possibly hundreds of these disempowering ideas. We will learn the process of how to reverse misleading beliefs through personal growth and by developing wisdom. These changes will alter our perceptions of the world, bring us peace of mind, emotional stability, and greater self-control.

We will learn what biological restrictions we possess that can blind us to existing hazards or make us forget crucial steps for workplace safety at the worst possible time. We will cover the automatic mental processes that can take over our actions at any given moment. This mental process was designed by nature to conserve energy; however, it doesn’t have any awareness for existing hazards or knowledge of learned safety practices. We will discover that when mindsets are corrected, we will be more focused and aware of our every action. This is accomplished by learning about the complex activities of the mind, so we may better diagnose the root cause of accidents as they arise in real time.

This is a book about accident prevention; however, eliminating accidents is only possible by understanding the greatest safety device we possess, which is our minds. We have always had the offensive power within ourselves to eliminate accidents, but the needed information was lost among an overabundance of misinformation which confused our full understanding.

Whether a person is a craftsman in a dangerous occupation or a safety professional charged with training others to work safely, this book is for everyone concerned about safety. All who accept danger for the sake of their loved ones, or who take on the responsibility for developing safety programs for others, deserves the best up-to-date safety information possible.

This book is full of useful information to teach new safety skills and will enhance workplace cultures at the same time. What we perform in our chosen occupations is in high demand for the lifeblood of society and our communities. It is up to us to create the safety culture where accidents are a thing of the past, and people working in dangerous occupations remain with us to enjoy the lives they labored so diligently to create. This is the goal and until that day arrives, Be Safe

Chapter 1

The Beginnings of the Search for Safety

OVER TWENTY YEARS AGO, my youthful exuberance for high-voltage utility line work was ended by the electrocution of my friend, mentor, and confidant, Alvin. Upon returning home from Alvin’s funeral, I wrote the song, Only Just a Dream. With tears flowing and emotions raw, the song poured out, as my mind begged to wake up from this terrible dream. It wasn’t a dream though, and the loss remained permanent in this lifetime.

The days following Alvin’s accident passed as a foggy daze as my mind tried to make sense of this emotional devastation. It was not possible that something like this could happen within our workgroup. There was nothing in the work situation that Alvin didn’t know backward and forward. He was a great utility lineman, a wonderful person, and a great friend.

The loss of a longtime friend and co-worker due to a workplace accident is an incredibly painful experience. It left so many questions running through my mind, but no answers which made any sense. Why did this accident happen? How could this accident even be possible? How could this accident have been prevented? What are we missing?

The conventional attitude, which believes that accidents happen in other people’s lives, was shown to be an illusion when faced with the reality of Alvin’s accident. Those of us who work in dangerous occupations convince ourselves that we know what we are doing as we say, An accident won’t happen to me; even though, some people fall prey to accidents every day. Just believing this self-inflicted white lie will diminish the amount of wariness we exhibit within dangerous environments. What is even worse though, is that if we believe we know what we are doing, so we won’t search for better information to work even safer!

We won’t search for new answers until we see a need for change; however, the pain of losing a good friend created a huge incentive for seeking new solutions for safety. The continual stream of lives lost within the industry proves that what we have always done in the past always fails us periodically. There had to be something which would allow us to grow our abilities and keep us safer in the future. We have to turn over every rock and ask every unanswered question in order to find out what we don’t know!

What typically has held us back is that after we have followed certain practices for so long, we can forget to question their effectiveness. As Thomas Paine said, A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. We have been conditioned to believe in the currently used methods for accident prevention, but some of these methods fail to teach any useful skills. Often the only result is a false sense of accomplishment for having done something substantial in the area of safety. This misplaced satisfaction camouflages the real dangers lurking from human obstructions rarely mentioned within safety programs. Few new ideas ever penetrate current safety programs; even though, hazards produced by technology continue to put workers in environments with increasing levels of danger.

Many of our ancestors’ widely accepted habits caused them little difficulty in simpler times. However, in today’s world, some of these mental habits create additional risks for accidents. Today we can fall from greater heights, be buried alive in cave-ins, become wrapped up in machinery, suffer electrocutions, be blown up in natural gas explosions, receive chemical burns, get crushed under heavy loads, become lacerated by blades, experience car wrecks, and the list goes on and on. There are more ways now to be injured on the job than at any other time in human history.

Have the preventative measures used in safety programs been able to keep up with the fast pace rise of dangers produced by new technologies? The answer is clear that great progress has been made to hold accidents to acceptable industry norms, but we have fallen behind in our abilities to defend each other from the powerful forces of technology. Ask anyone the following question: Is all the electricity used throughout the world worth one human life? The answer is clearly no, but we have over time painted ourselves into a technological corner.

We have come to rely on new advancements in technology to support the growing human population. We are now at the point where we must continue using technology to support the population, or failure to do so would result in millions of people dying of starvation and thirst. This leaves us in a precarious position of needing high voltage distribution systems that we know will kill many people every year. Logic ends up reasoning that the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few. This being the case, if we can’t stop the activity that is costing lives, then we must do everything possible to protect the people in harm’s way.

Accident prevention is admittedly the toughest nut to crack when compared to other challenges within dangerous occupations; however, being difficult can’t be the reason for complacency. Every possible idea must be investigated as long as there is unknown information holding back our abilities to work safe.

An old adage states the following false idea: What I don’t know can’t hurt me. This adage is held up as truth, but we are placed in danger when errors hide behind false beliefs. A false belief is any held idea that contains error-filled information but is believed to be true. Using faulty reasoning within our mental calculations produces conclusions that are in error and restricts the development of our full potentials.

This process is repeated continuously every day, so what we don’t know about ourselves creates unrealized obstacles that reduce our ability to cope with work-place hazards. We can’t protect ourselves from dangers when we don’t know how or why our best defenses become limited or switched off. How many lives could have been saved had the missing information been discovered decades ago? In my new position, I needed answers now more than ever before.

I was five months into a new position as the Field Supervisor of Electric Operations for a neighboring district at the time of Alvin’s accident. The most important part of my responsibilities was to develop safety meetings which fostered safety awareness and enforce safe work practices. I fully wanted to prevent further unnecessary accidents like Alvin’s, but my conundrum was how do we teach true safety awareness? What is awareness and how do we lose it? All known resources at the time were utilized to raise safety awareness; however, three years after Alvin’s accident, Phil was electrocuted during an early morning routine wire down call.

Phil and Alvin were both incredibly competent at their jobs, and no amount of technical training would have changed their outcomes. They spent years coaching and grooming both lineman and apprentices in technical skills. Both men demonstrated the best caring natures for their co-workers, and they exemplified the type of personal character others looked up to and sought to emulate.

The hardware nuts and bolts of the jobs they were performing was completely within their range of knowledge. It just didn’t make any sense that this could happen to two of our very best. The only rational conclusion one can reach is that there is something lacking within our training methods which remained undetected and unrealized. I began my search for the missing safety information, but in the early years there were more roadblocks and dead ends than bridges leading to answers.

In an attempt to discover new insights for working safer, I volunteered to go on a safety audit to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The safety audit was an attempt to discover why so many of their electrical workers were being killed every month. Taking a dozen flights over a two-week period, I visited dozens of central offices, generating stations, and crew sites. From the air, I could see vast jungles with only one road connecting villages with larger urban areas. The challenges of building and maintaining an electric distribution system in these isolated areas would be as challenging as anywhere else in the world.

The engineering they utilized to build the electrical grid and substations was modern and up to date. The power lines, poles, wire, transformers, and high voltages were built to the same technological standards as any developed nation. The electrical workers I met were energetic, friendly, and proud of their positions; however, this is where the similarities ended.

Even though these crews faced the same dangers as linemen in developed nations, the equipment they had to work with was subpar and in some cases nonexistent. Some men worked with wooden ladders, no rubber gloves, and had few hand tools. The electrical test equipment they used were outdated crude analog devices which were not plentiful enough to have one on hand when needed. Their tools were carried in the beds of small pickup trucks open to the weather and other contamination.

They did the best job possible with what little equipment they had available, but in high voltage environments, they continually suffered fatal accidents. The dangers created by modern technological advancements far outpaced their evolution in obtaining safety equipment and training. When the evolution to defend against danger lags behind the rise of new potential threats to our well-being, there will always be some casualties, and they were suffering losses every month.

This realization made my final report easy to write. I told the company that they had good employees, and all they needed was the state-of-the-art equipment and training to go along with the modern system they had built. This was an easy observation from someone who came from an area that already possessed the equipment; however, this understanding wasn’t obvious to people who had never seen the modern equipment that was available for high voltage line-work.

The next day, while flying home on an eight-hour flight, I began thinking about how obvious to me the solution for their safety problems were since I worked in an area where many of the solutions in training, tools, and equipment already existed. This made me wonder, What would the answers for safety in my company look like from a person who came from a place where they never suffered any accidents? No place like this existed in the world, and that is the reason the answers for workplace safety were not obvious to anyone including myself. However, during my long flight home I began contemplating the unique traits someone would already possess if they came from a place where there were no accidents and perfect safety awareness for hazards was the norm.

As I began writing a list, it included items like perfect visual abilities, so every nuance of the work environment would be seen and considered before taking any action. They would possess perfect memory and recall of safety procedures and technical information. They would possess a calm cool demeanor, so frustrations wouldn’t produce anger and reduce their mental abilities in the most inopportune times. They would place the safety of themselves and their colleagues above everything else, so safety steps would never be rushed or skipped.

They would understand human nature, so they could work with others in a way that produced the best possible outcomes by utilizing all the unique talents each crew member possessed. They would be consciously aware of the environmental hazards, and not allow the unconscious mind to control their actions when dangers were present. My fictional person did not exist in today’s world, but what I needed to learn was how to bring this level of self-awareness into reality for every employee’s safety?

To find answers, for what we were missing in our safety training, I began reverse engineering my imaginary accident-free person. I started looking at safety, not from where we were, but from where we needed to go to save lives. What known practices, from any sources, would enhance mental clarity, bring peace of mind, calm, patience, and unite people in relationships that work effectively for common safety goals. I had no idea what area of study could accomplish these higher levels of human awareness we needed to develop; however, I was sure there had to be something obvious we were missing. It would take me years of searching to find the answers, but the reoccurring accidents I read about fueled my efforts.

I had my eyes opened up in Brazil to what a huge problem accident prevention is worldwide. We collectively are the safety cultures everyone works within, and each shares a portion of the responsibility for the safety culture’s successes and failures. Lives depend on us finding the answers we do not currently possess so future generations can learn from our past mistakes. I set a goal to find the missing answers and bring an end to accidents with no clear path in mind. I would also let the search lead to the answers with no preconceived biases interfering with the process.

In forming safety programs, we have always focused our efforts around the physical actions we must take to work safely; however, every physical action is constantly affected by inherent human obstacles. Is it possible that naturally occurring weaknesses within our biology and mental processes negatively affects our ability to be fully aware of our actions? We all know we can’t drink alcohol on the job since the alcohol impairs the person’s ability to think clearly and be mentally aware; however, we have historically ignored self-produced sources of limitations that reduce these very same abilities.

As an industry, we do little to teach how to maximize our awareness, since we don’t actually recognize expanded levels of awareness as trainable abilities. We focus most of our safety training on action steps which can be completely undermined through common awareness shortfalls of ourselves and others.

Through studying, slowly the common themes revealed the various human limitations that could not be ignored any longer. The mind’s ability to deliver accident producing errors became increasingly obvious. The mind’s natural and learned limitations are so powerful that no outside defensive measures could ever guarantee any level of absolute protection. What we don’t understand about ourselves is the primary cause of human errors and how environmental awareness is lost.

Most people’s first initial reaction to an accident points to our instinctive understanding that the mind is the main source of accidents. Usually asked are questions like the following: Are you blind? Where was your head? What were you thinking? Why don’t you wake up and pay attention? These questions point to the truth that the mind is the core component for growing safety awareness and working safer.

Safety awareness has been known to be seriously jeopardized when the person isn’t focused on the task. A single moment of unawareness can erase years of careful training instantly. Our awareness can leave us momentarily in many different ways, but I have never received formal training on a single one. The number of ways we can create restrictions to our awareness is only limited by the creative abilities of the human mind, and the human mind is highly creative.

How then do we go about teaching a method for strengthening one’s ability to focus without distractions? Until this question could be answered, we are in danger from unrecognized sources which we have never been trained to recognize or defend against. Human errors are the inevitable result without training, but we never seem to look past human errors to identify the underlying causes.

Within the safety industry, it has been proven that the vast majority of accidents can be attributed to human error. Believing that people are predestined to make errors and suffer accidents, left the safety industry only one option for accident prevention. This option was to create new tools, better equipment, and workplace procedures to defend against accidents caused by human error.

A defensive strategy for preventing accidents always places barriers between the craftsman and the workplace hazard. This is a common strategy within current safety programs and has created an impressive selection of tools, equipment, and step-by-step procedures designed to keep people safe. As these defensive strategies have improved, the number of deadly accidents has declined. Yet even with all the wonderful equipment at our fingertips, our human limitations cause us to lose too many people to crippling injuries and fatal accidents.

We set up the same safety programs that we know only lowers accidents to within the expected industry norms. We stick to this approach, because we honestly don’t know of anything better. We almost expect people to suffer accidents, because we have been taught that human beings are prone to make mistakes.

Zero accidents for many is a myth or a pipe dream not attainable in dangerous occupations. However, many people have worked long careers in dangerous occupations and never experience accidents. What creates this safety disparity among people? Working long careers without suffering any accidents proves that this ability is possible; however, identifying the subtle differences among people which brings about enhanced safety skills was not easily discernible.

We can only begin to develop these skills by first believing working accident-free may be possible and then by identifying the subtle differences which create either safety awareness or accidents. In the beginning, I had many questions and few answers, so I began studying to find the elusive answers.

I began choosing from thousands of books to try and understand what people in other areas of expertise might know about gaining a greater level of safety awareness. I studied safety manuals, psychology research studies, self-help books, and internet searches on safety, but nothing I found really explained why our safety awareness could be momentarily lost. Much of what I read on awareness issues dictated the use of some drug to counter the effects of some chemical imbalance; however, I knew the answers we needed would not be found in a pill.

Scientific sources went into minute details trying to describe how the brain processes information. I didn’t need to know the microbiology of how the mind worked. I needed a user’s manual for why these processes worked together in certain predictable patterns. I was then introduced to information which began my education on the philosophical approach of understanding human behavior and how our thoughts drive our actions.

I had spent years studying the mind from a scientific viewpoint; however, science-based information was generated in the past few hundred years. The information I had been searching over a decade to find was in writings which were both recent and thousands of years old. It should not be surprising to find that those who lived before us have been trying to warn us of the pitfalls we would endure if we engaged in certain belief systems or thought patterns.

This has always been true, and people throughout time have been warning us to learn from their mistakes. If we fail to heed their warnings, then we are bound to repeat the same mistakes today. I took the advice of Socrates when I read the following quote: Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. Other people had long ago figured out the answers I needed to find, so all I had to do was apply their answers to our current problems within the area of workplace safety.

Many great men throughout time wrote down their understanding of the human condition. They explained ways in which we can rise above our pattern of conditioned responses to the world we experience. Philosophers, poets, religious icons, world leaders, neuroscientists, and authors left us with the gifts of wisdom and knowledge for the betterment of all men. Their writings with the advent of the internet are available to everyone with a click of a mouse.

As the years passed, I began to see patterns and constant themes in writings passed down from history’s legends. My task became to understand what the great minds throughout time had left for us to learn and collect all the information into an understandable process. This will be one book; however, it will be our intelligence, creativity, determination, and execution, which will determine the end results. Only by using our individual skills for each person’s development can one book be a guide to so many with diverse experiences and backgrounds.

As we enter into learning new safety skills, repetition is the key to success; and staying the course over time ensures personal growth. Many of the key ideas that are needed to develop self-awareness will be deliberately repeated to aid retention. If certain ideas seem overly repeated, it is a sign that the idea to the reader was not a foreign concept, so retention was easier. Redundancy is necessary for first-time experiencers of new information.

The repeated pattern allows new information to be absorbed within the learner’s mind each day, so the new information reshapes the mind during a good night’s sleep. While asleep, we grow an ever-increasing number of electrical connections. These new electrical connections represent new mental possibilities we previously did not possess. This is called personal growth, and the lessons within this book are focused on presenting the information in a direct and easy-to-understand manner.

This book will not be guiding us to learn complex rituals or memorize passages for later use. It will be mostly a lesson in truth, and when life gets closer to the truth it becomes much simpler. A person will, if they are successful in the end, unlearn much more than they will ever learn from this book. With less to do, the mind has more time to focus on just being aware of the surroundings.

The simplicity of this change, however, will be an education widely needed, seldom taught, and hardly ever learned. This is the goal of the Safety Awareness Schematics which take the enormous complexities of the human mind and breaks them down into codependent levels that makes the mental processes understandable for us everyday users. As Albert Einstein said, If you can’t explain a topic simply then you don’t understand it well enough. This became my challenge in order to explain this safety message to you.

The foundational base of the safety awareness process is you. You are the only one who wields any power in your mental and physical universe. Others can be teachers, coaches, guides, and mentors, but you hold the keys for your future safety. You possess unbelievable potential but possessing potential doesn’t guarantee you will ever develop that potential.

This is where the proper training is absolutely imperative. You are the foundation for everything we will build upon in the following chapters because how you learn and operate at your highest level must be the primary consideration for any safety program. Our inherent human abilities have not been the focal point of safety programs of the past as chapter two will outline further.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Isaac Asimov

page20image54975392 Alvin Binder was a lineman for Central Illinois Light Company for 30 years. He was married to Georgia Binder and they had two children. He suffered a fatal accident while working on a transformer Sunday, May 30th, 1995. This was just two months before his 55th birthday and on a beautiful sunny day one mile from home. He always answered the call when needed to work overtime and was on his second call out that day. We may never know the full extent of what transpired that day, but something went terribly wrong. The end result was a good man lost his life, and an entire family was devastated and forever changed.

My dad would speak of ideas he had about improving the workplace and ways to improve safety for everyone. It is ironic that by his death he played a major part in hopefully making the workplace safer for future generations. He would be good with that! I am very proud of my dad and he didn’t deserve to go down like that. I have to tell you it still hurts, and I miss him badly every-day. I think of him more as my best friend than just my father.   Terry Binder

PHILLIP REED EDWARDS was born June 27th, 1947 and died November 10th, 1998. He was a wonderful husband to Jane Edwards, and an extraordinary father to his four children. He was a respected and trusted co-worker, by union personnel and management alike, and the accident which took his life was not reflective of how he performed throughout his career.

Phil was a loyal and dedicated employee of Central Illinois Light Company, CILCO, for 33 years. He began working for CILCO at 17 years old as an interoffice mail delivery person in 1965. He took a leave of absence to serve in the U.S. Army, but upon returning from active duty in the spring of 1967, he went to work again for CILCO in the gas construction department. His ultimate goal was to be a part of the line department, which he accomplished in the fall of 1967.

He enjoyed the challenge of learning to build and maintain transmission and distribution systems, which are vital in order to get electric power from the power plants to customer’s homes. After successfully completing his apprenticeship he was excited to become a Journeyman Lineman. He worked on line crews honing his skills until he became a crew leader over his own crew. In this role, Phil was a teacher as he worked hard on growing the abilities of his crew members as he led the building dependable distribution circuits.

He was a mentor to all who knew him, and a great teacher for apprentice lineman and line ladies. Phil’s gentle nature saw all people as equals, and being free from preconceived biases, he fairly coached all apprentices equally. If a person was able to fill the challenges of the job he gave them high marks, but if being a lineman was not a good fit for their talents, then he assisted them with whatever needed to be done. It was better to guide a person into a different career path than to jeopardize their future safety.

With Phil the most important part of the job was safety. He had two basic principles he adhered to concerning line work. The first principle was, Keep safety first by ALWAYS performing the safety checklists, because you never want to assume everyone is safe.

The second principle was, Electricity is to be respected but not feared. He was known as the safest man at CILCO, since he was never careless or reckless with anyone’s safety. In his mind, I am certain that he was sure he had taken the necessary precautions to ensure the safety of everyone on the crew that day. Something went terribly wrong, and it was a sad day for everyone who knew him. He will remain forever in our hearts and minds.  

Mrs. Jane Edwards

Chapter 2 Past Safety Program Techniques

OFTEN WHEN SETTING out on a new journey with no destination in mind, it is helpful to understand where we have come from, so we can plot a course for where we want to go. This is especially true when the mountain before us seems impenetrable, and unable to be scaled with the current tools available. However, I believe no challenge is impossible when enough people bring their collective talents onto the same path seeking solutions.

The leading enforcement and preventative organization, for eliminating accidents on the job, is the Occupational Safety and Health Organization. The OSHA organization has worked diligently with their thousands of safety professionals to improve the safety environment within the workplace. Their efforts have definitely resulted in saving lives and reducing injuries; however, even with OSHA’s guidelines there