Re: What makes a man...?

Rich Weyand wrote:
Accidents are almost always heavily investigated, and new safety rules are
written when required. It is said that the railroad book of operating rules
is written in blood -- for every rule in the book, someone died in an accident
that made it clear that a new rule was necessary. Once a certain level of
rules are established, most industrial accidents are the result of workers not
following the safety rules.

It drives corporate safety officers nuts.

oh, and sorry to reply twice to the same post, but i forgot this
part... FWIW, i don't disagree with you at all, but it doesn't really
address my point, which is about *perception* of risk. For example, a
few years ago, I watched a contracting firm tear itself apart after
suffering 3 serious accidents in an eight week period. The industry
standard for this sort of thing was something like one per year. Yet
nobody expressed shock when, earlier, they had celebrated three years
without an accident. The point is that it's an industry with a certain
amount of inherent risk, this company was still beating the average (3
accidents in 4 years), but there was an enormous pressure to discover
what had changed that was causing these accidents. But they had been
perfectly willing to accept that the lack of accidents was due to their
skill and competance.

In the end, to the best of my recollection, there was no cause - it was
a statistical anomaly (or normalization, if you prefer), a moment of
carelessness here, a bit of overly-deferred maintenance there, no one
thing to blame but rather a bunch of little things going wrong. They
were under investigation by L&I, lost a lot of their best workers and
foreman because "this company doesn't care about us anymore," the
bleeding only stopped when some of the more recently hired management
types got the axe, though they presumably had less impact on company
policy than anyone. But it gave the appearance of fixing the problem
(even if there was no problem) which decreased people's perception of
the risk.

forrest_m

.

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