I have been responsible for EHS on major industrial construction sites for most of my professional career. I have written and enforced safety procedures for construction and operation of electric generating plants. My experience it these matters allows me to make a couple of observations.
1. No catastrophic failure is the result of a single cause. Every major accident or disaster is always the result of a chain of individual events the elimination of any one of which would have prevented the event. In the Meron event, for example, If there had been fewer people, or if a different exit had been used, or if the floor hadn’t been slippery, or if it hadn’t sloped down, or if the exit hadn’t been temporarily blocked, or if… You get the idea.
Safety procedures are a pain in the neck. They are often inconvenient and time consuming and interfere with the necessary work. In addition, the often seem unnecessary, even silly. Don’t be fooled. Here’s an example that recently occurred on one of my projects.
2. OSHA (occupational Safety and Health Admin) requires that fall protection be required for all work more than six feet above the floor or deck. This means that workers must wear a fall harness with lanyard which needs to be secured at shoulder height or above in the work area. Now, the fall harness is uncomfortable to wear and the lanyard always gets tangled between your legs and there often isn’t a convenient place to secure it and it has to be unhooked and re-hooked when you move and six feet isn’t really that high, etc. The fact is that this particular requirement is often ignored altogether or the harness is worn but lanyard is just tucked in. And you what. The worker ignores the requirement and nothing happens. He does it once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, and the hundred and first time he slips and falls and breaks his back!
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