[00:00:00] :  this show is brought to you by safety warning. The following broadcast contains adult language, adult content, frank safety discussions and stories that might sound unbelievable. But believe me, every one of those stories is true? We didn't start the safety war, but we are going to fight to win it for our families, for our communities, for our workplaces and for our lives. I can easily call this continuation of the previous podcast part to a sea lion because we're going to talk about it again. I got some feedback from the last episode and some of our listeners wanted to have a little bit more detail on the abrasive blasting one because that's something that a lot of people don't face. And if they have it in their facility, someone abrasive blasting. What we used to call sandblasting. We don't call it that anymore, what what do you want? So I'm not gonna go and give a full blown abrasive blasting thing. But I'm gonna start with this story. So, as a refresher, we have an industrial painting company coming into the facility. I didn't mention this, but they were painting the inside and the outside of a lot of ground storage tank. My company manages and has managed for about 15 years aboveground storage, tank painting and killings. So we're pretty much what you could call an expert in this, even though I don't really like calling myself an expert in anything. And I tell people if someone calls you an expert in something or identifies themselves as an expert. Especially you want to be very careful because in my opinion, there are very few experts. Mhm. So where do we go with this for abrasive blasting the appropriate PPE. It's almost always a blast stood with supply. There is for open blasting and you have to have containment. You have to have other things going on here by controls and safeguards. Now, what's the blast to provide supply there? Right from that serious source. It's not for ideal age, immediately dangerous for life and health situations. And it also gives you hearing protection to a certain degree respiratory protection. And since it is fitted with a cape or a cow, it gives you a little bit of body protection for if the abrasive last comes back at your body. The painting contractor that we had here wanted to use rather than this setup, which is the industry standard half faced p 100 respirator. I wanted to discuss everything behind closed doors because I don't like putting people into a situation where I might undermine them or they might undermine themselves with their bologna. But this guy, he wanted to be a show off. So he chose to have this whole discussion in front of everybody else. I said, you may not want that, we'll talk about it right here. So I had some time that morning and I went on and one hour long, extra jesus long discussion. Uh and I had time that day and on why he needed this setup. I talked about ocean protection factors, air sample results, noise monitoring results. Just to name a few things. It was interactive was essentially a uh training sessions for free. And I asked the worker that he was with, I said, look, were you ever told any of this stuff by any chance company ever give you training? And this is for a very large, nationally known painting contractor. Some of the people said yes, some people said no, the foreman were for confident person. He identified himself as a confident person. His primary excuse for not using this equipment, among other things is that he was audited on his last shop by a very large auto company. And on top of that to other large firms, they were energy companies were trying familiar with. I've worked there before and most of you heard of them and no one said anything. They're all okay with it. They said they're doing a great job, a fine job. Everything else. This guy had everything they needed, all the certificates, all their paperwork was in order, which was, you know, kind of scary that they would do this stuff with all this training, at least on paper. So let's look at this from the other facilities. Industrial painting is a very highly specialized thing, especially when you're painting tanks, pipelines, above ground storage tanks, underground storage tanks with methodic protection and everything else because these are two part epoxy paints, they have to be warranty and guaranteed by the manufacturer, the paint and the applicator of the painter coding. You need a and I forget the whole acronym. It's a nice certified person to inspect this stuff and that's a clothing specialists with corrosion specialists. Also, that's not an easy exam. It's like highly credentialed, insane. But going on, not too many safety professionals know about how to do this type of work is highly specialized. We happen to know that. So it doesn't surprise me that nobody else that, that they worked with anybody else exactly knew what was going on. I can't fault the people. You don't know what, you don't know it. So how did this discussion? I mentioned that to him. I said, I'll tell you what, why don't we get your corporate safety person on the line and also whoever else you want. I will ask her about this and I tell you what, if she can produce air sampling data, that total dust, what restaurant does is below this number and I label the number. I'm not gonna give it to you folks. You gotta pay me for that one and respirable dust is below this number. We will discuss how to proceed with a half face respirator. Then I wrote down the number on a sticky note, right a little post it note. If you sound, it might sound like it's a gamble, but I have been doing this for a long time. I knew what the numbers were going to be about. And the other thing is I doubt that they had air sampling data based on what this guy, how he was acting. The job would stand for about two hours by this time. But we got everybody on the phone right? I'm in new york. Everyone else's everywhere else in the country, the midwest, far west. It's on a monday after a three day weekend. I briefly explained the situation to the project manager and safety professionals and she says to me that the safety registers hold on, jimmy, I'll get the IH samples that we got from last week. We know we just got him, hold on, I was shocked. Right? Then she says, well, here's the results and wouldn't you know it? They were within 5% of my number and I had it written down like the amazing Kreskin on the old sad johnny Carson trump right where it was hysterical at a certain level, the response from the project manager was even better. So he was in supply there. Right? She said it's company policy that all abrasive blasting has to be done in supplied air period, end of discussion regardless of where you are. And by the way, uh, he's in violation of our company policy and his training, which we just gave to him by three weeks ago. Oh crap. The work proceeded and result the work proceeded safely after this. Unable to come to a friendly relationship with the contractors foreman, the management loved me, but his foreman, they didn't like it because one of the reasons it was, he chose to openly confront me in front of everyone and go through this whole process in front of everyone rather than behind closed doors. That was his first mistake. His work crew did not trust him after this and eventually had led to him leaving leaving the company. I blame the company, not the person for putting him in this situation and there must have been some type of incentive for him to do this either in formal or informal type of thing, right? With the right attitude and some experience, he probably would have been a very valuable asset to that company. So what did we learn from all of this one don't confront people in front of it. Everybody be a nice person. Be helpful. Number two, the foreman expected that the safety officer did not know anything about what he was doing. That was the expectation because that was his experience. He also expected the safety people to stay in their office and not do anything. I don't go on the internet study for a test. The other thing is this. And based outside this discussion and the safety officer told him to do something, he would ignore it. That was this other thing because in his mind and made the job easier and quicker. The next thing, smaller projects mean you can get away with more because on the big jobs they got away with more. So on the small jobs, that means that they're not gonna get, they're gonna get away with stuff because it's a smaller job in their mind. This is what his experience was. This is a classic place of work as planned versus work as completed. The company did not know what was going on in the field. Let's talk about that more in a minute here. The other thing is this, I was talking to the workers in the course of the project over the next couple of weeks and the workers did not push back on their foreman were confident person in this case to encourage them to work unsafely and and and ignore the rules. They all had the same training. They all had about the same level of experience except this person was a foreman. There was an incentive that only informally to ignore the rules. What was the incentive? The workers got better treatment didn't have to work as hard got positive feedback from their foreman and from their management and everything else. But consider this all the hazards associated with this activity that there was an issue with. We didn't have issues with physical hazards, slips, trips and falls, the fall protection, anything like that. We had problems with industrial hygiene, all these hazards that I pointed out here. Noise respiratory right in this case. Alright, confined space entry. This is also confined space century all had to do with long term exposures, Noise exposures, You know, we're hearing protection and you're not gonna have to worry about your hearing being impacted now you're gonna have to worry about that. Hearing being impacted 10, 15, 20 years from now. Again, long term it's not an immediate thing. You fall, you break your leg. That's me. That's a long term respiratory hazards. Although we don't use crystalline silica as a blasting medium as much anymore. Especially with the new regulations, we still have some hazards related to dust, just regular dust. Any other respiratory hazards from last media may take years or even decades to show up. So again here you have something, we're doing something but we're not seeing a bad thing happen immediately when we got to play long to think long term ergonomic stressors, blasting has ergonomic stressors. Again, that's a long term exposure. Very difficult for these people to get into their heads sometimes for people to appreciate this confined space entry. If you're relying on a permit and a piece of paper for a confined space century uh situation to make it safe, You're probably gonna fail. Things will not be assessed. That's why in a confined Space Century program you have multiple controls in there. That and that paper is just on the last piece in in those controls. That's to verify that all the controls are there again again, if these things are planned out, nothing's going to happen because they have multiple levels of protection really the only acute situation you may run into his lead but even with that lead does not usually show up as a symptom where you have symptoms of lead exposure until you're legally twice as high meaning your bloodline is twice as high as the maximum allowable limit under otra. So again none of this stuff happens. That's why they don't take it seriously as much. So what else are we doing? Why are people ignoring rules? Why wasn't this got the answers that I got from these guys but they're not unique. Right? These rules were written by people in offices and have never been able to have never done the work. It was several fewer steps to get the job done without setting up this equipment and guess what? You're not really protecting yourself? Fewer steps mean more production. There was a perception that rules are made to be broken and there are no real hazards and no real consequences either by getting hurt or sick. But we just outlined some stuff since there's no immediate consequences, everything is okay let's not confuse this with the lack of consequences in a system where there are multiple controls and you try to be in the skills work mode in the S. K. R. Model. Right? And the skills mode we know is the lowest error rate and with the most amount of controls, how do we combat all of this Brett Sutton among many of the other people on this network, J Allen, Todd Conklin, all of those would say learning teams, you have to do learning teams and audits. You need to find out how that work is being done, how work is being completed, ask questions if your safety professional, you need to do your homework. If you're a safety professional, it's critical that you learn how the work is performed before you start changing things, questioning things or anything else you have. It all comes down to learning teams. If there's an accident, don't have an investigation team, say we're going to find out what happened here, call it the learning team if you want, let's see what the hell happened here and try to prevent this. That doesn't that sound a lot better than we're going to be doing an accident investigation, accident investigation, sounds like Jack Webb with dragnet. No, you want to learn what's going on, what happened? Have questions, have an opening attitude here because you're going to generate more info, more data points and it makes it easier for you and the organization to organize mitigate manage hazards, it becomes more resilient. You have more capacity. You have to give the right incentives. You can be profitable and safe at the same time, they're not mutually exclusive here unless you really want to cut corners and really want to take risks and then what happens one major accident and there goes all your money that you save, use their learning team even after an accident. Keep asking questions. Have some goodwill towards your coworkers. But you also realize that you have to be fighting a safety. You're fighting a war against the hazards in your workplace, in your community, don't make that a war against people. You're fighting the war for people. And that's the safety war. You gotta have some backbone. You cannot fight the safety war without backbone. You'll get more respect. You'll get better results with backbone than being a spineless jellyfish for safety wars. This is jim proposal. Are you tired of hiring safety consultants and safety professionals that don't have any passion for what they're doing? How about those who have never worked in the field or done the dirty work? Is their resistance to taking safety training because the training is boring, irrelevant And an engaging. Are your employees playing a team councilor or someone on the dark web to take the online safety training for that look, no further safety words can come to your facility. Where do most of the training you need through an online platform at times convenient for you for more information, call me Jim proposal. Your safety words host at 8456944170. Or you can email me at jim at safety words dot com. Remember if you've heard this transmission, You are the solution to unsafe workplaces. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast. Are those of the host and its guests, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. It should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information, assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means mechanical, electronic recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen. Okay.