this. This this show is brought to you by safety FM. 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. Welcome to the safety words podcast, August 17, 2022. We're going to start out with some news updates. Then we're gonna move into some commentary on one of the news stories. So I'm up here in Rockland County as everyone knows new york new york, about an hour and 10 minutes north of new york city, except when I go to new york city where it takes about two hours. That's a little joke there, polio continues to impact my area of new york. And you know, why am I covering it? Well, first it's as local as local could be. I literally had this going on about a mile away from my house from where I'm sitting right now. One of the goals of this show is to be at the forefront of a lot of this stuff. We were born officially during the pandemic. But I've been wanting to do this for a long time and anything like this for the public health emergency. I want to be at the forefront of it so we can give you good, accurate, scientifically valid information and something you can do with it on top of that. So what I see going on here with polio is that it's coming out this week. It came out. I should say that a lot of the communities that are surrounding me here have very low vaccination rates. A lot of these communities primarily uh pacific jews and I'm not saying anything anti Semitic here, I'm stating a fact have lower vaccination rates in some of the other communities. There are several uh Hasidic jewish communities here in Rockland County, Orange County, which is next door and also up and down the eastern seaboard here, mostly up in the metro new york city area. And as I see what I see potentially happening is all these communities being negatively impacted by it and it's spreading further potentially. And if you think your may not have this problem at west, guess what? There are city jewish communities out west, like in and around Denver colorado where this might impact those. And there starting a vaccination program there. They've had one since the middle of last month I believe and throughout Rockland County and people are getting vaccinated and now there's really been very little resistance and everything else is a little bit too swampy in the conversation. So we'll leave it at that. But uh what the big thing news that came out this week is that health authorities have reported that there are several 100 cases in my community and they're measuring that in the sewage that they're able to draw some conclusions based on the sewage treatment plants and the same thing is happening over in new york city. Second story, I wanted to talk about rust. The rust movie set incident with alec baldwin. If you recall the cinematographer on the movie rust, this happened in New Mexico. Helena Hutchins was shot with a gun allegedly held by alec baldwin. I think uh, you know it's in the news, you can go and check it out what all the major details were. But as a refresher, we covered this on our program a couple of months ago when the state of New Mexico and their occupational safety and health uh agency uh detailed a whole bunch of alleged violations against the movie and it came down to a culture there as the system failing. It was like a textbook example of a system failing which led to this. The FBI this week issued a report that said that it was unlikely for the gun to go off without a pull of the trigger. So if you're familiar with revolvers, you can have a single action or double action, the single action, you have to physically pull back the hammer on the revolver, pull the trigger and you get one shot the next shot, you have to pull the hammer back again and take another shot with a double action. You just pull the trigger and it is able to fire the gun without pulling back on the hammer. So this was a antique style gun and what one of the questions was, could the gunfire with just a, when you're pulling back the hammer and the hammer slips with a quarter pole or a half full or full pull. And what the FBI has said according to the reports here is that the gun, uh, had to be the trigger, had to be pulled for that gun to go off. I don't know. We'll let the lead attorneys figure it out and everything else. But the important thing that we learned from before is you might want to keep your mouth shut if you're going to be involved in criminal type thing or potentially to accuse of a criminal type thing and you know, see your attorney to make sure that you're doing the right thing. You have a little bit of background noise here, but I'm not gonna redo the recording here because I think I was on a roll. So for the third, uh, story we're talking about is an hesh and as everyone knows, I think by that now she passed away from a drunk driving accident is what's being reported. I don't know if that's true or not. That's what's been in the news, but she was allegedly intoxicated and involved in the one person car accident and which burned down a house. Thank God nobody else was killed. The reactions to her death have been mixed. And I wanted to comment on that. It's A little bit disconcerting. No, I've evolved over the years 20 years ago, I would have probably been very hard on there about, what the uh. with the benefit of age, maturity, learning about human and organizational performance and some life experience. I'm really not gonna be that hard on her. I mean, you have to use sides here. People seem to come down on two sides. Right. Either 1 1, she is sick and an addiction is a sickness. All medical authorities pretty much say that uh, if you're addicted, it's not necessarily a a moral failing or anything like that. She was doing an irrational thing. She was driving while intoxicated. She knew what the hazards sorted by this side. She got into a car accident that could have easily killed someone other than her. And no, she caused massive property damage. This is all part of the addiction cycle where you know, something is no good for you and you do it anyway. And that's just the way it is. What I'm hearing it from one side. Well, she wasn't an irresponsible insert whatever word you want to use and she deserves no pity. Right? And she did it to herself. Come on. All right. Let's talk about statistics here for a moment. Let's talk about drunk driving statistics, Drunk driving fatalities have leveled that at around 10,000 people a year 10-10,500 roughly according to most of the statistics and beginning from the National Transportation Highway Safety Board. But the good news is that 65% lower numerically Then in 1982 when they first really started uh, compiling these statistics? How has all of us been done a lot of stuff, stricter laws, penalties, awareness, new technology and safer cars. Remember we didn't have airbags in 1982 we did not really have cars that were constructed to take a hit as well as today. They crumpled up versus my father's 1967 mercury. That thing was a tank or I, I think about the early 19 seventies oldsmobiles. Those things were land yachts and the crisis are huge, but no seat belts, right? Weren't used often, really, 1980 to 1983 is when seat belts were really starting to be used. They were available. Going back to the sixties, the modern seatbelt about 76. And then in 82 people started to wear seatbelts. And then by the mid eighties at least in my neighborhood, pretty much everybody is wearing them. We have better emergency care today than in 1982. All these things and more reduce the impact of drunk driving because you have multiple controls here and multiple things going on all at one shot. But let's remember something also, we have more drivers and more miles driven also. So, you know, we've had a really significant, uh, statistical change, but we've plateaus statistically at above 10,000 seems to be where it's state. Now, let's get back to the story question is this, what kind of society do we want? They want a kinder one looking to fix problems, learn and improve or to shame someone who is sick or something in the middle. I'm probably gonna go something somewhere in the middle, but we're gonna favor trying to help people and fix problems if this rough and tumble way of shaming people, especially, it's not, not nice to talk negatively about the dead. That's what I've always been told, right? If this continues to be the norm, which I think it is the norm at this point, I don't really see good end results in any of this. It won't reduce strong driving. We've already had penalties. They've been there for 40 years In New Jersey. They've been there since 1906. Those were the first recorded drunk driving laws. Everything else has gotten us to the no, everything else has not gotten us to this mythical zero that we're always talking about. What we talked about. That green sign. We've worked the 5380 days with no lost time injuries or no injuries, no illnesses notice. And no. And then the next day, thanks Joe. We've worked zero days without injuries. So that's the blame. It's a medical thing. Alright. So I don't where we need to go with us, right? We know that what could have happened here this easily could have been a mass casualty event. But, but what did happen? It was one person right, involved in a car accident, hitting property and destroying it and one person ultimately being killed and Hesh recipes, She knew what the potentials were. We know what the end result is. We know what it is. I don't know if she knew what it is, unless it was immediately before this happened. Any number of addictions or behaviors from overeating, eating wrong things too much. Social media, sexual addiction, gaming addiction, workaholic, you name it, have negative destructive consequences. And that's just a short list of addictions and negative behaviors that we have here as human beings. My Minister would say where you live in a fallen world and this is the way it is. So we know that she did it, Why? Why did she do it? Because the same reason why people bypassed safety procedures, safety plans, short term game and incentives, short term game was probably getting high. What was the incentive? Nothing bad happened so far since going to continue to go on, that's for likely what it was based on my experience sound familiar. How many times have you heard this in the workplace? You're playing a crafts game and you're hoping to roll the right numbers and most of the time you don't, you do, you don't, you know, you don't get to have a problem muslim, that's reinforcing behavior and what are you gonna do about it? We have to have a different approach here. Trying to understand people we know from our human and organizational performance stuff that blame fixes nothing blaming and shaming people who are sick, who have documented health issues like addictions, mental health issues also will not get us to preventing drunk driving and its results. What is needed is a systemic approach and a cultural change cultural. We've been trying this for a long time since the late 1970s, I grew up with this stuff. We have had a culture shift in the US by penalizing people very commanding control. Maybe this approach works for people who do not have a clinical diagnosis like alcoholism or anything else. Now, the question is, what do we do with people who do have these issues? More mental health resources. Could be one thing. One thing that happened last year was that the Biden administration signed legislation that mandates anti drunk driving features and new cars by 2026. Eventually all cars will have this technology once the older cars are off the road, I'll probably be one ft in the grave or in the grave by then, by the time that happens, especially with people like me who like to drive old cars, that's a systemic solution to the problem. But it's going to take decades to get there right. That's the kind of systemic change. We need smart technology, Things of that nature increase penalties. Sure, okay, how much more, you know, are we going to do with this? I don't know how politically feasible is even to lower the standards for drug, blood alcohol content for example. And now we have other compounding issues potentially with legalization or decriminalization of drugs, uh, there with marijuana and other drugs that's going to get thrown into here. Do we need better intervention programs, medication therapy or anything else? Maybe rather than shaming them? Perhaps, perhaps we need more compassion, more empathy. And of course, tough love. Getting people to admit they have a problem and cured or at least manage it is a whole lot better than a lot of the other alternatives. Is there a place for criminal civil penalties? Yeah, but that's only one way in 40 years. We're still getting there at 10,000 deaths per year. But let me, I know this is a ramp here, but let me think, leave you with this thought, think long and hard as to what kind of society we want to live in. You want to live in a harsh commanding controlled society, more penalties, potential police state. Because this does not end here. There are other things that go on with, uh, that go on here. If they pass a law, we all know in the United States, they don't pass a law, They passed a law, They passed writers along with that law and a whole bunch of stuff gets buried in there. Who knows what's gonna get buried in there. Maybe that's not the way to go. Something maybe being more in tune to the realities of life that are getting people and getting people to help and finding out why they're not getting help might be in order, either formally or informally. So that's all part of the safety war that we're fighting here for. Safety wars. 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