Health and Safety, how's your H&S game?

You have a problem with that? Because thems the rules in our UK office.

Yes seen him, a very powerful speaker.

I’ve been working construction for far too long. But I can say the improvement in HSE is vast in that period. I worked on the Channel Tunnel for a couple of years in the undersea tunnels. HSE was just about non-existent. Yes hard hats, hi-vis & steel capped boots were worn but that was about it. The lack of any safety culture cost lives. The first was an 18yr old kid. Barely out of school, no construction awareness or experience. Turned up late for his shift, missed his crew train down to the face, so walked down wearing a Walkman listening to his music. Never heard the train that ran him down & killed him.

The interesting thing is the areas that have the greatest struggle with safety culture is the older more experienced guys. They are the very epitome of survivorship bias.

As a former safety adviser, it often depends on what your safety adviser did before, whether they did a "proper" job or whether they went straight into h and s

"I've been doing (insert really dangerous thing) for 30 years and I'm still here"

Thanks, grandad.

One of my other favourites was pulling into a building site with 12 pallets on the flat bed and then not being allowed near it to undo the straps as the H&S wonk had decided that once a lorry was in the area no one was allowed near it on foot.

Or the time I went to a site with one lift on the flat bed and upon arrival they pushed big bag cushion things right up to the lorry, again I could not get near to unstrap, apparently I was supposed to unstrap on the road and drive in with it just on the lorry by gravity. The H&S pillock on that site could not grasp how I was not wanting to drive with an insecure load onto site.

I did get a nice new set of Hi Viz stuff on a site that reckoned mine was not Hi Viz enough.

Been years since I went out and about unless its a total emergency, im sure its got worse out there.

As a general rule i protect my eyes and lungs. gloves if I can be arsed. the rest is safety by having a suspicious eye and cynical realism as to what will go wrong and making sure I am out of the way if it could break.

There are lots of examples of young lads having nasty accidents because they lack the experience to see the danger, its a fine line between over sanitising stuff so no-one builds this experience and sensible H&S policy that is there to point out what will go wrong if you give it a chance.

The post accident quote of "there wasn't a sign to say not to do it" can be a fine example of this, especially if its something really basic like hot water was too hot or the knife was sharp.

I remember reading a news article in my early days of truck-steering about a guy with a box trailer who'd stopped short of fully reversing onto a dock to go speak with the warehouse people through the open doorway. For whatever reason, the truck started rolling down the slope with nobody in it and he was crushed to the thickness of a sheet of A4 between the trailer bed metal cross member and the metal dock leveller plate. Unsurprisingly, he didn't survive. It's stuck with me ever since and I've always been scared witless of going behind any trailer on a downward slope when it's only been a short distance to something solid, eg. most loading bays. You see drivers only leaving themselves about a 6ft gap, just enough to swing the doors open or closed, or get the reg plate, but I'd always do them on the flat in the middle of the yard before even starting reversing down the slope, and likewise when pulling off the dock. I can't even begin to imagine the pain of having your rib cage crushed into tiny bone fragments from 20-44 tonne of truck & trailer pressing against it .

After a very serious accident at the last place I worked it was decided that H&S needed a shake up. Consultant hired to tell us how ste we were at H&S, apart from that difficult to see what his contribution was.
The guys that were chosen to lead the new H&S regime were the guys who had the accident. Their work was extremely dangerous so needed to be done in a very carefully controlled way, not the slap dash amateur way they approached the work. This had been pointed out to the bosses before the accident. We were told to shut up and keep it to ourselves if we were interviewed by the H&S exec. I wasn't interviewed but several who were didn't keep quite, quiet rightly, the result being a well deserved hefty fine.
This fine could have been even bigger if it wasn't for a small group of lower rank staff who had made efforts with H&S with absolutely zero encouragement and back up from the senior staff.
To be fair, H&S needed a shake up but to have it lead by the guys who nearly killed themselves was hard to take. They found it difficult to get staff to cooperate and gradually got eased out of the work. The rest of us found we were not very far from were we should have been with the H&S stuff, rather satisfying in the end.

We rely on Sharing these in our company, the learning from Operation Experience can be very useful. The challenge is getting the right info to the right people at the right time.

That's exactly what it is. As trucker dogleg said above, the requirements to unstrap/strap your load off their property out on the main road perfectly demonstrates this. I've had it myself when I did heavy haulage. I was moving a massive Liebherr crane arm section to a new site and they refused to let me unchain it where it was to be lifted and said I had to unchain it off-site and then drive slowly across something that closely resembled the surface of the moon with approx 30 tonne and half a million pounds worth of crane section gingerly balancing on its support on the bed of the trailer. It was about 10ft tall. When pointing out to the site H&S chief the absolute absurdity of what he was instructing, it just went in one ear and straight out of the other. Either do as I say or you don't come on site. I refused to even entertain it and the management agreed when I rang them. After sitting there for most of the day while they argued it out with each other, I got instructions to take it back to the docks. I later heard that it sat there on the trailer for 2 weeks before a dock crane lifted it and put it on one of Liebherr's own trucks that had come over specially from Germany to take it to the site. Our company made a small fortune off them in fines and storage costs.

All these companies don't give a single fk about anyone's health or safety. If you injure yourself or die they don't care, just so long as it's not on their property so you can't put in a claim. But I can see it from both sides as there are so many dumb people out there these days who don't use their brain or take any responsibility for their actions, putting in claim after claim for "compo" and 99% of the time they get away with it. Companies are then forced to put all these measures in place to protect themselves. It's largely a problem of our own making.

In the 80s into the 90s 500-600 workers were killed each year. Into the 00s there was still around 250 people killed per year. Last year there was 135 people killed.

I still see far too many incidents to this day. I wouldn't want to return to the standards when I was young. Serious incidents were far too common.

It has, but we still have a lot of unsafe places of work. A lot of office based staff see health and safety from their point of view missing how much it's required elsewhere.

It is bad that companies are so protective of their safety record that they'll move their production facilities off to countries where safety issues and incidents are not recorded or highlighted.