Printer-friendlyEmail to friend

Making Safety a Habit
Is safety an ingrained habit with you and your workers, so much so that it’s second nature? Or do you find that people tend to get hurt in your system?  This article discusses the development of a safety habit, talks about encouraging safety by practice and recognition, and provides links to safety training specific to workers in water and wastewater treatment.

Is Safety a Habit in Your System?
Habits…they can be good or bad, and everyone has both kinds. Horace Mann, the first advocate of public education in the mid-1800’s, said, “Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.” I think of the habits I have…one of my good ones is getting up early. I don’t even need an alarm clock. Sometime between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m., my eyes open, and I’m up for the day. It’s a habit I developed when I was a kid, and never got over. It’s a great start to my day to take my coffee onto the back porch when it’s nice out, to watch the sky change color as the sun rises and listen to the birds tuning up, or to start raking leaves or shoveling snow when the only sound in the neighborhood is me.

Safety can become a habit, too. When I learned to drive in the 1970’s, I didn’t know one single person who wore a seatbelt. A person might need to use seatbelts in a big city, where people drive more recklessly, but out in the sticks, it just wasn’t really necessary. Or at least, that’s what I was taught. Then wearing seatbelts became law. It took me a long time to develop that particular habit, but now, I can’t even start my car unless I have the seatbelt harness fastened. It just feels safer to me, and it’s my habit.

How about you? Do you have a safety habit at your water or wastewater treatment system? Or is safety more like an occasional afterthought? We’ll talk about developing and encouraging safety habits in this article.

Know What’s Right…
The first step in developing a safety habit is to understand the correct action for any given situation. But how do you figure out what the correct action is? First, pain avoidance is the guide—when we’re learning to walk, we fall a lot. But we eventually avoid that pain by learning balance. When you’re working in a water or wastewater system, though, you shouldn’t have to get hurt in order to learn to operate the equipment. Training is the key to safety.

In water and sewer line construction in 2007, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration (OSHA) reported that very small businesses (10 people or less) had an average injury rate of nearly five incidents; businesses employing less than 50 people had an average injury rate of nearly six incidents.(1) Water supply systems had an incidence rate of 2.3 for systems employing between one and 10 workers, and 7.8 for those systems employing between 11 and 49 workers. Wastewater treatment systems had incidence rates of 3.9 and 8.5, respectively.(2) So on average, between 20 and 50 percent of the workforce employed in water or wastewater treatment were hurt in 2007, enough so reports were filed with OSHA.

What happened in most of these instances? Slips, trips and falls were the most frequent cause of injuries, followed by strains and sprains (caused by improper lifting or carrying techniques). In office situations, repetitive motion injuries, those related to slips, trips and falls, and those related to lifting were common.

General safety training for water or wastewater treatment employees should include proper tool usage, lifting techniques, heavy equipment operation, lockout/tagout, electrical hazard recognition, confined space entry, trenching and excavation safety, and working in traffic situations. All operators and managers should have general safety training as part of their job orientation, before they enter the system to work their first shift. Office workers should have training in ergonomics, lifting, and office equipment safety.

…And Then Do It!
Safety training should not be limited to an annual event, where all the workers gather around the office TV and watch a couple of videos. (I’ve worked in places like that!) Anyone who has kids knows that the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work—you actually have to model the behavior you want to reinforce, every single day. That means that system leadership must understand the system and the work, be aware of safety issues, and actively support safe work habits at all times.

Daily tailgate safety meetings are very effective when you are performing a specific task in the field. Pipe repair, hydrant flushing, meter reading, or construction all have specific hazards related to the work. Identifying the hazards ahead of time, and then describing specific behavior to mitigate the risk of injury to your workers, will help them to recognize and avoid injury much of the time.

For instance, if your meter readers know that there is an aggressive dog living at a certain address, you may be able to notify the customer ahead of time that they need access to read the meter so the dog can be restrained. The meter reader avoids a painful bite, and the dog’s owner avoids a lawsuit—a win-win situation! Your flagging personnel should be aware that drivers using cell phones may be oblivious to the bright orange cones and traffic signs, the reflective vests, hardhats, and big red stop signs they use to direct traffic around a repair site. If a flagger is aware of how to spot such a driver and can identify an escape route prior to the encounter, it may save his or her life.

It’s actually more challenging to be safe when performing normal day-to-day operations in your system. Being secure in your knowledge of how to operate and maintain your equipment may lead to a lapse in judgment. I can’t tell you how often I’ve run into the sharp edge of my kitchen counter just walking past…due to daydreaming, carrying something that blocks my view, or just not watching where I’m going. This kind of thing happens to everyone, and it’s generally because you get overly-comfortable with the places you know.

Walk your entire system, and identify places where accidents might occur. Uneven walkway paths, stairs, and poorly-lit areas may cause trips. If your system does not have the money to repair or replace them, consider using reflective yellow paint to mark uneven areas, and signage to identify areas that may cause people to fall. Fencing and handrails are also relatively inexpensive ways to protect folks from drop-offs. Enforce the buddy system for lifting items that weigh over 20 pounds or items that are bulky. Repair pipe leaks that cause puddles.

If there is a specific task going on that may be relatively infrequent (think bulk chemical delivery, doing a complete filter cleaning, performing repair work inside a tank, etc.), a written procedures guide is invaluable. Step-by-step instructions on how to perform the operation from start to finish, a description of possible hazards that can occur during the operation, and techniques to avoid or mitigate the hazards, can help your workers focus on the task while being safe. The written procedures guide not only helps to train new employees, but refreshes the memory of old hands. Day-to-day operations should have written procedures, too.

Recognition for Safety
Your employees should be recognized for spotting and correcting unsafe work behavior or identifying areas for safety improvement, or taking formal training to improve their own safety. Empowerment and reward may help employee morale, and also may increase awareness and participation in the safety habit. But you must think about how the implications of recognition and reward will affect your employees’ behavior before implementing a reward program.

For example, when I was in college, I had a summer job doing bulk loading at a cement plant. Leadership recognized employees who didn’t get hurt on the job with lavish quarterly gifts: jackets, tool sets, T-shirts, concert tickets, and so forth. The rewards for not getting hurt on the job all year were huge: weekend vacations in gambling towns, sets of tires for cars, cash…Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But actually, some employees were not reporting injuries in order to qualify for the awards. Some slackers who sat around doing nothing were given prestigious recognition, while people who worked hard during their shift and got injured doing so received nothing. Morale spiraled down, while resentment went up. You can see how “not getting hurt on the job” is not synonymous with “being safe on the job.” (Finally, the leadership there figured it out, too, and discontinued the program.)

Albert Einstein said, “If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” Having a safety habit is actually its own reward.

Helping Develop the Safety Habit
There are a variety of training materials available from many sources. General safety training may be found through your state (see http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/osp/index.html for links to state OSHA offices) or through OSHA (examples are at http://www.osha.gov/dcsp/osp/trainmat.html). Specific safety training for waterworks personnel is available through the American Water Works Association (AWWA) at http://apps.awwa.org/ebusmain/OnlineStore/ProductListing.aspx?Category=SAFESECUR. Specific safety training for wastewater treatment personnel is available through the Water Environment Federation (WEF) for Manual of Practice 1: Safety and Health in Wastewater Systems (1993) at http://www.e-wef.org/timssnet/products/tnt_products.cfm?primary_id=MO2001&Action=LONG&subsystem=ORD and the WEF Skills Builder at http://www.wef.org/ConferencesTraining/SkillsBuilder/. 

You can also build your own safety program for your specific system. The above training is a good place to start, and incorporating the safety information from your equipments’ O&M manuals will help to flesh out the program.

But remember, nothing leads like a good example. If you work safely, encourage your employees to work safely, and provide them with the tools and knowledge to show others how to work safely, your program will be a success.

REFERENCES
(1) Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workplace Injury,  Illness, and Fatality Statistics, October 2008, Table Q6, page 10 of 133, http://www.osha.gov/oshstats/work.html.

(2) Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workplace Injury,  Illness, and Fatality Statistics, October 2008, Table Q6, page 104 of 133, http://www.osha.gov/oshstats/work.html.