Rethinking safety culture: Part 1

There is always one idiot

My biologist friend once did some business development at my son’s company, and he told me that my son opened the meeting with the de rigeur safety minute. Part way through the “minute” he thought, “I know that story!” It turns out my son thinks that his old man is the poster boy for the unsafety culture. In my defense… well there really is no defense but here is the story, and you can decide for yourself.

Upon graduation from university and within three weeks of starting work at the engineering office of an underground mine I was told that I must take a compulsory break for the annual three-week shutdown.  My new wife and I needed a quick infusion of cash and so I convinced the mine management that I was the perfect candidate to work on the blast crew during the shutdown thus maintaining a cash flow. 

I worked on a crew loading explosives so that there would be broken ore available for mining when everyone came back to work. My partner and I were assigned to loading the “slot” for the pending blast.  When rock is blasted its volume expands by about one third and to prevent the broken rock from compacting again, some of it is removed so that there is space for the broken rock to expand into.  The slot was what provided that expansion room.  In our case the slot was a near-vertical raise or opening equipped with a ladder and which “dog legged” or doubled back on itself about fifty meters up and then went up for another fifteen meters.  Our job was to load the holes drilled into the face of the rock at the top of the raise. 

Anticipating our impatience, the boss sat us down and explained the facts of life to us.  “You will soon get tired of climbing up and down the ladder and will want to take enough explosives for three or four holes at a time with you.  Under no circumstances are you to do this.  Only take enough explosives for one hole at a time so that there is no risk of the explosives falling down the raise.”  That seemed simple enough and we nodded our assent.  He then showed us how to put a primer charge in one of the sticks of dynamite and told us to put no more than five other sticks of dynamite in each hole, tamp it gently with a copper capped pole to keep the sticks of nitroglycerin from falling out of the hole and then come down for six sticks of dynamite for the next hole.

Our boss had us pegged perfectly.  After an hour of humping up and down the ladder and, having forgotten everything he told us, we decided that it would be best to make four primed cartridges and take another twenty cartridges of dynamite in a box up the ladder so that we could do four holes at a time.  On the very first hole, meaning that we had about twenty-two sticks of dynamite with us, disaster struck.  Our methodology for loading the holes involved one of us standing on the second to top rung of the ladder while the other sat on the top rung and held the belt of the one standing.  This allowed him to use both hands to feed the sticks of dynamite into the holes overhead and gently tamp them with the loading stick.  The system worked very well and, because we couldn’t see down into the murky dark, neither of us were fully aware of the fact that we were leaning out over a steep drop of about sixty-five meters – instant death if the belt holder were to lose his grip.  But that is not what happened.

My partner was tamping the cartridges of dynamite and I was holding his belt with the box of dynamite held by my feet on the ladder.  My partner struck a piece of loose rock which fell and hit him on the head knocking his lamp off the hard hat and then dropped into the box of explosives tipping it over.  With the cap lamp spinning around and disorienting us I had the presence of mind to grip tighter to his belt until he could sit down on the ladder in safety.  Then we both heard the eerie sounds of the box of explosives with a rock in it bouncing off the walls of the raise.

There are a couple of things you need to know about dynamite.  It is sensitive to pressure and when it is primed with a blasting cap it can be detonated.  Secondly, if one stick of dynamite explodes, all sticks of dynamite will explode.  We had three primed cartridges and a loose rock in a cardboard box full of unprimed cartridges bouncing down the raise.  This was enough dynamite to reduce the average house to a pile of rubble.  If they went off in the confines of the raise, the blast would send a compressive air wave up at us that would reduce us to a thin paste on the wall of the raise.  I thought of all this as I listened to the box smacking its way down to the level below and I wondered how my poor wife would make out with me gone.  After what seemed a lifetime, the sounds of the bouncing box of explosives died away and we were able to draw a breath.  Climbing down the ladder was made much more difficult due to the weakened state of our knees and at the bottom we both sat on the ground without speaking for the better part of an hour.  By mutual consent we picked up the evidence of our stupidity, unprimed the cartridges, put everything away in the locked explosives storage boxes and went back to the surface.  The next day we finished loading the heading one hole at a time.

I wish I could say that this was the last of my really bad decisions. But I adhere to the policy that sometimes risks must be taken to get bad jobs done. The difference between me and thee, I would argue, is that my risk profile and tolerance is different from yours. I am happy to lean out from the top of a 20-foot ladder to apply that little splotch of paint without moving the ladder, but I would never ride the roller coaster that gives you so much pleasure. While we can argue over acceptable levels and types of risk let’s quit the pretense that life can be lived risk free.

This is not a rant against safety. My work in the mining industry included everything from digging ditches to initiating blasts to operating heavy equipment to eating donuts in the head office. I believe that I, and every other worker, has the right to refuse to work in unsafe locations or to use unsafe work practices. But has it gone too far and has the desire for zero accidents boomeranged into more rather than fewer accidents? Have workers been so anaesthetized by constant admonitions to “be safe” that safety is ignored, and work has become more dangerous? There are lots of questions and lots of opinions.

There is data to suggest that a singular focus on safety culture is becoming counter productive. Many articles take the view that the safety culture is overly bureaucratic. These authors argue that, to do productive work, the important and operative elements of safety are being ignored and the accident frequency is moving up. Other arguments discuss a concept called “bounded rationality” which is described by researcher Dr. Rob Long as, “… the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision. The truth is humans are limited by what our mind and social constructs can manage. Humans have to make decisions without all possible information available.” In short, if you flood me with information that is not contextualized and ranked by importance, I will zone out, treat the information with equal gravity and become more unsafe.

Has the safety culture mentality seeped into other parts of the culture? There is a growing expectation that medical researchers will find the answers to all the issues that cause our bodies to wrinkle up, slow down and stop altogether. Breathless (and mostly mindless) reporting on the latest medical breakthrough that will lead to immortality is replaced six months later with a reversal. A couple of days ago I read a study asserting that my melanoma was caused by too little rather than too much sun. The eggs that were going to kill us now turn out to be our friend. It is a wonderful marketing strategy but are our hopes for “zero death” realistic?

Some argue that government responses to covid reflects the safety culture. Most governments argued that entire populations can be effectively isolated as protection from a rapidly replicating and mutating virus. It is one thing for island nations like Australia and New Zealand to achieve zero covid by quarantining the healthy and quite another for Canada to try this stunt. The question is whether the belief in zero covid results from a devotion to an unrealistic safety culture philosophy. It is an interesting question considering the increased incidence of covid in lockdown nations.

Alex Berenson recently reported that educational outcomes for non-lockdown Sweden are positive because their students did not forfeit learning by sitting behind computer screens on unwatchable Zoom calls. Similar studies of North American students are not so positive. He quoted a CNN article pointing out that schoolteachers began preparing wills when they were required to show up in the classroom again. Apart from being surprised that these teachers didn’t already have wills it suggests to me that there is a creeping and irrational belief in the ability to “be safe under all circumstances”.

I do not advocate for my version of safety stupidity, but there are good reasons to believe that the thirty-year experiment with zero accidents, zero covid, and zero death needs a rethink and some corrective actions. Encasing ourselves in rhetorical bubble wrap is no guarantee against the thorns and pricks of outrageous misfortune and, besides, plastic wrap makes breathing more difficult. Safety is a complicated topic because it involves understanding the individual and mass cognitive processes of large groups of individuals working together. It is not a mature science and, if those groups of individuals working together includes one idiot like me, then all safety bets are off.  Perhaps instead of quarantining everyone in a suffocating safety culture it would be better to find and quarantine the idiots.