Safety, It can hurt you

[akflyer 1427]

A little write up I just did for the safety meetings here at work..

Safety, it can hurt you!

Ok, so now I have your attention.. Just how is that I can say that safety can hurt you? Well it can happen very easy if you do not do what we have been having preached to us day in and day out here at Kuparuk. Read on to see what I mean.

A few weeks ago I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. I was WORKING! Ok, so it was not so unfamiliar, but it is true not very often do I find myself with a shovel in my hand, heck, that is why we had kids right?? So lets set the stage. I flew out to a buddies lodge to do a job I figured would take 2 days tops to jack up a cabin that was sinking into the dirt and get it leveled up. Turns out that just like we have happen here, the job just continued to fight me. Jacks not working properly, horrible weather, back hoe not wanting to start after sitting for 6 yrs etc. Next thing I know I find myself way behind and 5 days into the 2 day job.

The task at hand was to jack the cabin up, dig out where the support pilings are until we hit solid ground then back fill the holes with gravel that we had to haul with the 4 wheeler from a hole I had dug out in the woods ¼ mile away. Simple basic task right??? What could possibly go wrong… right??? one day I will learn to stop asking that question!! After two days of hauling gravel that was dug from a pit with the backhoe, then loading the gravel into the trailer by hand shoveling we were getting worn out. We were about 15 loads into the job when the nice sunny weather turned on us. In a 3 minute period we went from bright sunshine, to a Louisiana down pour. My fiancé and I started really hustling on the shoveling to get the trailer loaded and headed back to the lodge. She was standing on one side of the trailer and up on the gravel pile a little bit while I was on the other side of the trailer with one foot on the edge of the 10’ deep hole I had dug, shoveling furiously from the same gravel pile. Remember, we had done this at least 15 times in the previous two days! Well as we were working along in perfect rhythm my mind wandered around to SAFETY! No joke, as I am still shoveling I start to think about just how lucky we were to not have hit each other as the shovel heads are swinging back and forth in very close proximity to part of me that I am kind of fond of (my face). The instant that I think to myself how lucky we really were to not have hit each other I find myself seeing stars and getting a lesson on mean ole Mr. gravity. A few seconds later I wake up to my head feeling like I just went a few rounds with Mike Tyson and my fiancé standing over the hole in a panic. This goof ball wanted me to jump right up and let her know I was OK. I just wanted to lay there and try to remember my name! Have you ever had a head wound? No matter how slight they may be boy can those things bleed! All she can see is me rolling around in the bottom of a hole with my hand over my eye and blood running, not dripping, running through my fingers and down my arm. Yes, she was panicked! I am going to end the story here… Well, no I cant stop here, we really need to back it up about 12 hrs..The previous evening we are laying in bed and she starts giggling. I asked her what was so funny and she tells me that the big hole I had dug with the hoe, out in the woods 100 miles from nowhere, looked like a mass grave she has seen on some show. Since this gal has every episode of CSI (Ney York and Miami), Bones and any other murder / detective show ever made memorized I got a bit freaked out!

So here we are, I am laying in the bottom of this “grave” in the middle of nowhere and she is standing over the top with a shovel in her hand. I kid you not, had one speck of dirt come into that hole I am sure I would be infront of a grand jury right about now wearing a cute yellow suit sporting a not so comfortable pair of nickel bracelets! As it turned out there was a happy ending with me patching myself up with butterflys and super glue and going back to work after I had a few ahh, medicinal beverages!

OK where did I go wrong?? They preach safety to us here right?? I was thinking about safety when I got hit right?? WHY. Because I did not do the other thing they preach here, and that is FOCUS ON YOUR TASK AT HAND! Folks, I can’t emphasize enough just how important it is that we focus on the task you are doing, right that second. If you happen to find your mind wandering get the bad word out of the line of fire. Step back and remove yourself from becoming a hazard, then put on your safety thinking cap and get a look at the job and make whatever changes you need to complete the job safely!

It was not until later that night as we were sitting in the lounge that it hit me. Crap, I flew us out here, there are no other planes around and the cell coverage here has been down for a week due to weather. What if I had not had the extensive first aide kit in the plane that I keep in there? What if I had laid my leg open with the chainsaw earlier in the day? There would have been no way for her to have gotten me to medical attention had I really done something stupid (ok, more stupid than I normally do).

That brings us around to something that is relatively new here at Kuparuk.. Planning! Make sure that just as we plan our work here, when we are at home plan you play time too! Do you have a way to call for help if you need to? Do you have a good first aide kit / survival gear with you when you are out in remote areas? Make sure that you cover your bases at home just as well as we do here at work!

[EDMO 1078]

The most important part of safety is to remember what you said just before she whacked you in the head with the shovel!

ED in MO