Reflections -- A Nice Safe Place to Work (PDF)

My expect career in father Pennsylvania. him counselor, was to be a an coal I inspired and did miner not he in Pennsylvania. I did not expect him to be an inspired c reer counselor, and he did not disappoint me. When I was a child, I would muse about what I wanted to be when I grew up. He would listen in tolerant silence to my speculations until I would mentionknowingly and ever so casuallythat maybe I would get a job in the mine. Unfailingly, no matter how many times I baited him, his Irish temper flared and he would growl, 'Til break your legs first." Old Jack was not a man to beat around the bush. Nor, obviously, did he have a sense of humor about the mines. For the first 12 years of my life we lived within a stone's throw of the colliery, and he never discouraged me from proving that I could indeed hit it. In those days the colliery whistle marked the changing work shifts with a blast that could be heard for a mile or more. When it blew at any other time, everyone within earshot knew that it signaled an accident, maybe even a cavein, and we would run to the shaft below the tipple and await the dreaded word. How bad was it? How many were hurt? Was anyone killed? Who was it? Accidents were a part of life in the mines, but we were never blasS about them. The mines were a damned dangerous place to work. You know what? Water utilities are damned dangerous places to work. For the past three decades or so, water utilities have had an accident rate about three times higher than gas and electric utilities. Bituminous coal and lignite mining have a better safety record. So do heavy-construction contractors, police departments, and a number of manufacturing industries. Ours is not the worst safety record, but that is small consolation indeed. The sad thing is that the water industry's safety record need not be as bad as it is (6.20 lost workday cases reported per 100 full-time employees). The injuries that plague water supply workers are mostly preventable. The most common problem? Back injuries. Not too serious, you say? Not so to the ones injured. And not so to the organization's budget and productivity. Those 6.20 cases mean 109 lost work days per 100 employees, remember. And who knows what the cost is in medical bills, workmen's compensation, and other associated losses? "Okay, what's the explanation?" I asked one safety expert. I expected a lecture on the lack of safety procedures, training, supervisory attention, and the like. His answer, born of long experience, was simple. "Management," he said. If