Episode 206: Proper Protections

In this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety Podcast, Dr. Mark French examines two tragic workplace fatalities that highlight the critical importance of hazard recognition, machine guarding, emergency preparedness, and personal accountability in safety leadership.

The first case involves a bakery employee who was fatally pinned between a malfunctioning conveyor and a stainless-steel collection tray. Dr. French explores how seemingly routine equipment issues can become normalized over time, leading workers to repeatedly perform unsafe tasks such as clearing jams without properly de-energizing equipment. He discusses the dangers of "normalization of deviance," where workers become comfortable with known hazards because they have successfully managed them in the past. The incident also raises important questions about machine guarding, lockout/tagout procedures, emergency stop systems, and how quickly organizations can respond when something goes wrong.

The second story focuses on a golf course employee who lost his life after a mower overturned into a pond, trapping him beneath the equipment. Using his own experiences with lawn care and operating zero-turn mowers, Dr. French emphasizes that familiarity with a task does not eliminate risk. He highlights the importance of using rollover protection systems, respecting terrain limitations, and avoiding shortcuts that can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Throughout the episode, Dr. French reinforces a key leadership lesson: safety is demonstrated through consistent actions, not just policies. Whether in the workplace or at home, leaders set the example for others through the choices they make. By addressing hazards proactively, following established procedures, and modeling safe behaviors, leaders can protect both people and organizational performance.

Transcript

Mark French: 0:01

This week on the podcast, we're talking about two news articles that I've come across that really shine a light on the importance of summer safety, follow through machine guarding, and a whole lot more. This week on the podcast, we

Unknown: 0:22

welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:26

And welcome to this episode of the Leady and Learning Through Safety podcast. So happy you've joined me this week. Unfortunately, when it comes to reading about safety news, majority of what we get is the worst case scenario, and it's even hard to find a lot of those accurately to be reported, and getting information is sometimes even harder, and so we have to bridge the gap and look at history and look at other, I guess, symptoms of what could have led to the thing that happened, and so this week I want to start off with the first story, was this was a bakery in the northeast, and there was a fatality, and emergency crews were called in because an employee was pinned between a malfunctioning horizontal conveyor in a lower stainless steel tray. Now, in there's that's a horizontal conveyor with a steel tray in the food industry is very common, because it's easy to clean, it keeps it off the floor. So basically, the conveyors run, and in a lot of cases, especially with things that could fall through, there's a stainless steel pan underneath to catch that can be cleaned out, sterilized, and it keeps it off the floor, keeps it clean, sometimes can even be repurposed, depending on like the situation, and all of that. So, given that they said it was a malfunctioning horizontal conveyor in the stainless steel tray, that is a very tight space to get caught between. Now, it's unknown whether this person was trying to fix the situation, was trying to unjam it, was trying to unknown of what they could be attempting to do, but I can imagine when I think about bakery work, and I think about horizontal conveyors in stainless steel pans, and they say the word malfunctioning is that this person was trying to fix the problem, and they'd probably been shown how to fix the problem, and they've probably been able to fix that problem time and time again safely, and this is my assumption, but we can see where this acclimation, this normalization of deviance. This, it's broken, but I know how to fix it, so I will fix it. And

this was also at 11: 4:08

20pm So we're at the night shift, we're in the evening hours, we're doing this work, machines jammed, machines not working. You go underneath it, you start working, and you fix the problem. And if you're not in the right position, it grabs you and it pulls you, and that machine doesn't know how to stop. Now, is there a pull cord on the side, because what I have seen that is a best practice with these conveyors is that there's a red cord or a e stop cord that runs the entire length, you grab it, you pull it, you stop it. Now, is that the way that everyone does it? Of course not. That's a good way, but. Was there even an e stop within distance of catching it, so as I dug a little deeper, I wanted to see, has this establishment, has this company ever had issues before? And sure enough, back in 2021 which, honestly, in safety terms, five years is not significant, it's a decent amount of time, but it's not enough to show a good pattern that in 2021 there were pretty significant violations of what did they involve, blocked electrical panels, lack of machine and conveyor guarding, to just name a couple that were cited for what they had there. Some of their biggest penalties were in those areas of machine guarding, fire extinguishers, emergency preparedness. Basically, the things that we need if something goes wrong, we need those to be there for us. We need those items to be one, know how to use them, and know where they are. No hazcom program was another one, but the most, the largest one was by far the lack of machine guarding. Now, there was nothing. There was a follow-up a couple of years later, no findings then, but then this, so less than around five years later, a fatality involving one, the lack of machine guarding. Now, whether or not the guarding was even there to begin with, or if it was removed to do this work is unknown, because if any work is going to occur, you have to turn it off. You have to de-energize it, and if this malfunctioning conveyor had been de-energized, it wouldn't have activated, it wouldn't have pulled this person in, it wouldn't have killed someone if the proper stages had been corrected. Now, I also asked the question that they made a very - the news article made it a very clear point, and I've read there's really a couple of news articles when I did a search that reported this. It's pretty much the same information, but the word malfunctioning conveyor shows up. How long has this been malfunctioning? Is this one of those areas I wonder, this is this one of those that it's something that everyone knows this conveyor jams every day, or it's frequent. We know that it's going to happen. We know we're going to have to unjam it. We know that the problem is going to happen here, and yet there's not a fix, because the easy fix is we just unjam it. We keep going. It's a three minute solution, rather than fixing it for real or fixing it permanently, and so with that we have this piece of equipment that we're getting used to in, in having to work on and having to unjam, we get into a situation where we're unjamming and we're very it's it's evening, it's night time, and suddenly it turns on and grabs someone. Worst-case scenario, and reading it, it was the emergency responders had to lift the equipment off, but it was unfortunately too late, and that was at the speed of the emergency responders. Wherever they may have had to come from, it doesn't say how long it took them to get there, but there's always a delay. I wonder, there also, what was happening in between, because unfortunately I have seen very minor. Thank goodness for what I've seen was a very minor situation where someone, where a piece of equipment activated and trapped them. It was not severe. It resulted in some bruising and some pain, and very scary, because they had tried to unjam something, and it unjammed, and it grabbed them. But fortunately, it wasn't a very high pressure situation, where it was creating a lot of tension. But the unjamming shouldn't have happened. That's what we call maintenance, but I remember back in the day that immediately there were people who, the people that worked around them on the assembly line, knew that piece of equipment, and they knew how to get it, they knew how to disconnect the air, they knew how to start taking it apart, they knew how to release the pressure almost immediately, because first thing, e stop, boom, someone hit one, next they started pulling, like releasing the air pressure, releasing the manual, releasing the mechanics that held it there. At the same time, maintenance is on the way. Our maintenance team was on the way out there to start disassembling as needed to get this person's arm out of the piece of equipment that had grabbed it, and then, of course, I'm on my way out there with an emergency bag to make sure that to be ready for whatever we were going to have to do, depending on the scenario, because all we heard was that someone was trapped and that we had to respond, but it was a a strong response from all. Parties that probably led to lesser of an injury. It's still very unfortunate, still a lot of learning about lockout, tang out, unjamming, turning off, not trying to push the timeframe, not being comfortable with the hazard. It all came down to that. And I look at this, and I remember my time in the food industry, and I can picture what this looks like in a bakery, and it's a very sensitive situation, because there is so much that becomes the cultural norm of like that's always broken, we just unjam it, it's easy to unjam, it's easy to do that. You just do this, this maneuver, it unjams, it's no longer malfunctioning, and we start work again very quick, very easy. But what is the emergency response plan? It felt like it from reading this, and from a very high level, because we have zero detail at this point is what did happen in those minutes before EMS could arrive and start extricating the person. What were who was trained? Who knew what to do? How do they fix it? All those questions are so important. Is we never want the bad thing to happen. We never want that, but if it does, how fast can we respond? How fast can we get help? How much do we know to be able to help that person? That's all part of what we have to think about as leaders. What is the contingency? What do we do to protect the most important to reduce the risk of the most significant, and there was a lot here that seemed to not be happening, but there's certainly paths and ways that can improve. Let's talk about something a little different on the second half of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.

Unknown: 11:57

You are listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast with Dr. Mark French. What drives next level performance in your business? It's not just strategy, it's your people, and great performance starts with great leadership. At TSDA Consulting, we believe real leadership begins by creating a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and heard. TSD Consulting is led by Dr. Mark French, a recognized leader in the workplace culture, who helps organizations bridge the gap between behavioral psychology and operational safety. Learn yourself, lead others, create safety. Visit TSDA consulting.com today.

Mark French: 12:43

And welcome back to the second half of the Leading and Learning through Safety podcast. So, moving on to more of an unfortunate summertime lesson, and this is something that rings this one hit me in a very homeward place that I want to talk about, but it was another news story. Unfortunately, about a golf course worker who was found dead in a pond. They were driving the mower, a mower, and they were found pinned under in just three feet of water. Some he was trapped under the mower and in the pond near the on the golf course, which makes me think that it probably got too close to the edge, slick, muddy, maybe a rock or something, and it overturned, and when it overturned, it pinned him underneath the water, and unfortunately resulted in that fatality, and every year in a lot of the states, especially what I know is in the southern states, where I'm able to, I attend some conferences that tell me more about, like, the fatalities to happen. Every year, there's a number of probably a small handful of lawnmower accidents that result in fatalities in an occupational setting, which, when you think about the how many of these mowers are out there, not only in commercial use but personal use, and I, being one, I have a large zero term mower, because I have a lot of property that requires mowing and maintenance during the spring, summer, and probably even most of fall, that for each occupational fatality, where there should be training, there should be more protections, there should be different, like more professional equipment, for every one of those, there is a number of injuries and fatalities that come from the home that aren't reported, because they don't have to be reported, still tragic, still terrible, still something that happens, and it's a good, it's a reminder, it's a strong reminder that certain. Safety precautions have to be taken on these types of mowers, even if you've done it so many times, you know your property. I'm sure he knew that property like the back of his hand. And unfortunately, it was one moment, one difference, one change - something was there that led to this out of this event, this unexpected event that led to that, and I now have my son, is now old enough to really help me a lot in the yard, and I'm very appreciative for it, and we mow together, we, we, we have different things that we each do, but it reminds me, especially, that we have to be careful on these types of mowers, that it can turn very quickly from a normal mowing experience to something very dangerous, and what they say is, make sure the roll bar is up, make sure you don't get on certain inclines, that you don't run sideways on the inclines, and you're careful even going up and down on significant inclines. Yeah, I'll be the first to admit I hate trimming, I hate push mowing, and yet there is a pretty - there's a good piece of my property that is not level, and I hate it every time that I have to get the push mower and push mow that area. This is a reminder of why I do it, even though I could use the zero, even though I could run that mower across it, and I think 99% of the time I would be perfectly safe. There could be the one time where it goes wrong, and so I push mo, and even though I've made, if you've been a longtime listener, you know, I have made some critical mistakes while doing yard work. I am not the best at even following my advice with yard work. This one here is one that I really try to stay with a lot, because I'm also teaching my son. He's watching me, even though I'll tell him, 'You're going to wear this, you're going to wear these ear plugs, you're going to do this. You're only going to mow this flat area for me as I'm doing the trimming. You're going to save me some time. You're going to get these areas with the mower. I still have to set the example, because if he sees me do it, if he sees me slide down the edge a little bit, because I've decided to do something a little bit more risky to save some time or save myself some effort. It'll definitely set that example, that one time can set that example for him. And so I'm reminded that, especially as we're doing this work, especially as the summertime is here, and oh my goodness, it.. I'm in Western Kentucky, which is kind of south. It's hot temperatures, it's high humidity, it's miserable to be out push mowing and trimming. I hate it, but we have to do it the right way. We have to be able to show and demonstrate to those who we, who we care about. One, we want to protect ourselves, because we always say, you know what, I can handle the risk better than someone else. Always, I can do it. I can do it safely, safer. I can do it in a way that I'll be safe. I don't want them to take that risk, so I'll do it. That's a very, very common cognitive thought, is that I'll do it. So I save the risk for some, I detract that risk, because I know I can handle it. Truth is, that risk is still there, and I'm probably not mitigating it near as well as I should. And so we have to set that example, and that's what I'm trying to do. And this is a very somber, very powerful reminder of doing it every time. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. I'm so happy to be part of your podcast rotation. Thank you for joining me. And until next time we chat, stay safe. Bye.

Unknown: 19:11

Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online@www.tsdaconsulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training, or legal advice, the. This has been the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast, you.