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Warehouse and Operations as a Career and I’m Marty T Hawkins, I think this is the first episode that we don’t have a title picked out as we’re recording it. I usually work off of at least some bullet points or some article to talk to. Its storming really bad here in Dallas TX, I hope the episode sounds alright for ya today! Well, let’s pick a topic, I’ve worked on accident investigations all week so I guess we can start there, how about that, and well see where we end up! You know, accident investigations seem to really stress us as employees out, I see how it can seem more like an interrogation sometimes but actually accident investigations are designed to help our companies, our industry and us employees. I do a lot of incident or accident Investigations, I learn something from each one of them, when completed properly we hope to be able to avoid the same thing from happening again. I hope if we’re in a management role we’ve been trained to gather all the information for our company officials, health care providers and legal teams so they can protect our employees. Our industry does a great job learning from these incidents and creating processes and procedures or rules to help identify and prevent them from happening again. When our supervisors take the time to find the Who, What, Where, When and How through their investigations it makes us all safer. I see a lot of associates try and be a little less than forth coming with answers sometime, Ladies and Gentlemen, be honest. The investigation will produce the truth, these days 9 out of 10 times there’s going to be a video of the incident, or a witness is going to describe what happened better than we will. I’m sure, or I hope, that we were all told when we were hired that it is so important to report any accident or incident immediately to our supervisors. Just today I know of a gentleman that was let go. Not for bending the racking while placing a pallet up in the reserves but because another employee mentioned it before he did. In his defense I’m not certain that he was even aware he’d bent it but he would have had to know that he’d touched it or hit it. I think it was probably his defensive voice or tone when being questioned during the investigation that actually cost him his job.
Let’s take equipment operators for example, we’re trained to be aware of our surroundings, how to properly operate the equipment and all the safety rules that govern their operation. The rules that are in place today are the result of years’ worth of incident investigations. An incident or accident occurred and we as an industry learned from it, created a rule or procedure to prevent it from happening again. That’s truly what accident investigations are. There to help us be safer and work in a safe environment.
I was working on one case; a gentleman had reached over his head to scoot a pallet off of a stack of 12 and lost control of it and it landed on his little toe. Three things were discovered during the investigation. First his supervisor had not noticed that his shoes only looked like steel toe boots while in fact they were not. It was determined going forward that the supervisor would be verbally checking with his crew each day at the start up meeting to ensure that they had their proper PPE’s on. Secondly, it was determined that pallets would only be stacked 10 high going forward as 12 required most employees to stretch way over their heads to scoot the pallet towards them. And lastly it was decided that associates should be wearing gloves when working with pallets. These procedures were put into place because of an investigation and should help prevent someone else getting injured in the same way! This guy lost 7 days of work. The investigation stressed him. Naturally he felt like the finger was being pointed at him, that’s the human nature in all of us. After it was completed, he felt much better about it and was fine.
You’ll enjoy this one and thank goodness no one was seriously injured. A gentleman was unloading trucks, lining up the pallets in front of the doors, kind of making lanes out of them for the receiver to get them tagged and the pallet runner to haul them off. He was standing in between two pallets and using his cell phone, the calculator on his phone to do some kind of counting on the pallet, I guess. Well the pallet runner came to run under a pallet, kind of scooting it into the unloader. Luckily, he didn’t get smashed between the loads and it could have been a pretty serious accident. Through the investigation it was discovered that there were already 2 rules in place that would have prevented the incident. First, no unloader is to be between the pallets or even in the lanes once it has been dropped off for staging. This rule he ignored. And secondly cell phones were not permitted in this particular facility, or in the warehouse anyway due to them being such a distraction. In this case they disciplined the employee and now at the morning start up meeting everyone is reminded to put away their cell phones. Oh, and this is a good comment to add. The company purchased like 20 little pocket calculators but only 2 people really wanted to carry them. Kind of makes the using my cell phone as a calculator a mute issue doesn’t it.
As a supervisor its pretty tough to drill down to root causes of accidents, it’s not always going to stare us in the face. I’ve always found its best to work backwards, talk to everyone that not only saw something but to those that heard anything. I think its important to even speak to people that had seen an individual before something happened. A lot of times we can learn that the individual had something else on his or her mind before the accident. And the equipment’s history, a very important part of an investigation. The pre-trip and its recent maintenance records or schedule can tell us volumes about the unit.
Here’s one really quick, a gentleman grabbed a pallet jack, drove to the end of the building, made the turn towards his dock door and found that the jack didn’t plug properly. Plugging is when you reverse the acceleration to slow and stop the jack. Thankfully he had plenty of room and had slowed down enough to let go of the handle and the jack just touched a stack of pallets before coming to a complete stop. Think of what could have happened if the operator hadn’t of had the piece of mind to let go of the handle or had been running the equipment wide open, could have been a bad accident. Anyway, so during the investigation it was discovered the previous shift had experienced a little trouble with the jack and had written it on their post shift report and even filled out a work order on it. Two things were determined from the investigation. The previous shift employee did not place the equipment inside the maintenance gate. He had, from habit of course, just went ahead and plugged it up to its charger. With everything appearing normal the next shift employee grabbed it and failed to do his pre-trip on it before signing it out. Now going forward its been determined that all employees will take their pre and post trip equipment reports to their supervisor so he or she can follow up on them.
Don’t stress over investigations ladies and gentlemen. If we’re doing our jobs properly and as we’ve been trained all an accident or incident investigation is going to do is make our jobs safer for us and our teams and reduce loss to our companies. Be open, honest and helpful, it’ll only pay off for us.
Well, I enjoyed talking a little about accident investigations today and I hope I mentioned something that made you think about them, maybe in a more positive light! If you have a thought or topic, you’d like to know more about I’d enjoy learning about it myself, sharing a little about it or bringing a subject knowledge expert on the show to explain it to all of us! Remember to like and follow us on Facebook and Twitter too using @whseandops, we’re having some great discussions on those feeds each week too. Until next week, be safe not only at work but at home as well, we’ve got loved ones counting on us putting our safety training to practice!