Great Workplaces Keep People Safe – “A Scream Of MAN OVERBOARD And Suddenly Our Safety Training Was Being Put To The Test”

Dave Hill - SV Zebu

It was August, 1987, and I was working on a sail training ship called Zebu. Zebu had seven crew, and 15 young male and female sail trainees from all over the world. The trainees would join at three-month intervals. The ship could hold 13 sails, and there were approximately 150 lines (ropes) controlling the sails and the yard-arms (the horizontal wooden poles holding the square sails). The ship was on a four year round- the- world expedition as part of Operation Raleigh, and I was on board for a year travelling from Australia to the Caribbean via Africa. I was the engineer, the electrician, and also involved in sail training.

When I first joined the ship, I was very impressed with the professionalism of the crew and the focus on safety. We would have weekly man- overboard and firefighting training exercises. In addition to that – anytime an object such as a hat would blow overboard, we would put the rescue procedures into action and try to rescue it. On a motor ship you can do a figure- eight maneuver to rescue someone, but on a sailing ship, such a maneuver is not possible while under sail. You generally have to keep sailing and launch a rescue boat. During practice, the whole rescue operation could sometimes take over an hour.

When we were sailing around the Cape of Good Hope off of South Africa, the sail trainees had been on board for nearly three months. By then, they were excellent sailors. They knew all 150 lines by memory, even at nighttime, and most of them were fearless climbing 80 feet up the masts to furl sails, even during storms. It was winter in South Africa, and conditions were miserable on board, damp with freezing cold sea spray.

During the afternoon, there was a good wind and the captain put the trainees through their paces. They were directed to tack the ship backwards and forwards (zig-zag) through the wind with all sails up. This would require the trainees to work quickly to change the position of all 13 sails about every 15 minutes. When the ship was being worked hard, it was a most beautiful sight to see all the sails moving simultaneously. There was a natural flow to the motion, and the ship appeared to be waltzing on the waves.

Late that night, the wind continued to get stronger, and the captain who was on watch made a decision to reduce the sails to a minimum. Four of us were in our little below-deck hovel which contained bunk beds and a small table. We sat at the table telling stories in the dank humid space. Every time the ship rolled, we could hear the water rushing overhead on deck as the ship rolled and the side dipped deep into the water. I could see little drips of salt water falling onto my bunk. Up on deck, we could hear the sea shanties being sung energetically to help with the rhythm of pulling ropes. We could hear the loud rumbling of the square sails being furled (folded). Imagine sail trainees 80 feet in the air standing on horizontal ropes with the yardarm at their waist. There they would try to capture the sails and furl them neatly, with the ship rolling heavily. We knew they would be having a tough time. Even though they were wearing simple waist safety harnesses, this was a dangerous operation. The procedure was that when ever you stepped on or off this foot rope, you shouted out what you were doing – “stepping on” – “stepping off” so the others could prepare to keep balanced.

Out on deck, we heard the chilling cry of, “MAN OVERBOARD“, followed a few seconds later by the sound of a flares exploding into the darkness. When I reached the deck, the captain was on the wheel trying to keep the ship in a straight line while floating flares and airborne flares were being set off one after the other. Half the people were standing on the deck, standing rigidly trying to maintain visual contact. They were pointing in the direction of the sail trainee as part of the procedure to ensure that we would not lose sight of him. The other half were frantically pulling on the pulley ropes to get the rescue boat into the water. By the time we got the boat in the water, the sail trainee had been in the cold black water for 15 minutes, and he was already far away on the horizon. The huge waves were making it hard to see him in the orange lights of the flares.

The rescue boat engine burst into life, and two of the crew went chasing after him. They were just a speck in the distance when they radioed back that they had found him. This was one of the most chilling nights of my life. A foot rope at the bow of the ship had broken before the sail trainee’s safety harness was clipped on. The chances of rescuing someone from a sailing vessel at night are very, very remote. Dedication to man-overboard training paid off.

What Can We Learn From This?
□ It is critical that we all strive to work in safe workplaces.
□ When guiding our kids towards a particular career or job, we can research to see how safe that industry or company is.
□ How serious does your workplace take safety training? Is it a token effort, or does it have value?
□ Are people actively pursuing better ways to deliver safety training so that there is ongoing value for it and retention of the information?
□ Do you take your safety training back home with you to help keep your family safe from dangers such as fire?

The story above had a positive outcome, but that is not what always happens. In my 28 years working as an engineer, I have been on the front lines of four fires, one explosion, and an incident where a friend got killed. People’s safety is the highest law, and we all play a significant part.

If you have any advice, thoughts, or comments on workplace safety, please feel free to respond to this blog or send me an e-mail at dave@davehillspeaks.com

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio, Keynotes, Workshops, etc.) www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2009 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved

Great Workplaces Train People To Be Safe – The Company Training Agenda Said; “Burn Them, Humiliate Them, And Scare Them To Death”

Dave Hill – Fire Fighting Training

I spent 14 years of my life working on cargo and passenger ships as an engineering officer. During this time, I was involved in 4 major engine room fires and one explosion. A fire on a ship is a very frightening experience; there is nowhere to run to and the last resort of taking to the lifeboats does not always provide much assurance of survival. There are no professional fire fighters, and there is no phoning for help. When there are accidents, you are forced to deal with them. Ships officers undergo three day fire fighting courses every few years.

In this article, I want to tell you about the fire fighting training that my fellow engineer officers and I received in Leith, Scotland, that helped us get through these incidents. During these courses, the firemen try to teach you the reality of firefighting. They teach you that a real fire situation is nothing like the Hollywood movies. They teach the realities by putting you in situations where you are scared to death, and everyone gets some form of burns.

The course starts off with some classroom training where they teach you the mechanics of a fire. At this stage of the training, everyone is pretty jovial; put a group of ship engineering officers together, and you have a lot of jokes and story swapping about the unusual life at sea. After a day of classroom training, we progressed to running up the nine story tower with self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) on. By the time we got to the top, we were fighting for our breath. My brain was telling me to take the mask off as I could not seem to suck in an adequate supply of air. A few people took their masks off and were forced to repeat this part of the training.

Next, the firemen took us into the lower floor of the six-story building, which was a simulation of a large metal ship’s engine room. The firemen were dressed up in their fire suits and had their SCBA’s on. A group of about 15 of us trainees stood in the room without any SCBA protection. In the middle of the room, there was a big pile of wood. The firemen lit it with a jar of kerosene and the doors were slammed shut trapping us. The flames grew quickly. At first we were joking with each other, but soon the smoke and the heat started filling the room pushing down and down from the ceiling. We became totally focused on our breathing, adrenalin pumping, and brains getting focused on survival. One of the firemen in the room wearing his SCBA sarcastically shouted out, “You all have gone very quiet – what’s the matter?” Soon we were all lying flat on the ground – our mouths in the dirt sucking for air, our ears stinging with the heat. After a while, one of the firemen told us to keep our heads low on the ground. We heard a fire hose belch out and water was going on the fire. The superheated steam produced by the water hitting the hot fire immediately hit us like a wave, and finished cooking our ears. The ears are one of the primary indicators that tell a fireman that it is getting too hot. The firemen kicked open the doors and we ran out coughing, spitting and retching – smoke coming out of our mouths for the first few breaths.

The next part of the training was search, rescue, and fire fighting using protective clothing, SCBA air tanks, and facemasks. This was to be a disaster from start to finish. The idea was that the engine room would have a large fire on the bottom floor – we would enter the top of the six-story engine room in a group of five wearing our SCBA. We had to manage a fire hose and a rescue rope to rescue a hidden dummy as well as put out the fire. Firemen were hidden throughout the building, so that if anyone got injured or ran out of air they would throw the doors open and drag us out. When we entered the engine room, one by one holding the fire hose, it was like entering the gates of hell. Thick black smoke poured out, and the heat was already painful. You could only just see your hand if you put the flashlight on it. We were all breathing heavily with stress. The procedure was that at each level of the engine room the last person on the hose would stay at an entrance to a room while the other four did a search for the dummy. The person at the entrance would sit with the hose clapping his hands shouting “door is over here” again and again so that we could stay oriented in the pitch black smoke filled building as we did our systematic search. Changing floors, you had to walk down backwards for safety, this is where we had our first mishap – someone’s breathing air bottle got stuck on something and in his panic to free it, he managed to rip the bottle from its screwed fitting. The 3000-PSI of air in the bottle caused it to literally fly like a balloon with its end untied with the sound of an airplane taking off. The firemen quickly opened the doors and pulled us out. We had to start again.

The next incident involved me. I was on the end of the fire hose and we were preparing to go down a floor. The 4 people in front of me went down and I then let go of the fire hose, turned around and went down the stairway. At the bottom of the stairway I groped around for the hose but I couldn’t find it, not only that, I also could not find my teammates. I couldn’t understand it. What I did not know was that there were two stairways near each other. When I let go of the hose I had turned around and climbed down the wrong stairway. I was lost. I came across a hidden fireman; I tapped him on his shoulder and muttered through my SCBA mask, “I have lost my friends”. The curses that came out of his Scottish mouth shouldn’t be repeated!

We eventually made it to the bottom floor with no sign of the dummy yet. We were all standing near a closed door in a line – hose in hand. Behind the door was a huge fire. I was just about to open it when a hidden fireman grabbed my hand and shouted out, “THINK BEFORE YOU OPEN THAT DOOR.” I had forgotten to get everyone to lie on the ground. They would have been badly burnt by the heat coming out the door. We lay down, opened the door, and started fighting the fire. While groping around the room trying to locate the dummy, someone shouted out, “I have found the dummy”, and we headed towards the voice. We were just ready to tie the rope around the dummy, when it shouted out in a Scottish accent, “Get off me you bastards!” We had mistaken a hidden fireman for the dummy. By the time we found the dummy, the whistles on our air tanks were blowing telling us that we had only a few minutes of air left. We had six stories to climb to get out with the dummy, and we panicked. We brought the dummy out with the rescue rope tied… around its neck. The fireman gave us hell again.

I consider this training the best I have ever done in my life. It gave me a great respect for the difficulty of fire fighting, the danger of fire, and the complexity of rescue. The fire fighters at Leith Fire Fighting School in Scotland scared us, burnt us and humiliated us, but I have no doubt that they have saved many people from the horror of fire through their training. Over 20 years later, the training they gave me is still ingrained in my mind.

If you have any advice, thoughts, or comments on exceptional workplace training, please feel free to respond to this blog or send me an e-mail at dave@davehillspeaks.com

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio, Keynotes, Workshops, etc.) www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2009 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved

The Empowered Engineer – Finding Your Career Goal

Dave Hill - Starting Up A 30,000 Horse Power Ship Engine

I have had an interesting, colorful, and prosperous career as an engineer. Very little has been planned in my life; however, I have been very lucky that I have nearly always stumbled in the right direction, allowing my career to blossom.
I grew up in small towns in Ireland, and career guidance was non-existent. Even when I went to a boarding school, there was nothing in place to steer me in any one direction. Fate was a major factor. We now live in a world where career guidance is a lot more accessible, career days at school and research on the internet opens up doors of understanding. At an early age, engineers show the signs of technical inclination, but when reaching a point where they choose a specific type of engineering to pursue, there appears to be some randomness. My conversations with up and coming engineers indicates the initial choice may be “what sounds cool”. In other words, young engineers may not get it right the first time. Stumbling around to find one’s way to a fulfilling career is still the norm.

Dave Hill - Chief Engineer Officer

Looking back into my past, I remember living in a small town in Ireland called Rathdowney. There was a one room schoolhouse where the teacher taught all grades, and whose first task in the morning was to light the coal fire to keep the room warm. The schoolhouse had outside shack-like toilets. Fast forward a couple of years, and I am studying at an engineering college in Glasgow, Scotland, and I had been sponsored by a British shipping company called the Bank Line, and they were paying for all college fees, accommodation, food and even travel back to Ireland for vacation. On top of that, they paid me a small wage. At the age of 20, I flew out to Bombay, India, as an engineer cadet on a cargo ship. About eight years later, I was wearing four gold and purple stripes on the cuffs of my engineering officer uniform, indicating that not only had I reached the top qualification as a chief engineer officer, I was also working at that rank. By the time I was 25 years old, I had traveled around the world seven times, and by the time I finished this 14 year career, I had been to 75 countries. This career ended literally the day I got married. Four years earlier, I had met a Canadian girl in Darwin, Australia, while we were both working on a square rig sailing ship. I was on the sail training ship for a year traveling from Australia to the Caribbean via the Indian Ocean, around South Africa and up the South Atlantic. When I moved to Canada, I transitioned into a career as a machinery loss prevention specialist for the property insurance industry and stayed at that for 6 years. That career transitioned into a Corporate Principal Risk Engineer Career in Dallas, Texas, working for a chemical corporation.
While working for the chemical corporation in Dallas, the company would sponsor high school kids to come to our department as interns. They were high school kids who were just getting the inkling of wanting to become an engineer, and my company was providing them with a unique opportunity to explore this further. It fascinated me to learn that when I asked the question, “Why did you choose to become an engineer and what prompted you to decide to pursue a certain type of engineering?”, the frequent answer I got was, “I was good at math and science and my teacher suggested that I become an engineer. The reason I chose a particular specialty in engineering was because it sounded cool!!!” Based on this feedback, it looks like career choice still has some “randomness” and there is still a need for stepping stones to allow young engineers to stumble in the right direction. At my kid’s middle school, I do keynote speeches to educate the students on success strategies, and do educational sessions to help them decide if an engineering career would be a good fit or not. I talk about how I had continuously built my foundation with a passion for learning, and this had allowed me to change careers and each time reaching greater fulfillment.
.

TEN THINGS YOUNG ENGINEERS CAN DO TO GET NOTICED AND PROMOTED
1) Understand your passions and find a career that might be a good fit
2) Choose a job that will be valued by the organization (you will lose energy if you do not have this vital component)
3) Develop a passion to learn, expand your knowledge and skill set to the limit
4) Use you time well, pursue a routine of learning by listening to personal and professional development material while exercising or driving to and from work. Develop skills in communication, negotiation, conflict management, listening, management, leadership and presentation skills etc.
5) Find a career where a company recognizes and supports the importance of professional and personal development (ask if they have an audio library etc.)
6) Supercharge your learning ability by having mentors. Many experienced engineers are thrilled to be asked to help someone out by sharing knowledge and experiences (ask!).
7) Find a company that will provide you with a structured career path
8) Ask for uncompromised honest feedback during performance reviews
9) Develop a positive “can do” attitude. Volunteer, volunteer, volunteer – get yourself noticed.
10) As your career progresses, determine what aspects of your job excite and energize you and what aspects you dislike. Develop a plan to move your career in a direction where you do more of what you like and less of what you dislike.

Dave Hill - Principal Risk Engineer

If you have any advice, thoughts, or comments on this subject, please feel free respond to this blog or send me an e-mail at dave@davehillspeaks.com

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio – Keynotes – Workshops etc.) www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2009 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved

Dealing With Workplace Conflict – “Mutiny at the Bay Of Lions”

Photo by NOAA

It was July 1986, at about two o’clock in the morning. I was on an Irish ship as chief engineer officer. The ship had left Morocco on the North coast of Africa with a full cargo of oranges. I was not in a deep sleep, as the ship was being thrown around by the waves and there was the continuous crashing and banging of pots and pans and other bits and pieces being ejected from their storage areas. Beside my bunk were my working coveralls laid out on the floor with my boots. They were there in readiness of emergencies that would regularly happen in the ship engine room. I had been on the ship for several months, and got used to the regular, “Chief, come quickly” urgent requests summoning me to the engine room where equipment breakdowns and emergencies were frequent. The pounding on the door this early morning was different; it was overly aggressive. I was immediately alert from my sleep. The chief officer switched on my light, and with a furrowed brow, he exclaimed, “I need your help to take over the ship from the captain!” He was in fact asking me to embark on a mutiny, an act that could result in losing my officer credentials and destroy my career.
The ship was in a notoriously bad area north of Africa called the Bay of Lions, carrying oranges in its refrigerated cargo holds. The Bay of Lions was living up to its reputation, and there was a howling storm outside. Our ship was taking a hammering, and was rolling precariously on its course towards Marseilles, France. The waves were hitting us side on, and the engine was screaming as the ship lurched when hit by a large wave. The propeller would come near the surface of the sea. I arrived quickly on the bridge of the ship where the captain was staggering around with blood on his face from a fall. When I asked the drunken captain what was going on, I received a vacant glance. The chief officer exclaimed that the ship was in danger, and that we needed to immediately change course and seek shelter. With my heart beating nervously, I agreed and as the second most senior officer on the ship, I had the captain escorted from the bridge. The seriousness of the storm became apparent the next day when it was determined that we had a damaged rudder bearing. The subsequent dry-dock also showed that the thick metal plating on the bow of the ship had been “pushed in” by the force of the waves. The day following the mutiny, I went to the captain’s office to discuss the events of the early morning and try and get a feel for the consequences. I knocked and entered to see him stealthily try and hide his “breakfast beer”.
What did I learn from this? This was probably a marking point in my career, a point where my instinct told me to do the right thing, no matter what the consequence. As my career progressed and transitioned to different industries, I have maintained ethics that will allow me to weather any storm, be it on a ship, on a land-based engineering organization, or in a corporate office.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE EFFECTS OF DESTRUCTIVE MANAGEMENT?
a. Employees are distracted and productivity suffers
b. Stress levels result in motivation and self esteem being impacted
c. Absenteeism and high turnover erode profits
d. Loss of respect and trust
e. Deadlines get missed
f. Workplace safety may be compromised

10 WAYS TO DEAL WITH STRESS AND CONFLICT ASSOCIATED WITH DESTRUCTIVE MANAGEMENT
Note: The variables of managerial personalities, workplace culture, and specific scenarios make this difficult to identify hard and fast success strategies. The following are offered with the understanding that circumstances may dictate that some are more effective than others in your working environment
1) Bring the issue to the table once the emotional levels are conducive to respectful communication. Take into consideration whether it is a one-time mistake or a behavioral issue
2) Listen to the managers points of view and empathize honestly without patronizing
3) A positive attitude will give you a head start in conflict management
4) Do not dwell on past conflict; it increases your stress levels, deal with the issue at hand
5) Make an effort to surround yourself with upbeat, positive attitude, lighthearted people. Don’t spiral into destructive negativity.
6) Do not get sucked into groups whose conversations resound of negativity and continuous criticism of management and the company
7) Determine if you really want to work in this kind of destructive management environment. Is the rest of the job good enough that you can put up with this trade-off?

ACTIONS THAT SHOULD BE USED WITH EXTREME CAUTION:
8) Use humor where appropriate to lighten up the situation – taking into consideration the temperament of the manager
9) Talk to the manager privately, and clearly state the problem and how it makes you feel.
10) Involve Human Resources or your managers boss when the circumstances dictate a need to elevate the issue (this may be a permanent relationship breaker)

This is an important subject to me. Any feedback or stories would be greatly appreciated. We can help each other have better working lives. You can reply to me at dave@davehillspeaks.com or reply to this blog in the comment section below.

Dave’s Public Speaking Website (Bio – Keynotes – Workshops etc.) www.davehillspeaks.com

Copyright © 2009 Dave Hill Speaks LLC all rights reserved

The Exceptional Workplace – Preventing Accidents During an Economic Downturn – “All Fired Up by a Washing Machine”

It was July 27th 1989 and I was the chief engineer officer on a cargo ship hundreds of miles from shore. We were travelling between Morocco and France with a full load of oranges. I was sitting in my cabin when the shout of “Fire!” came booming down the corridor – followed by the piercing fire alarm. With my heart racing and my engineer mind going through ingrained emergency procedures “Shut down the air conditioning fans, shut the ventilation dampers, slow down the engine, start up the fire pump….” I ran and turned the corner into a wall of smoke with orange flames flickering in the background. Less than an hour later the fire was out, adrenalin was easing itself from my bloodstream, and I was looking at the melted mass of a burnt out washing machine and a room and corridor with smoke, water and heat damage. This was a time when the cargo shipping industry was in a lengthy economic downturn, and doing things cheaply had become the norm. Accidents were so routine that I slept with my working coveralls laid out beside my bed so I could dress and hurry to the emergency. When I would go home on vacation from a six month voyage, I would look gaunt and sick from stress.
The washing machine had caught fire because it had a water heater that would stay on whether there was water or not. The last person using the washing machine had switched on the heater to wash his oily working clothes, but had forgotten to turn the manual heater switch off after the wash cycle. The washing machine had no safety devices to prevent this kind of accident. It heated up to a critical point then exploded into flames. I informed the ship owners in London of the cause, and requested a better washing machine with safety controls. It was to my amazement when we arrived in port in Marseilles, France to see a brand new washing machine awaiting us, of exactly the same make and model. The economic downturn had reduced the safety culture to a tattered safety poster on the wall.

Twenty years and two careers later as I sit pondering some of the major challenges to engineers in my “circle”, an alert e-mail popped up from the US Government Chemical Safety Board (CSB). The e-mail pointed directly towards challenges that engineers face as companies go through tough financial times and cycles of cost cutting, re-engineering, or a declaration of “survival mode”. These are times where decisions are made that can lead to accidents, the accidents probably do not happen immediately (which helps justify the thought process), the things that cause accidents tend to fester in the background until circumstances line up to allow bad things to happen. After the accident engineers and others get to look in the mirror and ask the questions, “How did we get here?”, “Is there something I could have done to prevent this?” “What if I had spoken up at the cost-cutting meetings?” These are tough times for engineers we enter our careers; with passion, and in the blink of an eyelid, we can be put in a box where we feel our ethics getting eroded and our attention to detail getting watered down.

Chemical Safety Board Bulletin:
“My safety message for oil and chemical companies is clear: even during economic downturns, spending for needed process safety measures must be maintained,” Chairman Bresland stated. He noted that the CSB investigation of the 2005 Texas City refinery disaster linked the accident to corporate spending decisions in the 1990s, when low oil prices triggered cutbacks in maintenance, training, and operator positions at the plant. A total of 15 people were killed and 170 injures. Costs to the company were in the billions of dollars.

Anyone who has had a serious accident at work knows the devastative effect on workers. In my first career where I spent 14 years as an engineering officer on cargo ships, I was involved in three major fires- one explosion and the fatality of a friend. I got the opportunity to look in the mirror and ask if I could have done something differently. So what are some of the potential results of an accident?
• Morale gets eroded
• Workers lose focus and more accidents can start lining up
• The “blame game” can start and relationships get broken
• Worker energy levels are impacted
• Trust levels are impacted
• Work loads can increase due to investigating accidents and taking corrective action
• The company image can be impacted
• People get hurt, equipment gets damaged and the company finances are strained even further.

Ten Ways Exceptional Workplaces Stay Focused During Economic Downturns
1. Generate a strong safety culture and “transparency” from the board of directors all the way down to the front line.
2. Develop workers so they are not afraid to speak openly
3. Establish open communication channels at all levels of the organization
4. Incorporate a culture where senior management interact with employees and solicit ideas for safe cost reduction
5. Produce systems where employee ideas are considered. Employees receive recognition and rewards for ideas that are implemented
6. Recognize and reward employees so they feel invested in the solution and bring ideas to the table
7. Employ experts who get down to the detail, challenge ideas, come up with alternatives and have exceptional communication skills
8. Invest in employee career development including communication skills.
9. Develop employees so they have the expertise, confidence, communication skills and ethics to convince people of adverse consequences of actions and are also able to convince people of alternative approaches
10. Incorporate a culture where the senior management lead by example and are respected. A culture where employees will do anything to help each other and advance the company. They evoke a self-sustaining workplace of creativity, employee empowerment and energy.

How can you help me communicate more information on this important subject?
1) Share stories pertaining to safety in the workplace during the economic downturn, whether they are positive or negative.
2) Find other points you would advise people on.
3) Do you have any unique methods for increasing the effectiveness of any of the 10 points above?

Final Note
The day I got married was the day I quit this career. The history of accidents that I had been immersed in played a big part in my decision. After 14 years as an engineering officer, I had reached the top of my career in qualifications and rank, was earning an excellent salary, and was travelling the world- but it was not a journey I wanted to continue. The change in career took me off in a different direction, and allowed me to pursue my passion to prevent accidents.

Copyright © 2009 Dave Hill Speaks LLC All rights reserved.