I said it and I am proud to have said it. Back in the earliest of days when they were discussing all of the extraordinaire measures that we would need to take to “flatten the curve”, I stated that after the measures work, we will then be faced with the idea that “this was all overkill and it was not necessary” based on the success of those very measures.
We see it all the time in our profession and it is darn near impossible to prove the success of safety without removing it and letting bad things happen. I can not help but compare these last two months with my 27 years of implementing LOTO at facilities that did not believe it was necessary; many thought it was silly, government over-reach, just for the stupid people (ironically my favorite response), etc. Sound familiar? Some of these plants had even suffered significant injuries (and even death in several facilities), but that was not even enough to convince them for the need for LOTO. Heck, as many of you have probably experienced, some of the loudest voices against safety practices like LOTO are from the very workers who have suffered injuries because of the lack of safety practices such as LOTO.
But here we SIT (driving me insane as I want to get back to work!) rejoicing in our success from those extraordinaire measures and we see a segment of the population doing exactly the same thing – using the success of those extraordinaire measures to prove to us that the risks were “overblown” and that none of these measures were even necessary. I even find many of my patriotic friends decrying that we have given up our rights and liberties in return for these successes and they quote a lot of our founding fathers who decried giving up liberties for safety.
I have asked a number of them after they have posted meme’s asking who in their social media friend circles know someone directly who has passed away from the virus – attempting to show how low the risk of death actually is. This is quite silly and for “professionals” to be playing these games is quite ignorant. I have 600 FB friends and I polled them, the results would be MEANINGLESS as the sample size is too small and skewed. But even a broader problem with this mindset is there are safety professionals who are proposing that before we can recognize a hazard/risk, we would have to have a direct impact on us to understand it.
Ask your social media friends how many know someone directly who has died from a failure to Lockout or in a Permit-Required Confined Space. And when everyone responds they know of no one, be sure that when we return to our workplaces that the first thing we do is tear up the LOTO and PRCS programs as we just proved they are all overblown and not necessary – our social media friends prooved it.
Our goal was to “flatten the curve” and yes the methods and measures were extreme and it will take us decades to fully understand the effects they had on society, but just go back and read the “public comments” in the LOTO Preamble and we will see that society’s view of risk has not changed much over the past 50+ years. We see a lot of the same concerns about the impacts the measures would have on industry in order to save a finger or two of the few workers who suffer such an accident. It is amazing the parallels we see in the push back against these measures for the virus and industrial safety.
Now the rest of the world has gotten a glimpse inside our world, do you think our jobs as safety and health professionals will be easier or more difficult when we return to our workplaces and try and get our workers refocused on working safely?