On shift at Remote Energy Plants without the benefit of other employees or the designated Safety Representative watching over your every move – That’s right, it’s a “benefit” - a non-participant might make the incorrect assumption that it’s easy to make “Safety” a subordinate consideration.

I recall one day on the job with the aforementioned benefit of others – when a mechanic admonished me with, ”How do you get by without sideshields?”. I hadn’t realized that I had gotten up from my computer and walked into the plant while still wearing my regular reading glasses. His “calling me out” for my own good was greatly appreciated and I immediately corrected the situation. I won’t forget it.

In Remote Energy Plants, many of the work areas are out of the main stream (pun intended) and a lot of times we’re working nights/weekends/holidays when others are enjoying their earned time away. Either way, “Safety isn’t 9 to 5″ with this team and like many other individuals in this industry, we take personal ownership of it.

While preparing for a job the other night, I needed to grab some equipment from our tool cage. Since the cage here is professionally organized, it didn’t take me but a few seconds to grab some orange cones, a portable light and a cart on my way out from collecting the other tools I needed.

When I got to each of the areas needing my attention, it was easy to set-up some extra lighting, put the cones out and string the extension cord overhead. You’ll also notice a Fire Extinguisher, the wheeled glare screen, and the cart; the cart doing double duty as a good place to post the Job Safety Briefing & Hot Work Permit since I needed to relocate for each consecutive task.

Even though the possibility of foot traffic through this area at 1AM is very slim, I don’t want to be the one apologizing for someone getting hurt because I didn’t anticipate the possibilities of a Security Guard, unexpected late night worker, etc… and I can say that set-up and take down of the safety equipment added less than 3 – 5 minutes overall.   

You don’t need to milk a job to get it done safely and at the other extreme whenever someone tells me that they don’t have the time to do a job safely, I tell them that I don’t have time not to.

It’s how we roll.

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Tags: safety, Work

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