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Thursday, December 14, 2006
What You Know Can Hurt You
An IEEE technical paper, published in Industry Applications Magazine, provides a unique and interesting view of industrial safety. The paper is titled, "How Do We See Safety?" To help us get a different perspective on safety it quotes several people, such as Mark Twain who said:
"It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so."
If what you "know" to be true is not really true, then you are in an unsafe situation. We tend to trust that "seeing is believing", but are we really seeing safe? The paper uses this example:
Suppose there is a routine task that needs to be done on a regular basis. This task can be done without safety precautions and you have never seen anyone get hurt while performing this task. Safety them becomes a very low value priority.
When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree 35 years ago, my first job involved testing newly installed control systems. These were digital controls using mechanical relays. One of the electricians who was working on wiring the control systems would test for voltage by touching the wires. He said that he never got hurt, as long as he used the back of his hand.
How did he see safety? He didn't. In this case he was totally blind to safety.
Read this technical paper to help you expand your ability to "see" safety.
"It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so."
If what you "know" to be true is not really true, then you are in an unsafe situation. We tend to trust that "seeing is believing", but are we really seeing safe? The paper uses this example:
Suppose there is a routine task that needs to be done on a regular basis. This task can be done without safety precautions and you have never seen anyone get hurt while performing this task. Safety them becomes a very low value priority.
When I graduated from college with my electrical engineering degree 35 years ago, my first job involved testing newly installed control systems. These were digital controls using mechanical relays. One of the electricians who was working on wiring the control systems would test for voltage by touching the wires. He said that he never got hurt, as long as he used the back of his hand.
How did he see safety? He didn't. In this case he was totally blind to safety.
Read this technical paper to help you expand your ability to "see" safety.
Labels: Safety Training, workplace safety
posted by Steve Hudgik - Go to this Workplace Safety Post |
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