Varanus Island is back to normal

According to various Australian media reports, the natural gas plant at Varanus Island in Western Australia is now back to full capacity following the major pipeline explosion in 2008.

The government has estimated that the explosion blasted $A2 billion from the state economy and will be pursuing the pipeline’s owner, Apache Energy, through the courts.

The government says the pipeline was inadequately maintained and corrosion led to the failure of the pipe.

Apache has already been in the courts seeking an injunction to stop the Western Australian Mines & Petroleum Minister, Norman Moore, from seeing a “a federal-state government report into alleged regulatory lapses that may have contributed to the Varanus Island blast”.

Apache’s move is peculiar but the WA government has become more involved in the investigation of this explosion than others and the company has not been happy with the investigation process for some time.

Kevin Jones

When employees are their worst enemy.

A recent article in a rehabilitation newsletter reminded me of a client from several years ago.

Several employees in a small item packaging line were reporting wrist and forearm soreness toward the end of their shift.  They believed that the line speed was too fast for them to comfortably work their full shift.

In consultation with the workers and the operations manager we went through various possible control options – line speed, automation, seating, posture, warm-up exercise, footwear, length of shift…..

A couple of days later, I was at the workplace at the end of the shift.  The employees said they were sore but they did not go home.  They stayed on for several hours of overtime.  When I asked them about this they said they always do the overtime.

So the assessment of working environment had incomplete data.

My advice was that if the employees were putting themselves at harm of the potential for harm, undertaking overtime while not fit-for-work contravenes their own OHS obligations.  If the employer offered these employees overtime knowing the employees were in pain, the employer is breaching the OHS obligation.

That is the straight OHS position.  But life is more complex than OHS.  The right OHS decision deprives the employees of additional income.  The right OHS decision could encourage employees to not report their pain or discomfort, for if they do, the offer of overtime would be withdrawn.  Non-reporting of injuries is a common short-term decision that many employees make.

It is in this context that consultation is required between employees, production manager, supervisor, human resources officer, and the health & safety rep, if one is on site.  This consultative group can then make a decision that everyone understands the justification for, even if some participants do not like it.

A question to ponder from the scenario above – if one of the workers developed pain during the normal work shift, undertook overtime without the employer being informed of the pain and put in a worker’s compensation claim for the pain, would the employer feel justified in contesting the claim?

Kevin Jones

Evidence, subjectivity and myth

There is a big push for occupational safety and health decisions to be made on evidence.  OHS academics in Australia are particularly big on this and there is considerable validity in the lobbying but as academics can have a vested interest in research, the calls are often dismissed.

There is also, around the world, a questioning of the value and validity of the risk assessment process related to workplace safety.  In Europe, in particular, the business groups see risk assessment as a major unnecessary business cost (but then again, how many businesses even perform OHS risk assessments?).  Risk assessment has often been criticised because of its subjectivity.  In some circumstances, risk assessment may perpetuate workplace and safety myths.

In the absence of evidence, myths fill the gap.  Sometimes assessments, investigations, estimates and FOAFs (friend of a friend) add to the tenuous credibility of those myths.

Peter Sandman has talked about dispelling myths through risk communication.  One myth he discusses, the risks of flu vaccinations, is also touched on in an interview with Dr Aaron E. Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine on the ABC’s Life Matters program.

OHS professionals must seek evidence on workplace hazards so that their advice is sound but equally, myths must be countered.  The links in the paragraph above, along with the excellent website, www.snopes.com, can provide some assistance in how we can reduce the transmission of myths.

I am a big advocate of the “contrary”.  Only by asking questions about established beliefs and tenets can the flaws in our decision-making be illustrated.  Sometimes this is dismissed as being a “Devil’s Advocate” but the process does not advocate bad behaviours, it questions the basis for established behaviours – a process that many people, organisations AND business find enormously threatening.

As we get older or become socialised, we tend to forget the tale most of us heard as a child, The Emperor’s New Clothes.  This tale should be read regularly to remind us of how the contrary position, the quizzical, can be constructive and sometimes, revolutionary (even though in the tale the Emperor ignores the child’s spoken truth) but still provide evidence.

Kevin Jones

OHS crime alert

Media     -0x1.8b5ce0p-63lert-            52392336nal[1] - crimeIn late June 2009, WorkSafe Victoria tried a new approach to raising the awareness of the criminal status of OHS breaches through producing a formatted media alert and placing an ad in the daily newspapers.

It is unclear how else the “flyer” will be distributed other than through the WorkSafe website.  Indications are that a hard copy of the alert for distribution through WorkSafe offices is not planned.

The ad, pictured right, refers to the prosecution of Rapid Roller over the second serious lathe incident at that workplace in 12 months, the most recent resulting in a death.

Kevin Jones

Root Cause and Camels

In tertiary risk management courses, one is urged to look for “contributory factors” to an event.  An event can be a specific action or failure but a good investigation looks at the factors that led, or conspired, to the failure – “contributory factors” – as well as the failure itself.

For example, a common phrase is “the straw that broke the camel’s back” meaning a specific event that caused damage.  The common application of this phrase focuses on a single event in an already overburdened situation.

However occupational health and safety (OHS) expands this single event over time and work to analyse the cumulative effects on the camel of carrying innumerable straws.  It just so happened that one particular straw broke the camel’s back.

OHS is also about the cumulative effect of hazards on a company’s health.  There are a multitude of camels and a multitude of straws but the focus remains the same – investigate the combination of issues or hazards that culminated in an injury, event or disaster.

Decades ago investigators would look for a “root cause”, a phrase rarely applied in the technical discipline now but one that remains in common parlance.  However, root cause is not something that OHS professionals should forget or ignore.  A root cause can be an aim of an investigation but not one that dismisses other possibilities.  This may be why the term is out of vogue because it implies a fixation, an “Ahab”, which is a perspective that leads to very poor decision-making in all of the areas of work, business and life.

Kevin Jones

Integrating climate change impacts into OHS and business management

Today the European Policy Centre in Brussels released the report Climate change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions. The findings of this report do not directly affect workplace safety but do indicate new ways in which businesses must manage the economic and social hazards that climate change produces.  These new ways of management must be anticipated and understood by OHS professionals.

Synthesis Report Web coverThe report says that

“Linking climate change with broader sustainable consumption and production concerns, human rights issues and democratic values is crucial for shifting societies towards more sustainable development pathways.”

The need for integrated management of business has never been greater.  The common threat of climate change can only be met with a business strategy that embraces the reality of the threat and has this reality on the table of all business discussions – a desire that many professionals have also been pushing for OHS for years.  The boardroom and management tables are becoming full of issues that some see as competing but are in truth complementary.

The report discusses two types of action that can be taken.  Businesses that produce large amounts of carbon should be well involved with mitigation measures and the political policy frameworks.  Other businesses can benefit substantially from adapation, that is

“…whereby society increases its capacity to cope with the impacts of climate change, so far as possible.”

The report gives developing countries a particular focus for adaptation but the concept is equally relevant, and perhaps more easily implemented, in Western countries.

“Adaptation to climate change cannot be successfully implemented if treated as an “add on” and implemented separately from other initiatives aimed at fostering economic and social development and increasing the resilience of societies.”

Climate change is altering the statistical possibilities of worst-case scenarios.  The one-in-a-million is becoming the one-in-a-thousand.  The once-in-a-hundred-years is becoming once-in-a-decade.  The rapidity of change and the greater extremes and fluctuations of these events are changing the way projects are handled, costed and managed.  These fluctuations will challenge the way that safety is managed and are broadening the scope of the profession.

OHS needs to be seen as a discipline that is as multi-faceted as risk management, as human as human resources and as responsible as corporate social responsibility.  The OHS professional will remain focused on the safety of employees but what used to be on the periphery is now moving to the centre – climate change, business continuity, infectious disease pandemics, travel, risk management, shareholder expectations, quality, auditing, governance and accountability, to name a few.

And none of these issues can be dealth with without an integrated and adaptive approach, an approach that can provide more wide-ranging social benefits than ever before.

Kevin Jones

Resilience, stress and safety management

The July 25 2007 SafetyAtWork podcast is now available for download.  It includes an interview with Michael Licenblat where we discuss the psychological approach to individuals taking control of their own safety, the benefits of wellbeing programs and the changing workplace.

On listening back to the podcast today, I was struck by several issues he raises:

  • Michael is one of the few wellbeing gurus who directly link the management of stress to the productivity of the worker.  He displays more awareness than many others of the “proactive” OHS context of this approach to human capital.
  • He discusses why it is difficult for all of us to say no to some work tasks, even if  the task is high risk and may injure ourselves and others.
  • He states two core elements of workplace cultures that seem to revolve around the established OHS obligation of consultation.  Perhaps OHS managers can become real agents of change by cranking up consultation.

Kevin Jones

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