30 Hours of College

We could only watch as her body shook with the full force of an electrical current. As she turned to face us, slid down the wall, and landing in a violent plop beneath the fire extinguisher, I burst into laughter. This 30 hour class was going to be all I hoped for. Although I did expect a proper presentation of the NIOSH case studies, I had no idea they would be acted out with such dramatic talent. The class only got better from there.


The final projects from this group were among the best I had ever experienced. While presenting blood borne pathogens, the nurse in the class covered the hands of the women in blue "germ" glitter and the hands of men in red "germ" glitter. As she encouraged us to shake hands, we ended up covered in a purple reminder of how easy it is to transmit germs and disease through casual contact.

I wondered what the dean would say if she were to hear about the glitter in my classroom. I decided I would tell her we got bored with safety topics, and decided to try pole dancing. We laughed about it but I was a bit concerned for the couple of guys who had not only spent ten hours in my class yesterday, but had spent most of the night repairing a piece of machinery at the plant. It wouldn't look good to send them home to their wives after another ten hours covered in glitter.

I was also impressed with an ergonomics project that placed each of us on a paper airplane assembly line. We were able to discuss what ergonomic problems we might encounter if we were to execute our individual tasks on a daily basis.

One presentation was simply a collaboration of first hand accounts. The plethora of general industry related "near misses" flowed like chocolate at the Wonka factory. I stood amazed at the explosions, chemical burns, caught betweens, and split second fall rescues. I swear I learn more from my students than they do from me.

These lessons learned from these incidents are lost forever unless those involved are willing to share the details of these occurrances. If these difficult situations had to happen, I encourage my students to share them with others so that the basic ideas are conveyed.
 
For example, although the near miss may have happened to a machine shop foreman, once the accident investigation is complete, it may be determined that a chemical spill was due to his unwillingness to call for help to deal with something he was not trained to handle. The desire to handle situations outside our realm of control is not exclusive to shop foremen. The root cause of this problem can be applied to most any employee at most any facility. Once we have the main idea we begin to think of situations at our own workplaces in which we are tempted to handle things we aren't trained to handle because of convenience, time management, or maybe we just don't want anyone to know we can't do it.

In my experience, much of Occupational Safety is based on the idea that, "This is what happened to this person under these circumstances, how can we prevent this at our facility?" Even the OSHA and NIOSH websites constantly update fatality and catastrophe reports which are used to review causes of death and serious injury to aid in creation and implementation of environmental and work practice controls. The ultimate goal of this constant flow of information being the avoidance of future incidents.

Teaching at the college provides a wide array of job titles attached to each of my students, but the basic principles regarding the root causes of many incidents are the same. This group really seemed to grasp this concept and ended up forming an email group in order to stay in contact. The value of sharing these experiences among different general industry facilities will be immence. I appreciated the tremendous effort from this group and the impeccably high marks on the instructor reviews. Although I do not hope to hear of any near misses or injuries soon, I do look forward to working with and hearing from each person in the future. In fact, I had one of them to email me an acetylene question today. I was happy to see there were no adverse side effects from her imaginary electrocution.