MEMIC Safety Experts

On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Dr. Phillip Finemore, Physical Therapist and owner of WorkFitME about how physical preparation can help prevent injury and increase your quality of life both in and outside of the workplace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in many ways over the last two years. From our homes to our workplaces, and everywhere in between, we have all faced challenges that require us to live, work, and think just a little bit differently.

In this two-part episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Jason Beam, Director of EHS and Risk Management of CCB, INC in Westbrook Maine, about how he and his team have worked with employers and employees alike to maintain and encourage safe working habits and guidelines in the face of a global pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world in many ways over the last two years. From our homes to our workplaces, and everywhere in between, we have all faced challenges that require us to live, work, and think just a little bit differently.

In this two-part episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Jason Beam, Director of EHS and Risk Management of CCB, INC in Westbrook Maine, about how he and his team have worked with employers and employees alike to maintain and encourage safe working habits and guidelines in the face of a global pandemic.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Hello listeners and welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Koch. I expect that we are all if I can use COVID as a verb just a bit COVID-ed out these days. It's been a long road where most of the news has been challenging. So I want to hear more about the successes and where companies have persevered throughout the pandemic. In this episode, I get my wish. Jason Beam, director of Environmental, Health and Safety and Risk Management for CCB, comes to the MEMIC studio to talk about the challenges that CCB faced operating a commercial construction company with the geographically diverse projects throughout the pandemic and the lessons that they will carry forward. We cover topics from emergency management to leadership to basic communication practices. There is enough complexity to the conversation that we broke this out into two episodes. So let me introduce Jason and get going with part one. Jason [00:01:00] Beam, director of EHS and risk management at CCB, has over 25 years of health, safety and emergency services experience. He earned his Master's of Science Degree in Occupational Health and Safety at Columbia Southern University and currently serves as the Enterprise and Risk Management Chairman for the Pine Tree Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Jason is also a principal member of NFPA Technical Committee 704 On the Standard System for the Identification of the Hazards of Materials for Emergency Response, has written multiple articles for the International Society of Fire Service Instructors and has previously served as an advisory board member of the American Society of Safety Professionals Fire Protection Practice Specialty. Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Beam: [00:01:49] Thanks for having me.

Peter Koch: [00:01:49] Awesome. So I want to learn a little bit more about you even having some conversations here off the podcast prior to. But before we jump into CCB, you have a pretty interesting [00:02:00] history and have quite a bit of experience doing environmental health and safety and working with different organizations. So before we get to CCB, why don't you give me a little bit of history about how you got into health and safety and, well, how you ended up at CCB to begin with, I guess.

Jason Beam: [00:02:17] Sure, sure. I think we can shorten that up a little bit. You know, originally it was an I.T. guy. My degrees in I.T. writing code. We had an I.T Shop with about seven people and we were all police officers, firefighters, hazmat, and one of our clients at the time power plant, Biddeford said, Hey, we have a fire brigade. Would you come? Would you take on some additional training? So we took on the additional training and then that grew to filling in for their safety director when he was incapacitated, to becoming his replacement, to moving to their parent company and hitting a bunch of different types of work environments around the country. And [00:03:00] then when we finally get tired, the way the family and I get tired of being in me being in a hotel five or six nights a week, said, all right, it's time for change. First day back home eating lunch. I get a call from the at the time safety director for CCB is what are you doing right now. Well, Having a sandwich, Bob? Yeah, no, I mean right now. No, I'm having a sandwich. Yeah, no I am. It's. Well, when can you be here? I'm like, Well, where's here, Bob? So, you know, we said, Hey, come on in. I need some part time support. And I got somebody out on a medical and I could really use your help. So he eventually opened his own consulting business and vacated that post. And I was asked to stay on there and have been there ever since.

Peter Koch: [00:03:43] Interesting history. I can't tell you how many people that I've talked to that have found success at a particular company with health and safety, that they started in a completely different world.

Jason Beam: [00:03:57] It's more common than it seems. Yeah.

Peter Koch: [00:04:00] So [00:04:00] interestingly enough, like if I look at my journey to get to where I am as a safety consultant for MEMIC, as an insurance company, and I started as a basically as a ski bum. My goal was to run a ski area at some point in time. And I spent a lot of time, you know, working in all the different aspects of the ski industry and had different opportunities to manage risk and safety without actually being charged with managing risk and safety for a particular company. And then moving, getting an opportunity to, hey, why don't you take this on? Hey, why don't you take that on? Hey, here's some information about this. And I remember one day I was sitting in my office and the guy who was in charge of construction and development at the ski area came into my office. I had just gotten the job as risk manager and he said, I've got to have I have this thing that's going to really help you. And I'm like, Oh, great, because I felt completely out of my element. I really wasn't sure what I was getting into at that point in time. So I'll be right back. And he goes [00:05:00] out to his truck and he comes back in. He. Brings in three boxes. Like these are for you. Great. Thanks. Thanks for that. What's in them? Oh, just you'll, these will be good for you. So they were the code of Federal Regulations for OSHA, for construction, general industry, maritime. What was the. I don't know. So lots of books, lots of small print. Like, how is this going to help? But here I am thinking about it and that connection between the human person that I had to deal with all the time from a in the trenches, working with some particular individual all the time to the regulations and that connection between how to manage people and make sure that they are safe so that they can go home at the end of the day. And, you know, I think that's a big part of what you're doing at CCB and what's making CCB safety history fairly successful over the years.

Jason Beam: [00:05:58] Yeah, I would agree with that. We've [00:06:00] put a heavy emphasis on people before production. Yeah, it's about the people. If we're not taking care of the people, then we're not executing work at a high level out in the field.

Peter Koch: [00:06:12] Let's talk about the human side of this and let's bring this into the COVID world. So if we if we think about it, when COVID first came out, right, there were there was a lot of confusion, you know, 2019, 2020, as we're starting to hear all this stuff about COVID and how it's transmitted and what it does and how it affects people and who it affects and how fast it travels. There is a lot of information out there. No one really understood what it was and where it goes. And now we're in 2022. And there's still a lot of confusing information out there. Things have evolved as we've moved forward. So, you know, what are some of the things that you did early on in COVID to help keep your staff safe? [00:07:00] That may have changed as time went on. As we come into the present, like how did you start and then how did you get to where you are now with your COVID regs.

Jason Beam: [00:07:09] Early on was kind of kind of a two pronged approach, right? There's the business continuity piece. You know, if we don't keep the business afloat, we don't have jobs, we're not putting food on our tables. But there's the people side of it, too. There was a tremendous amount of fear and uncertainty. Right. I mean, even among the experts. Right. You know, we had all these different organizations professing to know the ins and outs of this. Yet there were contradictions, there were loopholes, they were gaps. And we had a group of people that were just nervous and they didn't know what direction to face. We really set out quickly to establish this this cadence of constant communication, effective communication. We consolidated it all into a single point. You know, folks were pretty much home at that time, even though in construction we were considered essential workers because of our government work. But we [00:08:00] kept the senior and executive management right there at 65 Bradley Drive and, you know, kind of war room time, so to speak. You know, what do we have to do to meet our contractual obligations, what we have to do to keep our people safe? And how do we you know, probably the biggest challenge bigger than either of those other two things was how do we how do we get them engaged and being part of the solution? How do we show them that we were not just trying to make a buck, they were there to take care of them. And we kind of had to build on kind of our philosophy of people first. We had to change how we did it. And it took a lot of individual campaigning with some folks, took a lot of group discussions, visiting job sites, a lot of one off conversations with folks just to set them at ease. And part of it was, is a safety and health department. We want folks in CCB to be able to feel they can call us on their worst day and get some sort of support. And obviously, if down deep, you know, you need 911, then call 911. But short of that, [00:09:00] we want one of the first ones. You feel comfortable enough to reach out to us for anything. And we took advantage of the good faith we had built doing that and said, look, together, we're going to get through this somehow. You know, we'll keep you up to date. We'll, you know, kind of work with our partners whether it's MEMIC our legal folks whatever to boil this down into what's the right thing. Because above all else, we got to do the right thing here. So a lot of it was communication at first. A lot of it was you know, we had a everybody at home for a little bit. How can we continue to engage folks or work working at home or some that were out of work at home? Because the nature of what was going on to help us kind of build out our solution.

Peter Koch: [00:09:48] Can I can I stop you for a second? Because I think that's a that's an important point to explore a little bit more, because you're not we're not just talking about ten or 15 or 20 or 30 people [00:10:00] in a small construction organization, CCB, relatively large when you think about a commercial organization, not a global thousands and thousands of employees organization, but it's a problem of scale. If I have five employees. You have to do the same thing that I have to do in order to make those employees or help those employees feel safe. Trust me, and make sure that they know that I'm there for them as a business owner. But as the scale gets bigger and you have more employees, you get more job sites. How did you deal with some of those problems of scale? I guess you could say?

Jason Beam: [00:10:38] Certainly. Certainly complicated things. You know, we're about 130, 540 people average annually. And then we have a number of subs. We work with close relationships with vendors, customers, all that. But we're so far distributed. We can have 40 concurrent job sites, maybe four concurrent job sites, you [00:11:00] know, down into Mass., up to Houlton, Maine. It's certainly, certainly muddied the waters and being in a union environment while we have a lot of core people that stay with us, you know, there's quite often, depending on what's coming down the line for jobs, quite often an influx and an influx of people that may or may not know anything about our culture or what's important to us. Different levels of skill. I mean, we've seen people that have never seen so many people that are absolutely new to the trades so that complicated it even further. So during the initial quarantine, it was pretty easy. We, you know, we set up shop right there at 65 Bradley and just started communicating, communicating, communicating while in the meantime, we're hatching out these solutions to keep the jobs going. But once things opened up again, senior executive management president, myself, vice president and the operations manager and we hit the road, we're going to job sites, we're [00:12:00] never able to abate all the uncertainty and fear.

Jason Beam: [00:12:03] I mean, it's just not feasible. But we're able to address a greater degree of it by getting out to the job sites, meeting with the crews, first with the foreman. You know, hey, here's where the company stands on this. And we need to know what you need for assistance. And then what we're going to do next is we as a leadership body are going to meet with the guys, you know, doing the iron work, doing the pipe fitting, doing the carpentry so we can help put them at ease, too, because you're their first line of defense and offense. You're going to come to you looking for support, come to you with questions. We need to arm you with enough information to be able to at least know which direction to point. So. You know, communicating with that level of field leadership and not necessarily making them subject matter experts, but making them comfortable being able to answer questions. Added a great deal to that.

Peter Koch: [00:12:57] Do you mind me asking? Because I find that [00:13:00] this can be a challenging part when your upper echelon meets your middle team and you get given information from the upper echelon as the middle manager, and then you're asked, do you understand that? The answer is typically yes, I do. Whether you always understand it, believe it or not. So how did you make sure that they were on board that they. Because, again, we started talking about the information that's out there. And there is I won't call it misinformation. There's just a lot of different information. And depending on where you get your news from and what you believed, then you may come at it from a completely different side than what your company was coming at it from. So when you're hearing something that might be very different. How did you how did you help that person truly understand what the message and what you wanted [00:14:00] them to know?

Jason Beam: [00:14:04] There was a couple of pieces to that. One is we have the I'll call it the fortune of some very open viewpoints in construction.

Peter Koch: [00:14:12] That's a very good way of putting that.

Jason Beam: [00:14:15] You know, I'm sure you're aware a lot of trades folks are not bashful about expressing their opinions and their concerns. So they were quick to say, you know, I, I think this is crazy. This is insane. You know, I don't understand yet. There are going to be some that just go with it. I'll call it refreshing after the fact, the number of them that that said, you know, no, no, no, man. What gives, you know, explain this. So that was an advantage. Know, we certainly engage with the business agents and stuff at the union halls to leverage that resource as well. We engage with you folks. Help us tell that story, you know, with clerk insurance. Help us tell that story because a, you know, sometimes the [00:15:00] same message from a different voice may be phrased a little differently from a different perspective. Add some clarity. You know, there's one particular conversation that stands out where one of the foreman says, I don't like Chris. We were subject to, you know, staring down the barrel of that federal contractor mandate where vaccination or you punish them or you fire them, get them to comply. And there were folks with real concerns about that. Sure. You know, some were philosophical, some were religious. Some were mistrust of the government some were fear of vaccinations. I mean, they were pretty open about that. And the way we framed it up was, look, as leaders, we're here for the people and we have to be here for the people. And whether we agree with the government mandate or not, we have an obligation to you to keep you gainfully employed if we possibly can. So [00:16:00] we could sit here and be upset and say, you know, saber rattling, we're not going to do it, or we can do everything in our power to enable you to make the choices you need to stay with us.

Jason Beam: [00:16:11] We don't want to get rid of anybody. We'll do what we have to do to stay in business for whatever set of rules, you know, whether it's OSHA, the government contracts thing or whatever. But, you know, we get it. You know, it's uncertain. It's unnerving. And for a lot it's aggravating, you know, and we'll get through that. But. We got to have a consistent face to the men. And that was a challenge too, because we all have different beliefs. Some were. I don't mean to sarcastic, but card carrying members for the cause. Others were 180 degrees different, you know, very opposed to it. But I think what carried us through a lot of it was the that faith we built up amongst our people. [00:17:00] CCB has always been a company that that invests heavily in that relationship. And I think we kind of built up that we had some credibility in the bank and like what you and I were talking earlier.

Peter Koch: [00:17:12] Sure.

Jason Beam: [00:17:12] Yeah. And I think we made some pretty big withdrawals from that that were certainly challenged by the constant changing of the rules of engagement because, well, jeez, you told us this, now it's this, now it's something else, you know, where does this end? Well, we don't know yet either. So I, I think probably, you know, thinking back on, one of the things that had the greatest impact was we were able to take advantage of the good faith, the credibility of the trust we had built previously, kind of in the face of so much change.

Peter Koch: [00:17:47] Yeah. And I do want to come back to that to make sure we talk about that more because I really believe, as we talked at the beginning prior to jumping into the podcast, that that is an essential theme that has to happen. If you are going [00:18:00] to if you're going to manage change in your organization correctly or properly or successfully, if you ever just want to stay stagnant, then you don't really need the trust bank because you can always find someone to fill in the gap that that someone else just left. But if you want to grow, if you want to get better, if you want to if you want to be the best company that you can be, you have to have that. So we'll get back to that. I like that theme. So let's talk a little bit more about the specifics around like when all the protocols came down about you have to mask or you have to quarantine and you have to stay six feet apart. And how did you manage that with a commercial construction site? Like how did you got you had said you could have 40 construction sites, you could have four sites. You could have a site up in Houlton or Fort Kent, Maine, or you could all be all the way down in Massachusetts. So people have to travel. People have to be overnight, different places. How did you manage all of the what were the protocols [00:19:00] that worked? How did you implement some of those protocols and how did you manage compliance? I guess those three questions for you.

Jason Beam: [00:19:08] Yeah, some of the easiest ones were managing the lodging. Fine. It's one person per room. Instead of bunking up together, limiting travel and vehicles together certainly had an impact financially, but we needed to keep people available to do what needed to be done. That was probably the easiest piece. There were definitely some challenges there. It made us focus a bunch on how we lay out our work, how we stage our tradespeople instead of three people working side by side. Well, how do we rearrange kind of the work area to accommodate that? How do we how do we arrange different trades or subcontractors, you know, things that you might look back at, say, lean construction concepts, right. You know, every purposeful [00:20:00] motion, right. Every action has a defined purpose or do we really need it? It made us kind of reach back into that toolbox a little bit more than we had been, which was good, because it also created some refinements in our production process too. Right? Because I do think the same things that that lead to safe behaviors are also the same behaviors that produce top notch production, have the most engaged employees and so on. So I think it's all part of the same thing. So we're able to kind of reach into that toolbox and juggle things up. But some of it too is we eat an amount of our work is outdoors. That helped, especially when the state turned around, when Governor Mills said, well, you know, we're not as worried about outdoor activities. Perfect. However, you got to guys 60 feet off the ground in a man basket together, they're not six feet apart. You know, a it's hard to observe half a dozen different lifts in the air with everything else going on. And are they aren't they messed up, you know. Well, but the state says we don't have [00:21:00] to anymore. Okay. You know, I get that. So we had some challenges there. And of course, you know, if I'm building a steel structure and then I'm putting siding on it and a roof on it, and then I'm working inside at some time. At some point the outdoors becomes the indoors. And that was always a healthy debate too.

Peter Koch: [00:21:19] Yeah, when does when do we cross that line? Like how many walls have to be up for it to be considered indoors?

Jason Beam: [00:21:26] Yeah. And there were some healthy discussions around that and they're still ongoing. You know, I think some of what helped it though, is. A lot of our clients have their own sets of rules, and some are extremely stringent and very much exceed the current CDC recommendations. Others not so much. In other places, we were the stringent one. Of course, there again, you do that. And how come we're holding ourselves to a different standard than everybody else in the job site because it's the right thing to do. And again, I think that that credibility we built up, most, most everybody went, [00:22:00] all right, fine, I get it. We'll make it work.

Peter Koch: [00:22:03] Did you find in those spirited discussions, did you find that those are happening more frequently or happen more frequently because of the challenges around COVID than they did pre-COVID, like when you might have had some conflict around a particular job site or a particular set of instructions that might have been understood one way and then really implemented a different way. Were there more spirited conversations during COVID than might have been in the past?

Jason Beam: [00:22:35] I think they were different. You know, suddenly we have this new set of rules of engagement.

Peter Koch: [00:22:41] Sure.

Jason Beam: [00:22:42] Right. Some have penalties, some don't. But here's the expectation. And you're all going to do it. You know, that became a pretty good set of measurements to gauge things by. So it was I think it was easier to be able to sit there and not wave those around, but say, look, you know, bottom line is we have to do this. And if we don't do [00:23:00] this, it jeopardizes our ability to complete the work because people are people are getting sick. We're not caring for them properly. And if we can't do that well, now we have financial problems because we're not completing our contracts on time. I think it took some of the fire out of the work process discussions, but it certainly stoked the discussions relating to the two mandates.

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Peter Koch: [00:24:26] What I found in all of this is the companies that have found success in those spirited conversations, like in the moment, they can be pretty challenging. But when you reflect back on when you got to live in that tension for a little while between one, one opinion of the individual and then the mandate that the company is trying to put together when you live in that tension for a while, come to a realization and then move forward. That's a that's a pretty powerful opportunity. If you can recognize [00:25:00] the recognize in the moment that you could have success. So stick with that conversation. Make sure you're recognizing what concerns the individuals bringing to you and try to address those concerns as best you can. Where in the past, sometimes the way it was addressed was this is the rule. It doesn't matter what you think. You need to you need to follow the rule.

Jason Beam: [00:25:24] And for us, this wasn't we didn't want it to be one of those times. You know, we had our own philosophical position on some of these mandates and, you know, from the from the get go. So, look, we want people to be safe. We want you to we as a company are going to subscribe to CDC recommendations. People are looking for some sort of direction. Great. We're going to start here. And as we have to change and veer from what the CDC says, we will where it makes sense to. But these are the rules of engagement we're going to follow. And then along come these mandates. Well, our belief about what was right or wrong didn't [00:26:00] change. Yeah. So, you know, we're very open about our rules have changed in order to maintain this customer base with the federal contractor piece. And it's a very big part of our business, and we can't afford not to have that. And we still want you to take care of yourself. We still want you to not come to work when you're sick. We still think the right thing to do is get vaccinated and now boosted. But short of anybody telling us you have to, that's a decision for you to make. And we're not here to pass some sort of health policy on our folks or it's certainly not how dictate they and their families manage their health. So that was a tough spot to be in. But I think our position kind of between those two endpoints helped a bit because yeah, when somebody's sitting there, you know, I'm vaccinated, I'm for me, pretty painless process, but I can certainly understand the fear of that form. And I was mentioning earlier saying, you know, look, I'm not comfortable [00:27:00] with some of these things where the government's telling me that I need some medical treatment. He says, you know, I just I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm just not comfortable with this, you know, help me through this. So I think our kind of position between the two end points really kind of helped aid what you what you're aiming at here.

Peter Koch: [00:27:19] And that's huge for that foreman to come to you with the challenge and look for you to partner for a solution to help him through that is enormous. That doesn't happen all the time and again going back to that invested in that trust bank for quite a while. And then that time, here is the time where you have to go and make a withdrawal to maybe make a change in what is going to happen on the job site that will affect individuals. But that individual to be comfortable enough to come to you and say, I don't know what to think. Right? Here's my challenge. Help me through this. Help me understand this. Where do I go? What do I do? And [00:28:00] ultimately, it's their choice. It's not your choice. It's their choice. But to for you to be there as a company, as part of that senior team, to look and say, all right, yeah, I can help you through that, or I can provide you with some resources. Or we can here's some ways that you can you can go out and look for information on your own and then come back if you have questions, let's talk about it.

Jason Beam: [00:28:22] Yeah, you know what really strained that was when with regard to that federal contract and subcontractor mandate, they said, well, hey, here's how you're going to implement this. The people that will not comply, you need to enter them into your progressive discipline policy and apply as much pressure as it takes to get them to do it. We're sitting there going, that's not our role here. Right. And kind of announcing and rolling out that, okay, this is where we're at here. Certainly strained those relationships. But I but honestly, in all fairness, it was, you know, the field [00:29:00] leadership that turned around and got control of that. They're the ones that get their arms around all the tradespeople and said, hold on, hold on. You know, you do understand who we're dealing with here, right? You know, they care about us. They're interested in our success. And they're the ones that that helped really control that narrative, that, look, it's not CCB saying, if you don't do this, we're going to fire you. It's they're put in a position where they have to make some tough business decisions.

Peter Koch: [00:29:26] Yeah. And if they don't, then the whole point is moot because we're not involved in the federal contract anymore.

Jason Beam: [00:29:34] And that's a big enough portion of the book of business. So that's a pretty crippling thing. Of course then the legs get taken out from under that. Now the piece descends on us and you know where we're at with that. But you know, then how do you manage a, you know, for those that say, great, I don't have to get vaccinated, then how do you manage a testing program across that many sites? So yeah, it's been interesting.

Peter Koch: [00:29:57] So can I ask you that question? How do you manage [00:30:00] a testing program across that many sites? Because I think that's a question that a lot of people have even over one site that's been a bigger that's been a bigger challenge than I think OSHA had initially thought, because it seems pretty easy. Yeah, go ahead. If you're not going to get vaccinated, then weekly tests. But if you if you take a quarter of the people that you have at 130, you're you know, you're looking at a substantial chunk of people that have to get tested every week. How do you how do you do that when you've got job sites over seven, 800 square miles?

Jason Beam: [00:30:35] Yeah, it's the concept was very challenging. You know, ultimately now that the legs have been taken out from under the OSHA executive order sorry, the OSHA ETS, it changed our opportunities a little bit. You know, prior to that, we're looking at all right, we have a group up at several people up in Houlton, Maine. We have people down in Massachusetts. Even though we're 70 plus percent vaccinated, [00:31:00] there's still pockets of people that aren't. You know, there are some work environments where we can take some alternative approaches.

Peter Koch: [00:31:08] Sure.

Jason Beam: [00:31:08] But when you've got, say, you know, a bunch of people from up north that have no interest in being vaccinated, but you have to be protective of their data. You have to deal with the lack of testing opportunities. Oh, by the way, home tests either have to be administered or observed by the company. You know, logistically, how do you do that? And now you have you couple that with, you know, a union construction environment where even though we have some longer term jobs, we have a lot of short term jobs. And it's a matter of moving the chess pieces around for the best advantage for the company. So now you've got to track, well, where was everybody Friday? Where do we intend them to be Monday? And how much of Monday are we going to consume getting testing accomplished for these people? You know, we started asking questions like, all right, if it has to be observed or one solution is observed by a medical professional. How [00:32:00] do we feel about the people that have doctors, nurses, paramedics, whatever in the family? Paramedic has a medical license of sorts. Does that count? So we talked about that a bit. We looked at how we could leverage in a world of everything, zoom. Could we leverage that? But that created new challenges, too. Now you're tying up health and safety people for a good chunk of whatever day you pick. You know, great. I need your ten or 15 minutes. I need your 15 minutes. They're scheduling all these slots now. You know, trying to catch everybody has a major impact on the workflow, certainly complicated from a privacy perspective to go that route. And let's face it, just wasn't feasible to send everybody to all to send a bunch of people out to all these job sites to administer tests.

Peter Koch: [00:32:49] No, definitely not.

Jason Beam: [00:32:50] So. Honestly, we never came up with a great solution. We still have places that we need testing. You know, you got to have a test, negative [00:33:00] test within so many hours of going to the site. Well, those places have been doing it all along. So we're able to.

Peter Koch: [00:33:07] Maintain.

Jason Beam: [00:33:07] To handle those. You know, we have other job sites like over here at Maine Medical Center work in that expansion where, you know, our partnership with Turner, it gives those folks on that job site access to testing. So we're meeting the clients needs. Well, they're helping us accomplish that by really providing us the solution to. So as it is today, you take availability of tests out of it, which is complicated for everybody right now. Yeah, it's not horrible. But under the ETS scenario, I'm not sure would have been able to it would have taken us a couple of iterations to get it right. Yeah.

Peter Koch: [00:33:46] And I think what I'm hearing in all of this is that it couldn't have been done even in its even the testing as it stands right now outside of the ETS. It couldn't have been done without some [00:34:00] commitment and planning. By the company. And it's not just one person, but this has to be a conversations that happen because it affects everybody. Like if you expect if you expect the environmental health and safety person at your company to manage all of the requirements around testing and with no help anyplace else, and they decide that, okay, I'm going to do the observations. Well, that person's no longer available for anybody else to come in and say, Hey, Jim, I need this. Hey, Jason, I need this. Hey, Pete, I need this. Depending on who they are and what's going on, they're not available to have that question anymore, so.

Jason Beam: [00:34:41] Oh, absolutely. That was a big concern because a lot of what our team we have a we're in a tremendously good position. I think, you know, we don't have the biggest of companies, but we have a health and safety department of a risk department, all told of six people, including HR for that, you know, that ratio of tradespeople to [00:35:00] risk managers is phenomenal.

Peter Koch: [00:35:02] It is.

Jason Beam: [00:35:03] And, you know, we enjoyed the conversations where, hey, I'm going to hatch out a fall protection plan. Hey, what's the here's what I'm thinking. But would you come out and make sure that I'm not crazy here, you know, to be involved in in all phases of that project lifecycle from hey, let's talk about how we think we want to bid this through to let's triage this what went right? What went wrong? You know, over the years, CCB has really pulled that whole risk function into all facets of that, that project lifecycle. And to me, that's where we're making the most difference. So, you know, to take up minimally 40% of my time previously, I mean, early on, it was 100% of my time. But to carve that out, to be able to track vaccination status exposures, to contact tracing, you know, and to add the testing component to that. And now you're taking two people offline [00:36:00] and you're having that much less effect in the field. How much riskier is what we're doing at that point? Sure. Not that the folks that are out there doing it are competent. I mean, nine times out of ten, they say, hey, we were thinking of doing it this way. There's maybe a couple of adjustments we might make. By and large, they know. They know they're professionals, they're good at it. But sometimes just that reassurance or being able to troubleshoot something together comes up with a better solution. And to sacrifice that to meet a mandate was kind of scary.

Peter Koch: [00:36:32] Yeah. Yeah, I can I can imagine. And I keep thinking of sort of that domino theory and how things fall apart, right? So if you're not available and you're not there to catch that 1% this one time that you need an adjustment with for the plan that they because they couldn't come to you. And that mistake gets captured and ingrained in the process for the next project. Now it becomes not just 1%, [00:37:00] but it's now 10% and it might be 20% the next time that it happens. And it becomes a bigger and bigger problem. And all of a sudden when you get back into it, they've been doing it this way forever and all of a sudden you have to make a much bigger change instead of a small part that doesn't really change the operation, but you're pointing them in a different direction early on. Like it's much easier to change in the design phase than it is to remodel something to make it great.

Jason Beam: [00:37:25] Absolutely like a compass. The difference between true north and magnetic north. If I'm a few degrees off and I'm ten feet down the trail, that's an easy adjustment. But if I'm 100 miles, that's a pretty big gap.

Peter Koch: [00:37:36] Yeah, I missed the McDonald's completely.

Jason Beam: [00:37:38] Right. But, you know, you add to that the fear and uncertainty that comes with COVID, the conviction of people for and against the government's position. And all of these you know, all these other components of supply chain disruption, both at work and at home.

Peter Koch: [00:37:56] Yeah,

Jason Beam: [00:37:57] You add all those distractions into it [00:38:00] and it magnified outcomes, typically magnified negative outcomes. You know, we have all these new stressors, new distractions that we're trying to figure out. Well, there's only so much margin here. There's only so much bandwidth to observe what's going on around us. And for a good portion of that bandwidth is consumed with new problems and uncertainties. What are we missing? We're missing more than we did before this whole thing started. So, you know, there was definitely a focus on trying to trying to keep that in people's minds, to keep people vigilant for those things. But ultimately, it's a bit of a losing battle because you're fighting human nature.

Peter Koch: [00:38:42] True.

Jason Beam: [00:38:43] I mean, we got through it so far.

Peter Koch: [00:38:46] So far. Right. Knock on wood. Right. Right. So let's I'm not going to switch gears totally, but I want to go back to. So your history. You said you started out as an IT guy. So how did you use how [00:39:00] did you find technology helping you to manage some of the challenges on the job site for COVID, like whether it's contact tracing or any of the check and stuff, because again, disparate locations, disparate groups and, you know, a robust staff of safety people. But if you've got 40 job sites, six people can't make it to those 40 job sites if they're spread out all over New England.

Jason Beam: [00:39:25] A couple of different things. One of the things we instituted early on, we'd had a biweekly safety and ops call, you know, all the field leadership and anybody that wants to honestly jumps in and here's kind of here's the tale of the tape. Here's how we're performing on both fronts. Here's what's coming down the line. Here's what we've been on. Here's what we've been awarded. You know, be more inclusive with our information, right? We immediately out of the gate said, you know, this is going to be weekly and early on it's going to be COVID driven, you know, because people need to know. We need to know where we stand. They need to know what we expect and so on. Certainly, [00:40:00] you know, go to meeting Zoom, Teams, things like that made that piece easier because we're able to reach anybody that that chose to participate on all job sites. Yeah. Because of the Internet. You know, I have a phone and I have signal I can participate in that call on the vaccination tracking piece. Really? I can send if I can put a QR code on a job box and I need your vaccination status, I need to know that you're fully vaccinated because we're staring down the barrel of the executive order, 14042, blah, blah, blah. You know, I can get anybody. That doesn't have a flip phone. To scan that QR code. Are you vaccinated? Yes or no? If you're not, do you intend to be? Yes or no? Because we've got a plan in case this thing comes to fruition. And great. Then share that information with us and we tracks it. And of course, there's the questions about what about information, privacy and everything else. There's rules that govern that. [00:41:00] Right. And if we're following those rules, we're in good shape. And it's not that isn't a complex problem. The hard part was getting people to do it. Even the people that said, no, I'm not getting vaccinated. You know, I'm not doing it. I'll work someplace else if I have to. But I'm not doing it because I still get you to share the information with us. You know, I promise we're not going to sell it. Ultimately, we got the majority of it that helped a great deal. And to be able to provide, you know, executive management, the operations management with kind of a snapshot as to what percentage of our people are currently vaccinated, what aren't, because, you know, in the middle of that, you got a bunch of government job sites, some existing contracts. Those provisions weren't in effect yet. Some new contracts. They were. So you're you know, by the way, there's health care and education and all these other places with their own rules. You know, which pieces can I move where? So making that information available to them was big. And then we were looking at, [00:42:00] you know, if we had to follow through under the ETS with, with the testing piece, I, the only way we could even conceive of being able to accomplish that was to leverage things like Zoom the video piece. Would it have worked? Yeah, I think it would have with a couple of iterations, you know, I think it was more about would have been more about difficulties with the process, not the technology.

Peter Koch: [00:42:23] And I think a lot of people would actually add one more part into that from a difficulty, which would be the trust part. And then going back to that, that's a pretty big withdrawal when you're asking someone to give you their medical status, to give you their this particular status, to tell your employer something. And if you haven't built some trust up before then, even when you give them information about this is we're promising that we're not going to do anything with this. We're complying with this regulation. We need to do this. This is the process. If you hadn't built the trust, they're not going to believe you. [00:43:00] And so they'll be even more challenged with given that or if they do give it, they're going to give it in a very distrustful way. And that starts to break down your productivity and your quality and your safety and the people part of what makes your business run.

Jason Beam: [00:43:17] Oh for sure. You know, we were. You know, I talked earlier about the idea that we want people to feel that they can call us on their worst day.

Peter Koch: [00:43:27] Yeah,

Jason Beam: [00:43:28] Right. Short of 911. Right. But that kind of showed through. I mean, it kind of demonstrated that we're hitting our mark, I guess, in that regard with the trust. You know, folks would start say, listen, I've got a family member, my mom, my dad, my son, my daughter. I have a wife who's got immune issues. You know, what do you recommend? Well, we're not physicians here. We're not going to pretend to be. But we can tell you how we read the guidance and we'll do our best to help you through it to the point where. Christmas [00:44:00] Eve and Christmas Day. You know, a couple of folks had had some exposures. One was family related, and he'd say, I'm really sorry to bother you, but I don't know who else to reach out to. Right. You know, my doctor's office isn't open. Would you mind giving me your thoughts on this? You know, and they went through the scenario and, you know, afterwards I was talking with my family about it. Pretty big compliment there in that regard that that somebody in their own time worried about the health of one of their loved ones reached out to us based on the connection we've made with them throughout this. It was definitely an indicator that we were hitting the mark with some folks. Which certainly led to more probing discussions with people. And even some of the folks that are typically grumpier than others. You know, we're like, Yeah, no, we think you're doing the right thing. I'm not going to sit here and brag about it. So you don't either. But yeah, [00:45:00] we trust you. So again, I think so much of what we're able to accomplish was because of all the work we did and building the culture prior to the pandemic. Honestly.

Peter Koch: [00:45:11] Yeah. And to we talk often with some of our policyholders about that culture survey, taking the survey, taking the temperature of what's going on in the workplace. And obviously for us, it's always a safety culture survey. You're always, I'm always looking at it from the safety perspective. But from your perspective, when you heard that or realized what they were asking you on that Christmas Eve, Christmas Day question, you went back and tried to see if this is really what the perception of the rest of the company is like. How are what's the barometer? I mean, that out of the blue, that's an awesome pat on the back and a humbling compliment to think that someone would think that much of the of the relationship that you built with them to trust you for [00:46:00] an opinion. But how does that, is that pervasive through the rest of the group? And to re-ask that question to not just rest on that laurel and think, yeah, we're doing it, great, move forward. But to actually go back and recheck the pulse, I guess.

Jason Beam: [00:46:14] Yeah. And humbling for sure. I mean, that's absolutely you know, it wasn't a 100% success. Of course not. You know, and I don't think it ever will be.

Peter Koch: [00:46:24] It's human.

Jason Beam: [00:46:25] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I think we're able to capture a larger percentage of people because a you know, we understand that you can't control human nature. Right. I can't I can make assumptions about how you might react to something. But I don't know what's affecting you or your mood today. I don't know what's motivating you in any given day. So we tried to incorporate a little bit of that uncertainty in there to kind of putting a heavy emphasis on that based on our belief that this fear and uncertainty is really [00:47:00] eating away at people. So how do we not take advantage of that? But how do we how do we put that on a pedestal so that we're it's obvious that we're trying to take care of our people?

Peter Koch: [00:47:11] Let's stop right here with part one of my conversation with Jason Beam, director of Environmental, Health, Safety and Risk Management for CCB right here in Westbrook, Maine. In part two, we will continue with Jason around lessons learned managing COVID 19 on a commercial construction site. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you get notice when part two drops. The MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast is written, hosted and produced by me, Peter Koch, with production and coordination assistance from Rod Stanley. If you'd like to hear more about a particular topic on our podcast, email me at [email protected]. Also check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/Podcast where you can find additional information and our entire podcast archive. So while you're there, sign up for our Safety [00:48:00] Net blog so that you never miss any of our articles and safety news updates. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you took a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes, or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, then thanks, because it really helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing this show with a business associate friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.

Tire Servicing Safety is often overlooked unless it's your full-time job. Hazards from lifting and repositioning a heavy tire in an awkward position or being struck by a falling or exploding tire are all common exposures for workers serving tires in the shop or in the field. In the conclusion of this two-part Tire Safety episode with Andy Wood, MEMIC's Forest Products Programs Manager, we dive deeper into preventing tire-related injuries, and how we can keep ourselves safe when handling, changing, or servicing a tire.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Koch, manager of Digital Technology for Lost Control and safety management consultant with MEMIC. This is part two of our tire safety episode with Andy Wood, Manager of Forest Products Safety Services. Andy brings many years of professional experience dealing with hand and mechanical logging operations and servicing his own equipment when he worked in the industry. In part one of this podcast, we address the regulations how more than just big rig service centers are covered by these regs, and then began to discuss the different injuries that can be caused when servicing tires. In part two we will roll into more injury causes and then different controls. And as only Andy can, he draws from his personal experience to give us great perspective around why these are sometimes hidden or overlooked hazards. So let's pick up where we left [00:01:00] off.

Andy Wood: [00:01:03] So let's move along from our frequent injuries. We talked about some struck by injuries. We've talked about manual material handling. But let's talk about some more severe injuries. And we're growing from the back and shoulder and wrist injury or from the crushing injury that happens from a tire falling on someone. But really, when we get into a tire exploding, we're getting into ballistic type of injuries. So let's talk some more about those and what kinds of injuries come out of a tire exploding and what might cause the tire to fail catastrophically.

Andy Wood: [00:01:37] Yeah, you mentioned the ballistics. I'll just preface this by saying an injury I get quite frequently. If a tire blows up for whatever reason, I'm usually going to get a claim of ringing in the ears or the concussive force has blown out the eardrums. So even if a person doesn't get hit with anything or physically damaged, just the concussive force of the pressure in the immediate area is going to blow out his eardrums [00:02:00] or cause that ringing, which sometimes the ringing will just go away in a few days if things if it wasn't too bad but it could certainly be much worse. The tires when they blow out, those are the serious injuries. We've had people struck by the tires itself, struck by the part of the tire that gets shredded, struck by the tire cage when it goes screaming across the floor and the garage. I mentioned the concussive force, pretty, pretty blunt trauma, pretty, pretty serious injuries. A couple causes, I guess weak spots where they're going to fail. First one is the bead rim failure. So that's a question of when the tire usually during re inflation, because that's when a person is going to be right there. The bead of the tire goes over, either rips or it goes over the edge of the of the edge of the tire. So this is where the rim charts come in. You've got to make sure even if you put a new tire on a new rim, you can miscalculate. And the rim charts would tell you that they're not compatible, but [00:03:00] by looking at them, you can't tell the difference. So you've got to have RIM charts to make sure that you're matching, whether it's a single piece or multi piece wheel, that all the components and the tire are all compatible. The bead will be damaged frequently in operation and it can be damaged when it's dismounted and remounted. So the bead inspection is really important to make sure the beat of the tire is still in good condition when it goes back on the rim. Now the other thing is that the rim where the bead seats can be damaged as well. I don't believe this was as common a problem with the steel rims that folks always used to run, like on a on a truck tire, a tractor trailer type tire on road. They've switched to a lot of aluminum tires. We're starting to do that in the woods as well. And what we're finding is with the severe conditions that we have in the woods, you know, the logging roads aren't level, they're not paved. A lot of times you're rolling your tires, you're going around the corner and the weight is shifting to the inside tire. So the beat of the tire actually chafes on the rim and wears into the aluminum rim. So [00:04:00] the rims are getting deformed so that you can put a brand new tire back on a used rim. And even though it matches based on the charts, the rim charts, the rim has been damaged bad enough that the tire during inflation will blow right over it. And that's one that was probably one of the at one year a couple of years ago, the biggest injury I had was from a bead rim failure. And what happened was they were putting a new tire back on a used rim. They were re inflating it and the tire blew over the rim. No one got hit with anything physically other than the force, the air and the mechanic that was standing right in front of it was blown right across the garage into the next bay. You got wedged underneath the drive train or the rear axle of a truck that was in the next bay. And it was every part of his body I think was damaged. He had both shoulders needed to be operated on knees just from the force of him being blown backwards, hyperextended his knees in the opposite direction. You had dental surgery, he had [00:05:00] cuts and bruises, and it just went on and on. He would go through one surgery. He would recover from a little while. He'd go to light duty for a little while, and then he'd go have another surgery. So in that case, it was just a question of they make these little rim gauge rim flange gauges. When the tire is off, you just hold it up there and see how much wear the rim has, to see if it's safe to reuse.

Andy Wood: [00:05:21] They looked at the tire or they looked at the wheel afterwards and determined, you know, the rim was worn out. It really couldn't be used again. And when they put it together, it seemed okay until they inflated it and it came right off. So the bead rim is one failure point. Another one that we hear often is what's called the zipper failure or the zipper rupture. And that's usually in the sidewall and the upper portion of the sidewall close to the tread. And again, it's usually during re inflation, it's going to result from a tire that has been either overloaded or run soft. And when someone goes to reinflate it, what happens is when the tire [00:06:00] is overloaded or runs. Soft. It flexes the sidewalls beyond the designed parameters, and it causes the steel belts in the sidewall to flex. If you took a wire and bent it in the same spot several times, eventually break right there. Same things happening in the sidewall when they get squatted from too much weight or from being underinflated, one or two strands of that metal cord may break in there. And then when you reinflate it, the casing itself can't hold the pressure. And there's a weak spot where those one or two chords, the casing will start to expand between those and it'll pop the chord on the next side and the cord or the next side and the next chord down. And that's why you hear that pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And people call it a zipper failure because it sounds like you're opening a zipper and it'll just the entire sidewall will just open wide up and it release all that air at one time. So if the tire if you get the air in the face, that's bad, that may blow you across the room. Or if the tire is against the harder surface, it may propel a tire across the garage floor. [00:07:00] There's a guideline, it's called the 80% rule, which really is intended for just this situation. If you check a tire and it is lower than 80% of what its running capacity is, what it's generally designed to be run at. So if you're less than 80% of that, the tire should be removed and treated as a flat repair. In other words, the tire should be dismounted from the rim, should be inspected inside and out, put back in a tire cage and inflated there because there's just no way to know whether damage occurred or not without that close inspection. And we just had one of those on a logging truck. A person was had a loaded truck, got to the mill, noticed the soft tire, went to reinflate it, and the tire blew in the process. So the injury there again was just the concussive force. It was a ringing in his ear and damage to his eardrums.

Peter Koch: [00:07:50] Wow. So it's a good rule, that 80% rule. I hadn't thought of it that way, but if you've got less than 80% of what the capacity is or what it's supposed to be inflated [00:08:00] to, then you've got to treat it like there's been some damage someplace because under normal conditions, the tire shouldn't lose that much tire pressure. So if you're just running from wherever you're landing is bring in logs to the yard or bringing logs to the mill or bringing logs to wherever. It shouldn't lose that much. So identifying it, especially if you've done your inspection prior to work that day and all the tires were properly inflated. You get someplace and it's 80% less or it's less than 80% of its capacity or inflation. Treat it like it's been damaged. Just don't try to reinflate it because you're putting more pressure than the vessel can handle or potentially put more pressure than the vessel can handle.

Andy Wood: [00:08:43] And in theory, the tires have all been in the pre-trip you know, the tires have all been checked that morning. So that's all air you've lost that day. So, yeah, you're right. That's a lot to lose in a few hours or even several hours of service.

Peter Koch: [00:08:55] And that's a good point. You know, in theory and we both talk [00:09:00] about that as it's a given that it should be done. But I don't know if everybody's doing that every time. And I imagine, like the greater the potential for failure, the bigger the truck, the bigger the tire, the heavier the load that you're going to be checking those. But even with even if you're running a work truck, you know, a three quarter ton or a full ton truck and you're using it for plowing or your hauling landscape material from point A to point B if you haven't done your PRE-TRIP inspection and inspected your tires, making sure that they're all properly inflated before you start. When you get someplace and you notice a soft tire, you have no idea. Was it soft before you left? Was it soft from the night before? Was it soft between the point where you loaded it and you got to where you noticed it so you don't really know. So that information of what were what's what is the condition of the vehicle, condition of the tires before you start is a very important [00:10:00] thing to have a piece of information that you need to have in order to make a good decision later on down the road, if you notice something that's not functional for you. Excellent. So let's talk a little bit about, I don't know, maybe some you talked about a cage for re inflation and we talked about servicing some of these tires. You're going to treat it like it's a flat. So you get a tire that you notice is soft and you're going to have to bring it in for servicing. So the person that's servicing it is going to get this tire. It's not completely deflated. It's still got 80% of it's pressure inside of it. There's injuries that happen because you're treating a tire or you're dealing with the tire before you deflate it. So can you talk a little bit about that, maybe some of the injuries that might happen that way? And what are some of the recommendations to deal with a partially inflated tire, something that doesn't pass that 80% rule?

Andy Wood: [00:10:57] Right. The standard is pretty clear on that. And [00:11:00] you will see this repeated. Over and over and over in the TIA training or the in the OSHA standard that any one of those things you notice out about a tire that it's been damaged or run slack or before you're going to service it or do anything to it, you're going to remove the valves, then you're going to deflate by removal of valves. Then taking the valve stem completely out is the only way you're going to ensure that all the air gets out of it. You have a tire that's run soft and people say, well, that's, that's leaking anyways. There's not much pressure in there and they'll go and try and service it and it'll be a lot more pressure than they expected. Actually, I had that happen to a on a forklift at a sawmill. They had a tire that was going flat and several days they would just air it up and use it and air it up and use it. And finally they got the time to take it off. And there's in one bolt circle, there was two sets of nuts. There was there were big nuts and little nuts. So they took I can't remember which one was which, but they took one set of nuts off, say it was the big nuts. They took all the big nuts off [00:12:00] and they couldn't get the wheel off the hub. So what are they going to do next? Well, they'll go to the little nuts. When they took the little nuts off, they just took two or three of them off and the tire exploded. And what had happened was the it was a two piece rim and one set of nuts held the two pieces of the rim together and the other set of the nuts tell the whole assembly on the hub of the forklift. So when they couldn't get the rim off, they went to the other ones and they were actually unbolting the two sections of tire. And even though the tire was flat or considered flat under the weight of the forklift, there was enough pressure in there to still blow the tire and damage the rim, you know, deform the rim and damage the tire. And the person got hit in the leg. It wasn't a terribly big injury, but certainly there's a lot of there is a huge force there when that energy is released all at once. So, yeah, the first thing you're going to do under any of those conditions, remove the valve core and let it deflate itself.

Peter Koch: [00:12:58] Yeah and that you said that's part of the standard when you're [00:13:00] servicing.

Andy Wood: [00:13:00] That is written standard repeatedly.

Peter Koch: [00:13:02] Yeah, right on. And something that if you're not if you don't if you've never read the standard or you're not a professional tire technician, a service technician, you may not have known it might be something that you've been taught before by someone that has mentored you before, but know that that's part of the standard has got to be part of something that that gets done every time a tire is going to be deflated and removed from the rim. So deflate it, remove the valve core for sure. So we've been kind of talking we've mentioned this term a few times around here, tire, cage, you know, some shops will have a tire cage, some shops won't have a tire cage. Some people won't know what a tire cage is. Or some people will tell you that, yeah, they don't service tires, so they don't need a tire cage. But you know, like if we think about our curiosity when we go to the shop and we're not just looking at the injury stats all the time and talking about some of the manual material handling. We're [00:14:00] we're looking around the shop and we're going to ask some questions. And there's been some pretty interesting answers that I know I've had not about tires, but and I know you've had about tires and tire cages when you've gone to talk to some of your service guys. So as we start talking about tire cages, tell me a little bit about some of the different shops that you might have worked with and their and their answers. When you ask them about do they service tires or do they use a tire cage?

Andy Wood: [00:14:25] Most of these blow out incidents occur during the reinflation, for whatever reason, with mismatched or damaged tires or whatever. So there's some specific guidelines that go along with the reinflation process. And I think because of the, you know, you should have a tire gauge that's specified in the OSHA standard. You're going to have three things. You're going to have a tire cage, you can chain the tires. But I have never found anyone to chain of tire. You're supposed to have three chains around the rim and the tire assembly when it's being inflated. I've never seen anyone do that. So basically you're going to have a tire cage, [00:15:00] you're going to have a clip on Chuck with an adequate length of hose, and you're going to have a pressure regulator in line to set the pressure for the tire. So a lot of folks will say, you know, we just we don't bother with tires. And if you think about it, it's probably not the best use of your mechanic's time to be changing tires when tire shops are set up just to do that. But everybody's going to end up in a pinch and they're not going to have a spare and they're going to need someone to break down a tire and remount it and repair it right on the spot. So, yeah, it's interesting. Everyone up front says, you know, no, we don't do that. But in the reality they do quite a bit of it. And certainly we've had injuries to prove that I was in one shop and I asked the guy about the tires, how do you serve as tires? And he said, you know, no tires in my garage. I don't I tell those guys I don't want those things are too dangerous for us to deal with. If they want to do a tire, they have to do it out in the yard somewhere. I'm not going to have those things in my garage. So I said, Oh, well, that's good, I guess. [00:16:00] So we talked. We walked around. Garage. And, you know, he started opening up a little before we finished. He pointed up to the ceiling and it was a metal building and it had the metal girders and it had a metal roof on the inside. And there was a big place where the girder had been deformed and the roof had a big gash in it. And he says, You see that up there? He said a skitter tire went right up. That roof was probably 25 feet off the ground.

Peter Koch: [00:16:24] Wow.

Andy Wood: [00:16:25] And he said someone was inflating a Skitter tire on the ground. They had it laid right flat on the floor, on the cement floor, and they had a zipper rupture on the floor side. Of course, it exhausted right onto the cement, which is a great place for you to get that.

Peter Koch: [00:16:41] Physics again, right?

Andy Wood: [00:16:42] Yeah. Yeah. Physics to the thrust from the solid surface. And that tire went right up to the ceiling. And then he said after that, he said, that's when I made the rule. No more tires in the garage. So certainly and we've had a lot of tires and laying the tires on the floor is one that's got us repeatedly. We [00:17:00] have a colleague that mentioned that had a person just filling up a passenger car tire and the tire zipper failed on the on the down side. So the tire was catapulted into the air and it took him right across the forehead because he was leaning right over the tire and it fractured his skull. And then that one again went through to put a hole in the sheetrock ceiling in that garage. I had another person who was, again, tire was laying on the floor in the garage and they were leaning over with a non clip on truck. So you had to stand there and hold it and it was shot into the air. A zipper failure in the sidewall shot the and broke both of his forearms. So that's one we've seen. We've seen again and again. So the standard would be that first that nobody's in the trajectory. So the trajectory of the tire is if you have if the tire is standing upright and you stand with your back right to it, you put your arms out in front of you and just swing them to a 45 degree on either side. Looking forward, that would be the trajectory. [00:18:00] So as the rim goes out, that's where the tire, if there's any explosion, mostly that's where it's going to go. So there's supposed to be no one in that trajectory. The tire is supposed to be in a cage. That clip on Chuck allows you to once you clip it on, to get out of the trajectory. Otherwise, you have to stand in the trajectory zone to hold the truck on to reinflate it. So you put the clip on, Chuck. You've got a hose long enough for you to step back out of the way and the regulator is on the side. So then you can if the tire is rated for 80, you can put the regulator up to 80. Or if the tire is a truck tire, you need 110. You set the regulator for 110. The shot pressure. This is another problem we've run. You know, bigger garages are running shop pressures of 150 or 200 psi. If you can't regulate that down to the 80 or 100 or 110 at the tire, should have you easy, easily overinflated if you're not right there watching it. So the clip on Chuck gets you out of the way. The regulator lets you set it for whatever the tire is. So [00:19:00] that's kind of the standard guideline for doing that. And they do make smaller tire cages that are portable. And I know the tire people have those in the field if they have to service the tire in the field. But you can go on YouTube and you can Google exploding tires. And it is amazing how much energy. In fact, I found one that if you have an 11, 11 by 20 tire truck tire, 14 ply truck tire at 100 psi, if that were to zipper fail in the sidewall, it can it can lift a £3,000 car 21 feet into the air. Wow. Okay. So that's a that's a that's a truck. That would be a small tractor trailer tire. A 20 inch would be a big pickup tire or a small tractor trailer tire. 3,000 pounds is about the your average. Yep. 21 feet in the air. That's a lot of that's a lot of force. It's a lot of energy.

Peter Koch: [00:19:56] A lot of and people don't think about it like 110 pounds of pressure. That's not [00:20:00] doesn't seem to be a lot of pressure. But when you think about the amount of cubic inches of air that it's in, the tire that's released at 110 pounds all at once, that's a substantial amount of force. It's not just a little pinprick that 110 pounds is coming out of it. It's a substantial amount of force, especially when it is going to be pushed against a solid surface like asphalt or concrete or the hard ground. So yeah, a lot more force than we think. I didn't realize 3,000 pounds, 20, 21 feet in the air. That's crazy.

Andy Wood: [00:20:34] That's a long ways.

Peter Koch: [00:20:36] That's a long ways.

Andy Wood: [00:20:37] That's the family car skyrocketed it right up to the Ridgeline house.

Peter Koch: [00:20:41] No doubt.

Peter Koch: [00:20:42] The standard to avoid those solid surfaces, the standard says that the tire cage cannot be mounted with a solid surface within one foot of it for just that reason, to give that air a chance to dissipate a little when you lay the tire in the ground and it ruptures on the on the bottom side or into the cement, [00:21:00] that's great for surface for thrust.

Peter Koch: [00:21:02] Right. And now there's also some requirements about how you secure that tire cage as well. Correct.

Andy Wood: [00:21:08] There are holes in the bottom of the tire cage in the base. And most people thought that was to be bolted down. So it didn't move across the room because I had a situation where one the tire cage, the tire blew in the cage and of course, blew off center and started the tire cage spinning in a circle. And it went right across the floor of the garage and people thought it should be secured. Actually, if you read the directions on most of the tire cages, they're going to say, do not secure them, because that's one more way that they dissipate that energy by moving. And the other thing is, if you bolt that down, unless you had one inch bolts into cement, it's just going to shear them and become more projectiles. So most of the tire cages, instructions for installation, you know, no solid surfaces around it, nothing on it. Don't hang out or anything. Person's [00:22:00] not supposed to be leaning against it and don't secure it. Put it in an area where it should be allowed because it is going to deform substantially if a tire blows up in it.

Peter Koch: [00:22:09] All right.

Andy Wood: [00:22:09] That's the way it absorbs the energy by deforming.

Peter Koch: [00:22:12] Yeah. So really it's there to absorb the energy. It's not going to keep it in one place, but it's trying to limit the amount of damage that the tire can do in the open space of the shop.

Andy Wood: [00:22:22] And it's going to minimize the projectiles that come off of it. Hopefully, the tire will all stay together.

Peter Koch: [00:22:27] Okay. So let's just think about those preventative pieces again. So, you know, we started at the beginning, we talked about the correct personal protective equipment. So safety glasses hearing protection steel toes, if you need all that. But then if you're going to reinflate tire cage appropriately positioned clip on Chuck with an adequate hose length. So you're not going to be in the way in case it does fail and then the remote pressure regulator so I can fill it and I don't have to stand right there. And again, all of those all of the requirements are [00:23:00] based on injuries and repetitive injuries that have happened in the past. And you just spoke about a few of them that have occurred over just the few years that you've had experience with it. But if you go back in the history of servicing tires, there's hundreds of thousands of injuries that have that have occurred, I'm sure, at the reinflation stage that some of them will probably never even know about if you get back far enough in the history of automotive.

Peter Koch: [00:23:28] Let's take a quick break. Insurance is more than premiums and claims. It's also prevention and consultation to prevent harm from happening in the first place, to help injured workers get help fast MEMIC policyholders, have free and unlimited access to 24 seven injury triage and telehealth specialists. Policyholders can speak directly with a registered nurse within minutes of an incident which helps reduce overall medical costs and helps with faster claims processing. [00:24:00] Importantly, we found that 24 seven injury triage services can reduce claims for some policyholders by more than half. To find out more, go to MEMIC.com and then search, triage or telehealth. Now let's get back to today's episode.

Andy Wood: [00:24:19] Just the stories that I've been told since I was been aware of the tire hazards. I always ask the questions in the stories that I hear, you know, that some did or didn't or didn't generate injuries. That's like, wow, that's going on way more than we would think out there.

Peter Koch: [00:24:32] Yeah, it definitely is. Definitely is. And that's one of the pieces, like we said at the beginning of the podcast, like, you know, hopefully if you've thought that this has never happened in your shop before, we'll go back and have some conversations with people who've been there maybe longer than you have or have been dealing with tires for quite a long time. And I'll bet you there's at least one story in the history of your shop or history of your facility where [00:25:00] something has gone wrong and they've probably made some changes about how they deal with it to address that particular historical event. The problem becomes once that person leaves, or once you get comfortable with the process again, then you get back to just dealing with it like it truly isn't a hazard and that tire is almost that sleeping hazard. We don't think about it as a vessel pressure vessel, but that's really what it is. You put that much air into anything and there's certainly the potential for something to explode. And, you know, rubber and steel are it's not as strong as your as, say, like a steel a steel pressure vessel that you might have on a railcar or something like that. There's certainly the potential higher potential for it to fail. So think about it as a pressure vessel. Think about it as has the having the potential to truly kill you or someone around you. [00:26:00] So let's move from there. We've talked about the frequency of injuries. We've talked about the severity of injuries and what causes those types of injuries. Let's talk about some of the injuries that might happen actually on the road. So you've got some information about wheel failures on road wheel failures or actually some other challenges that we might have trying to manage a tire, whether it's still on the vehicle or the vehicle's actually traveling.

Andy Wood: [00:26:28] Sure. And the injuries and the liability shifts dramatically when the truck goes back on the road. If your mechanics or your operators are working on tires, it's really an injury to them. When the truck goes back on the road, it's an injury to the motoring public. And not only do you have to deal with the injuries to other people, but the liability becomes catastrophic. Managing that when you have one of your trucks fail, some component of one of your trucks fail on the highway. And maybe because it wasn't properly serviced, it can be, and again, just on the very limited [00:27:00] not servicing the bearings or the axle at all, but just you took a tire off and you put another one on. So you might have a failure of the wheel, failure of the tire lug nuts studs or the hub assembly. That's all. Just by changing the tire that you're exposed to that much. And one of the common scenarios is what they call a wheel off event. And that's when one of those failures of any one or multiple of those components allows it a wheel, or it could be a dual wheel to separate from the vehicle. If you're lucky, that wheel goes off the side of the road into the ditch, goes into the tree somewhere. If you're not so lucky, it could go down the highway and hit another vehicle or a pedestrian or anything else, do serious property damage or personal injury or and we had one of those just recently, about two years ago, we had a kind of a worst case scenario. We had a wheel off situation. Dual wheels came off, a log truck [00:28:00] rolled down the side of the road, hit the guardrail, and then went right down the inside of the guardrail. And there was a state trooper had stopped a vehicle, was actually assisting a motor vehicle, and he was standing between the car and the guardrail. And the tire came right down the side of the guardrail and struck him, you know, pretty much a dead hit and killed him. So that's kind of the worst case scenario. What can happen when you have a wheel off scenario. The good thing of that is it has stimulated a lot of awareness and a lot of training and a lot of questions. And in the state of Maine, at least, we've had a lot of training. In fact, I've been to a couple of trainings just recently, trainings just about tires in general and actually trainings about what exactly happened in that situation. And the interesting thing was there was no catastrophic failure when the tire came off that truck. They did an autopsy on the truck, the autopsy on the tire in the hub. And they actually the whole truck as the commercial motor vehicle folks would do. And I guess what I call death [00:29:00] by a thousand cuts, you know, it was just little teeny things that had been overlooked and clearly had been overlooked for a while, things that the mechanic should have picked up on, things that the truck driver should have picked up on doing his pre trips and his post trips. You know, it wasn't like there was some major thing that had just failed. It was like all these little things combined and it just kept getting worse and worse until finally the wheels came off. And like I said, that was about as bad as it can get. So a few things that are going to cause those failures from the trucks on the road. Heat is a problem. So heat is used in the garage. Sometimes if you have lug nuts that are frozen on, they're going to use heat to take those off. Going back to the standard, if you put a torch to a lug nut, the studs and the lug nuts all have to be changed. Sometimes you'll take all the lug nuts off and you can't get the hub that excuse me, you can't get the wheel off the hub because it's seized on there again. Sometimes you'll take the torch and heat up the rim to separate it from the hub. You put the torch on the rim, [00:30:00] it's out of service. That has to be changed. So heat there is going to be a is going to cause not necessarily a failure right then, but failure later on when the truck is in service. If you run a underinflated tire or an overloaded tire, it's going to generate heat in the tire as well.

Andy Wood: [00:30:16] That will cause the tire to fail. And what generally happens is the different components, the bonding of the different components, the different plies in the casings, the sidewalls, where they're all glued together. Something will separate at the bonding point when the tire gets too hot. So heat's a problem that has to be managed anywhere in the system. And the other thing that's a problem is lubrication. Some tires go on. It's right in the standards. It's right in the manufacturer's recommendations. The studs are not lubricated. They have to be put on dry. And other studs like the hub pilot had stubs. The there they have to piece knots, they have to be lubricated and the stud has to have a lubrication as well in order to create enough clamping force to hold [00:31:00] the tire on. So it's. Very specific on how that lubrication works. Some are lubricated and some are lubricated. Same thing when you're servicing the tire. If you're mounting and dismounting tires on rim, you need to lubricate the bead. In this case, they're always lubricated. If you don't use lubrication or you don't use the right lubrication, you're going to damage the bead. And that's not going to be noticeable until you fully inflate the tire and then maybe have it loaded. It's traveling at a high rate of speed which generates heat anyways, or it's heavily loaded, which generates heats. So those are going to be failures that maybe not be noticed until the vehicle is back on the road.

Peter Koch: [00:31:38] Early, early on in my career, having worked in some older garages for different vehicles and some old school mechanics, watching them actually trying to manage frozen on lug nuts for some vehicles. Seen them used torches before and had never I hadn't realized that that was part of the standard that you can't use heat to do that. So if heat's [00:32:00] not to be used to remove the lug nut, then what are some options that you have out there?

Andy Wood: [00:32:06] Well, it's interesting. After the wheel off incident, the fatal wheel off incident in Maine, our local trucking organization did a training and they had a guy from the TIA certified to do tire training and they had the officers who did the accident investigation, not talking about the injury, but just talking about tires in general. How many guys use a torch to heat up the lug nuts? And the room was full of mechanics and truck drivers and they all put up their hand and the guy said, you realize, you know, when you do that, that lug nut and that nut is out of service and everyone no, never heard of that before. So yeah, there's a lot of people that wouldn't have been aware of that. They did talk about several interesting tools that make your job a little bit easier and you don't damage so much equipment. One was the nut buddy, which was kind of an interesting unit. It's got a ratchet on one end and you slide it over the lug nut. It's got a brace that comes out and leans against the next lug nut. So it's stationary and you put a [00:33:00] handle on the end and you just turn it. It works kind of like a planetary gear. Folks know how that works, and it just creates a gear ratio of 58 to 1. So just with a small handle, you can apply incredible amounts of force to back that off there. And you don't you don't ruin any equipment in the process.

Peter Koch: [00:33:16] So I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to say, are you going to use a longer cheater bar on your ratchet arm?

Andy Wood: [00:33:22] Yeah, I know.

Peter Koch: [00:33:23] I'm glad I'm glad there's a better solution than that.

Andy Wood: [00:33:25] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was one option that worked really well.

Peter Koch: [00:33:31] Also, we were talking before, too, there are some things that you can do to prevent some of this stuff, or at least identify if there's any particular problems before you put the vehicle back on the road. And I think there's a an acronym for that, which is RIST correct RIST. So what does that stand for and how would you use that?

Andy Wood: [00:33:51] Yeah, a very simple process that came out of the training and is in the manuals as well. RIST, R I S T. The first one is [00:34:00] remove all debris. I inspect all components S snug nuts in a star pattern and t talk to manufacturers recommendations. So one of the biggest problems with going back to I remove all debris that's there's going to be some rust on the hub or on the on the wheel. And if you put that back together with rust in there, it doesn't allow the lug nuts to create enough clamping force to hold the tire in place. So a lot of folks think that the lug nuts, the studs hold the tire in place, but the studs and the lug nuts only create clamping force. And what holds it on there is the clamping force against the hub. So if you if there's any rust or any debris in there, you can't get that clamping force. So cleaning that meeting surface is really important. The inside of the rim and the outside of the hub inspecting all components. I'll mention something in a second. The five and one gauge. It's important, as I mentioned, with inspecting the rim flanges to make sure they are worn, particularly [00:35:00] in the aluminum rims. But all the components need to be inspected. The nuts need to be inspected. The studs, the holes, are they are they starting to wear wobble a little wear open up a little bit. That's all going to be inspected in the process and a tool that they had. There was the five and one inspection tool and that would check the studs for diameter. So if the studs have been worn from just from age or if they've been stretched at all, they're going to change in diameter. This tool, it's just a little tool that fits in the palm of your hand. It's just a piece of metal that's drilled out in different diameters to check the diameter of the studs, to check the diameter of the nuts if they're starting to wobble on both sides, elongation of the holes in the rim and the diameters of the holes in the rim. So for one easy tool, it can check five different components and you know, you're good to go to put that stuff back together. At least that stuff is going to be very quickly within standards and it's stuff that you can't tell by looking at it. It's nothing [00:36:00] you're going to be able to tell. But this little piece of metal has got index marks on it. If you slide it in and it goes to that point, it's out of service. It's pretty, pretty simple to use. And it solves a lot of the a lot of the problems. So remove all debris, inspect the components, snug nuts in a star pattern. That's just a question of, you know, we all heard that I think driver's ed, we learned that in high school. You know, you work your way around the rim in a certain pattern depending on how many lug nuts you have to make sure that the stress on the rim is being distributed evenly and that it's not getting distorted or warped at all. When you tighten one side all the way down and then go to the other side, sometimes it'll get bowed. So you do that evenly. And then the last one is the torque. And of course a lot of your places are going to use a wrench. They're going to use a air impact or impact wrench to put it back on. And the common thinking is that more is better in this case. More is not better. It's going to distort the wheels and it's going to stretch the studs. And if you stretch the studs, the lugs, the nuts after that won't stay tight in [00:37:00] the standard that says you need to use a torque wrench. Once you snug up the star pattern, you're going to go round with a torque wrench and set the nuts, the lug nuts to the torque that's recommended for that application.

Andy Wood: [00:37:10] You can't just wind it up. You can't just put the long cheater bar on there. You know, I made a tool when I first started in the woods. I made a tool that I could just designed for changing the lug nuts on a skitter. And I thought I was pretty smart. I had a custom made and you can put a big long bar on in that and I could snap lug nuts off like nobody. And I thought, Jeez, you think it would just tighten down and stop, but you get enough leverage and you can break those right off. Of course, just before they break off, you've deformed them to the point where they're not going to hold and you might not know that. So the torque wrench and there's different styles of torque wrenches that can be used by the torque wrench is supposed to be used to tension those lug nuts back on there. And interesting. I don't know how many people have ever calibrated their torque wrench. Most people buy them and just use them, but they need to be calibrated, occasionally [00:38:00] recalibrated, I should say, to make sure they're still within the specs.

Peter Koch: [00:38:04] Yeah, those are all good points and I think there's quite a few people, if they've ever changed their own tires that have probably used a cheater bar, probably not have used a torque wrench to do that. So they can, they can probably sympathize with you and, and think about some of those potentials. And, and you think about it, if you're running an aluminum rim and you are driving that that lug nut onto that stud as hard as you can and refund on it, that aluminum is brittle, it's going to break. And even if you're running just a steel rim, it's going to potentially deform. And then once you start loosening that wheel on the hub, you're going to start having problems around the rest of the components that are holding that tire or the wheel onto the car. So it really just starts the cascade of effects that could cause catastrophic problems later on down the road and possibly turn [00:39:00] into a tragic situation that you referred to there where the trooper got killed in Maine here. And I did. I ended up Googling while we were talking just a wheel off fatalities. And there's a number of fatalities that have occurred both in the United States and in Canada, where a wheel has come off from poor maintenance or from a component failure, and it's killed either someone in a car because it's hit the car and the car went off the road or it killed a pedestrian or someone who is on the side of the road.

Peter Koch: [00:39:33] So definitely something I never thought about until we started having this conversation. But it's definitely out there and the things like I've said it numerous times outside of this podcast, the tires are the thing that makes your vehicle perform. It's just like having good shoes on your feet. You can't get good traction if you don't have good tread and you can't have good balance if you don't have good support in in those shoes and the same thing on your [00:40:00] on your car. The treads got to be good. The tires got to be well maintained and the serviceable condition and it has to be affixed properly, correctly and securely to the vehicle in order for it all to work. And then it's got to be the right tire for the right application. Your shoe might do everything that you want it to do, except when you want to try to play a sport with it, you're going to end up having some sort of failure. The same thing is going to happen with a tire that might not be designed for the load that you're trying to carry or the speeds that you're trying to travel. So we're gosh, I can't believe it. We've been here now for quite a while. We're right towards the end of our podcast here. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should have asked you, Andy, that you want to talk a little bit more around tire safety?

Andy Wood: [00:40:46] Yeah, I think we've covered a lot. We've covered a lot of ground. Again, we're just trying to peak people's interest to maybe look a little further. I think for me, I had certainly been around heavy equipment, tires, been around trucks, and certainly [00:41:00] I have. I think I have the record in my at least in my family, five flat tires in one week. When I worked in the woods, you know, the gravel roads were just really tough on tires. So I spent a lot of time changing tires on equipment and on my pickups. It wasn't until just recently I went to some of this tire training and it was so simple and it makes so much sense. And yet it's nothing you're going to think of on your own until someone sits you down and says, This is the way this works. And you're thinking, Oh my gosh, I've done that all my life. I never realized that that's actually the way that's the way it works and that's the way it should be repaired. And so with relatively little effort, you can make yourself a much better technician as far as servicing, even if you're just doing occasional. And even when I change the tires on my pickup now I have a little different procedure and a little different process. So I would encourage folks to reach out there and look at some of the training that's available and get yourself or your mechanics or your technicians, or even if it's just operators [00:42:00] changing their own tires, get them to it as well.

Peter Koch: [00:42:02] I think that's a great point. And so if I were to start looking for more information about servicing tires or maybe to try to get some of that training, where could I look? What are where? Some places that our listeners can find more information about surfacing tires or maybe find some of that training that you're talking about.

Andy Wood: [00:42:20] Yeah. So the certainly the OSHA spells out what has to be in some of the training. But as far as getting the training, the TIA the Tire Industry Association, I would say that's the biggest trade group and they have the most training and it looks to me like it's pretty good. They have certified instructors that will go around to different parts of the country. Or you can go to, I think in the Midwest somewhere they are you can go to their facility and take the tire training, you know, and some of it's a combination of classroom training and hands on, you go to the tire shop, you have to do everything that you've talked about. The US Tire Manufacturers Association is another big group. So I would say those two would be places I'd start to get actual training by [00:43:00] myself.

Peter Koch: [00:43:01] Nice. And we'll, we'll put those links and some other links in the show notes for the podcast. So if you're listening out there and you do want to find more information, you can go to either of those two organizations, Google those organizations, or you can check out the show notes in the podcast and you can head out there and see what's available for you. So, Andy, thank you very much for joining us today and for sharing your expertise or really, truly appreciate having this conversation with you.

Andy Wood: [00:43:28] Sure, Pete. Thanks for the opportunity. And like I said in the beginning, when you start looking at these things and you kind of recount all the different situations you've been in, you realize, wow, there's a lot more things. I never really put all the dots together and think there's a lot more exposures than I thought I had out there.

Peter Koch: [00:43:43] Yeah, for sure. I know one of the things that I'm going to just take away personally, like just managing my own personal fleet of vehicles, whether it be lawnmower or tractor or the cars that personally drive. And one of the things that I'm going to do is clip on Chuck and not stand anywhere [00:44:00] next to that tire when I'm inflating it. Because no matter how good I'm going to be at looking at it, I might not notice that something's going to fail. So that's one of the things that I can do personally that might keep me a little bit safer. And I'm certainly going to impart that information to my teenage drivers for sure. Thanks again to everyone for joining us today. This is part two of our two part podcast on Tire Safety with Andy Wood, Manager of our Forest Products Safety Services. Here at MEMIC, check out part one.

Tire Servicing Safety is often overlooked unless it's your full-time job. Hazards from lifting and repositioning a heavy tire in an awkward position or being struck by a falling or exploding tire are all common exposures for workers serving tires in the shop or in the field. In part-one of this two-part episode, I speak with Andy Wood, MEMIC's Forest Products Programs Manager about the hazards of servicing tires, how to control them, and what standards apply.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter Koch, manager of digital technology for loss control and safety management consultant here at MEMIC. It's hard to believe that we've just celebrated our two year anniversary in November. We've covered topics from ergonomics and chainsaws to lockout tag out and fall protection. At first, you might think there's only a limited number of things that you can talk about regarding workplace safety. Well, that's just not the case. The number of situations, equipment and tools in any given workplace that can contribute to an injury is enormous. Add to that human behavior and the number of safety related topics. Well, it's near limitless. I think the hard part is to make the topic interesting and relevant and well, that's what we strive to do here on the podcast. And it's really an offshoot of what drives our lost control team here at MEMIC anyway. We have a team of experts that have worked in the industries that they serve, and I've had the [00:01:00] honor of working with each of them, and I know that they all share a passion for safety and assisting our policyholders with the workplace safety equation. Beyond the traditional look at the losses and focusing only on the reactive data, they like to get involved because it's where the worker meets, the hazard is where the injury occurs. And more often than not, this can help spot exposures before they cause injury or identify situations that can thwart even the best laid exposure control plan. That lost control person's curiosity for why injuries happen can extend beyond the workplace. So, for example, a few weeks back, I was getting the tractor ready for winter plowing and the last thing to service. We're checking and inflating the tires. As I was adding air while I noticed that the front tires were starting to show wear and signs of age, and I'd probably need to replace them soon. So it got me wondering how much air pressure would it take to blow one of these up? And how much force would the exploding tire create? [00:02:00] That got me thinking even more about how the tires got serviced. What happens when I drop it off at the service center? What do they do? What are the exposures? We never really think about it unless you're doing the servicing yourself. And it turns out that there are way more injuries to service technicians while working on tires that you would think to help us look more closely at the hazards of servicing tires is Andy Wood, manager of Forest Product Safety Services here at MEMIC. Before coming to MEMIC in the mid 1990s, Andy worked full time as a logger in the main North Woods and Canada. He's an instructor for the game of logging and currently manages the safety programs for MEMICs forest products policyholders beyond working with our policyholders. Andy brings many years of professional experience dealing with hand and mechanical logging operations and servicing his own equipment. This episode is going to be a two-parter because as Andy and I were preparing for recording and then discussing the various exposures when servicing [00:03:00] tires, we realized that there was way more than we could pack into one episode. So in part one, we will address the regulations how more than just big rig service centers are covered by the regs? And then we'll begin to discuss the different injuries that can be caused when servicing the tires. So let's just dig right in. Andy, welcome back to the podcast.

Andy Wood: [00:03:21] Well, thanks Pete. It's great to be back. Our topic is a little different this time, but I do. Having done a little research to prepare for this, I realize I have a lot of a lot of history with this particular topic, both personally and with my consulting here at MEMIC in the forest products industry.

Peter Koch: [00:03:38] Yeah, and it's really not that far jump from like dealing with forest products, logging and chainsaws to tire safety. And we were talking last week as we were kind of mulling through the parts of the podcast and found that you do have quite a history with tire safety, not just here at MEMIC, but from your own past experience. And I think we'll get into some of [00:04:00] those. We'll get into some of those interesting stories as we go. So before we jump into the whole thing, let's set the stage. Who does this topic apply to? So like, who should be listening to this particular podcast?

Andy Wood: [00:04:14] First and foremost, I guess it's not really designed for folks in the tire industry tires that folks that work in a tire shop because the people I deal with are all occasional people that service tires occasionally. And the standards, we'll talk a little bit about the OSHA, the federal motor carrier guidelines. But you don't have to be actually servicing the tire as far as mounting or dismounting if you just take a tire off a piece of equipment and put another one back on. You've performed a service that falls under these guidelines, the OSHA guidelines, for example, very specific guidelines in there and how that works when you do that. Again, you don't have to be doing brakes or bearings on the or taking the hub off or mounting and dismounting tires. Just changing that tire puts you into these standards.

Peter Koch: [00:04:59] All right. So that that [00:05:00] really broadens the scope. So it's not just the guy in the service shop, but it might be the guy out in the woods who's taken the tire off his skitter or somebody on the side of the road actually managing a flat tire who's working for a company. So it's not just the service guys, it's anybody who is doing anything with a tire can fall under the regulations that we'll talk about here in a bit, right?

Andy Wood: [00:05:25] Sure. And in fact, all the comments I'm going to make today don't come out of the tire industry. They're all for the folks with the small shops mechanics that do multiple things and servicing tires is just one of the things they do occasionally.

Peter Koch: [00:05:39] Well, and I think that's a good lead into this next comment, and we have to add a disclaimer here. So this is a podcast around the hazards for servicing tires and where some of the regulations are, how they affect you. Some of the challenges that you might find surprising or exposures that you might find surprising [00:06:00] when servicing a tire. We're not giving advice on how to service tires. It's not a practice or we're not providing information about what you should be doing to service a tire. No. No. Processes and procedures. And if you have any questions about those things or even some of the legality of it, you go to the federal DOT or your state regulations to find out what you're responsible for and what those procedures should be. And as with anything, if you are dealing with a particular hazard, you're dealing with a particular tire or a particular vehicle as an occasional servicing agent, then you should go back to the manufacturer to find out what the particular requirements are. So this is not about requirements, but this is to help us to identify where the hazards are. What are some of the controls and what regulations would be covering the occasional user?

Andy Wood: [00:06:53] Yeah, it's all really about peaking the interest of the listener. If anything, we talk about you've seen in your shop or, you know, your folks are doing. Hopefully, [00:07:00] it'll incentivize you to go and ask them more questions and get the details as well. I would note that I'm going to mention some of the guidelines that we use here in Maine. Every state can have different guidelines. I mean, the federal DOT and the OSHA standards are similar in that you can follow the federal program or you can have state run programs. So there's going to be little variation. So as far as the legal part, you need to go to your specific jurisdiction and find out what the specifics are.

Peter Koch: [00:07:28] Good. And you bring up a great point. You know, if you're a safety person listening to this or you're an owner, or even if you're working in a shop with a bunch of guys who manage or serviced the tires occasionally for the vehicles that come into your, your shop or your business. This hopefully will pique some of your interests. Like, I saw this happen in the shop and really, you should go back and look more into that because all the stories that we're going to talk about today have happened. And the injuries that we're going to talk about today [00:08:00] have occurred because of these exposures. So there's some real pieces there, even though it may not yet have happened to you in your shop. It will happen sometime in the future if that behavior or practice is allowed to continue. And that's just statistically probable that what we have seen within the safety industry that the more frequently something happens, the more potential there is for that to become a more significant event or a significant injury. So with that, like we let's talk about some of the hazards Andy. So if we look at what the hazards are for working with tires, you break it up into a couple of different segments so that we can look at it a little more thoroughly. So why don't you talk to me a little bit about what the hazards of working with tires?

Andy Wood: [00:08:47] Sure. As, of course, safety consultants and people that look at a lot of data. We're constantly trying to break down things into groups so we can, you know, manage them collectively and be a little more efficient. So one of the first breakdowns we often do [00:09:00] is frequency and severity. So I have I'm going to have several comments on the frequency, what injuries we see the most when handling tires and servicing tires. Then we're going to move on to the severity of the injuries that don't happen nearly as often and but are much more significant and more potential to be fatal. And then the last section, I'm going to comment on some of the on road issues for the DOT and federal motor carrier. And you have the risks there of not so much injuries to the person. This is when the truck is back on the road, the tires back on the vehicle and the truck is back on the road and something goes wrong with the tire. The rim assembly. Not so much a hazard to your employee driving the truck, but could create a serious hazard for someone else on the road. And when that happens, it creates a serious not just the injuries to the people or potential property damage, but the huge liability that you take on by having a truck that may have been out of service put back on the road. So kind of those three categories, I'm going to look a little more in-depth at right [00:10:00] on.

Peter Koch: [00:10:00] So let's just categorize like what type of injuries would end up being included in the frequency side, right? So we have the frequencies driving injuries, we have the severity driving injuries. So if we look at the type of injuries that are happening on the frequency side, what are those?

Andy Wood: [00:10:18] Yeah, the frequency is predominantly what we call comes from manual material handling, and it's pretty much a lot of soft tissue injuries, so that could be for my guys. It's back shoulders and arms, just handling the tires. They weigh a lot. We'll get into that a little more in a bit. You know, how are you going to handle that? How are you going to minimize the stress on your body during that process? So for frequency, it's soft tissue injuries.

Peter Koch: [00:10:42] Right on. And I bet you that some of our listeners, even if you've only ever managed your own tires, can see that happening because, like you said, tires and rim assemblies, even on passenger vehicles can get pretty heavy. So when we start getting to some more of the industrial tires that are out there, the weight goes up substantially [00:11:00] and you do it all the time or just a few times you're in the wrong position that awkward ergonomics could place you in a position for injury. So let's talk about severity too. And even though you can get some pretty severe injuries out of manual material handling or lifting and pushing and pulling, the majority of our severe injuries happen from a particular type of hazard. So let us know a little bit about that type of hazard.

Andy Wood: [00:11:25] Yeah. So for servicing the tires, what I put in a category of severity was the tire explosions, and we'll get into a little bit of detail about how tires come apart. And I use the term explosion for a bunch of different failures of the tire room assembly, and that's a catastrophic release of huge amounts of energy. And the injuries are multiple body parts. Injuries are usually trauma. There's usually going to be flying debris or just a concussive force of the air release is going to catapult people across the room if even if they only get hit by air. So those are usually larger, blunt force trauma, multiple body part type [00:12:00] injuries.

Peter Koch: [00:12:01] All right. Well, like you said, we're going to get we're going to go into detail in each of those bits and pieces and look at what's causing material handling injuries, what's substantially causing the severe injuries, the struck by tire explosion injuries. But let's first look at overall, since we know that there is injuries that are happening out there and there's more than we think there are regulations out there that cover servicing tires. So give us a little bit about what some of those regs are and some of those standard setting organizations. And maybe we can even talk some about some of the training that might be required or not required for people servicing tires.

Andy Wood: [00:12:40] I would start as with most of the things we do. You can look into the OSHA standards. Nineteen ten, one seventy seven. That's a general industry standard that I'm looking at. That applies to most of the people that I work with. The one seventy seven is specific to servicing tires and rims. So there's some specifics in there how that's managed. [00:13:00] There's some training requirements in there that's specified exactly what kind of equipment you need to service those tires when you're re inflating, when you're inflating. So OSHA's a big driver there, the federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or DOT people just use the term DOT that kind of synonymously with federal motor carrier. They have guidelines as well on how things are going to be serviced. There's a couple parts there on forty nine CFR, there's section three ninety three that's really about it's called parts and accessories necessary for safe operation. And that's really the part that of the whole commercial truck driving standard that focuses on the physical condition of the vehicle. So when you see people on these roadside inspections, they're pulling out that three ninety three the troopers are pulling out their three ninety three standard and looking at the equipment, and then there is three ninety six, which covers inspection of those vehicles. And that's everything from the pre trip inspection [00:14:00] from the driver, the post trip inspection, the regular inspections and then the annual inspections from a certified service center all the way up through. So how that's going to be monitored along the way with the inspection process is covered as well. The Tire Industry Association probably the most, the largest, I would say most active group of industry group that works with the tire manufacturers. They put out a lot of training, and so they don't have the regulatory authority to specifically tell you what to do. But because as far as what you do for training for your own employees, OSHA generally gives you the option to develop in-house training program to meet those needs. But most people that I work with again, they're not tire shops, so they don't want to take the time and effort to develop a whole standard for their guys. So they want to say, just give us a program, we'll send our guys to it. We'll call that good. So the Tire Industry Association is the group that they have all types of tire training, from entry level [00:15:00] tire training to multi piece greater tires off road tires, quite a variety of different depending on what your exposures are, and that can actually be incorporated by reference into an OSHA standard kind of like some information from an owner's manual could be as well. But I think the greatest tire regulatory. Or I should say, standard setting organization. If you don't fall under federal motor carrier guidelines because you're not a commercial motor vehicle operator, maybe you don't fall under the OSHA standards either. Somehow the laws of physics are going to apply to you regardless. So I'm not talking about, you know, at the quantum theory level, but just basic properties of matter and energy and the relationships between them. You know, if you take a tire that's rated for one hundred and ten pounds and it's been worn at all and you put one hundred and twenty pounds in it, things are not going to end well for you. So physics are going to be the overriding factor, you know, regardless of the legal standards that are set out there for you.

Peter Koch: [00:15:57] I think that's a really good point, because if someone jumps into [00:16:00] that OSHA 1910 177, you're going to find that excludes passenger and light truck tires for out of that particular piece. But. Even though if that's what you're touching, right, as part of your quote unquote shop, or even if you're just doing it at home, the laws of physics still apply. I mean, that's not an OSHA thing. So that's a really great thing to bring up all of these things that we're going to be talking about the hazards, the exposures and some of the controls that we're going to see here apply regardless. Just because of the laws of physics, you put more pressure than the vessel can handle the vessels going to deform, and it's probably going to fracture at some point in time. And the more pressure you put in it, the more force is going to be resultant from that explosion. So there's a lot, a lot to it. So I think that's a good point. So regardless, if you're thinking about checking out right now because none of this applies to you. Well stick around for a little bit longer because really, physics [00:17:00] is what's going to drive some of the causes of the injuries. And even on the manual material handling, it's all about physics. How far away, how much you can lift the mechanics of your body and how you grab on to something to pick something up. So stick around. We'll talk a little bit more about these going forward.

Andy Wood: [00:17:17] Why is that often comes up in my industry, of course, coming from the tree felling part or handling heavy machine components as people say, you know, gravity wins.

Peter Koch: [00:17:27] All the time.

Andy Wood: [00:17:27] It's all about physics, and gravity in the end is always going to win. So yeah, that's something we want to keep in mind.

Peter Koch: [00:17:32] Yeah, for sure. Now, something that anybody can do, regardless of what they're addressing or working on or servicing is have some personal protective equipment and we're jumping here first because it's ubiquitous. It should be something that you use regardless of what you're doing and when you're doing it, because there are certain hazards that we are just not able to manage well, whether you're [00:18:00] in the field or in the shop, there's just certain potential problems that PPE will help you. It's not the end all, be all. And as we know, it's really not what we want to rely on, but we should be using it. So if I'm going to service tires or be working in a shop that servicing tires, what PPE is required for me to work on those tires or maybe even work around those tires?

Andy Wood: [00:18:22] Yeah, it's pretty basic stuff, I would say. You know, tires are pretty heavy. You're going to be wearing steel toes, sturdy footwear with all the pressure and some of the power tools. You're going to be using eye protection gloves, of course, from the hand injuries, if you're working in a shop where there are compressors running and impact wrenches, you might add hearing protection to that because that level of noise might put you over the action level for the hearing conservation standard and OSHA's guidelines. And if you're depending again where you're working, if you're working in the field on a construction site, say where there's a lot of other equipment, high vis clothing would be part of the equation. [00:19:00] If you're working roadside, of course there's a D.O.T. standard you're creating work zone high vis clothing would be would be an issue there as well. So, yeah, those should be kind of default settings. You don't you don't always have all the equipment and all the stuff in the field that you want, but this stuff should be a given all the time.

Peter Koch: [00:19:16] Cool. Good. So good to know. So things to think about if you're going to be working on that steel toes, eye protection, gloves, hearing protection and high vis from a situational standpoint. So let's think about this from like, how do I know what I'm going to be getting into? So in order to know what exposures you have, you need to know a little bit about the tire itself, what type it is, maybe how much pressure it is and lots of that is given to us actually on the tire. So in order I think to know what we're exposed to, we need to know a little bit about the information on the tire. So let's talk a little bit about that. There's a ton of information on the stats on the sidewall. [00:20:00] So talk us if you can talk us through what information is on the sidewall, what might be important to someone who's servicing the tire and how that information might influence some of their decisions.

Andy Wood: [00:20:13] Sure. Well, of course, the training that's required is going to give you a lot of that information on what you should be able to what you should expect, but you're absolutely right. The specifics for any given tire are spelled right out on the sidewalk. DOT has a very specific sequence of numbers and letters on the sidewall information that has to be there. I think the last upgrade was two thousand. They specified just what need to be in there and how would it need to be formatted so anyone could get that information off the tire? It's going to be a little different depending on the tires that you have, whether you're looking at pick up tires or medium duty tires or heavy duty tires or off road heavy equipment tires. But some of the things that are going to be on there, the tire class will be listed. So on the low end of the spectrum, as far as tires designations that most people will [00:21:00] be familiar with would be the P that's for a passenger vehicle. LP is going to be your light trucks. They do have an ST that would be special trailer tires. MC is motorcycles, so there's a whole series there. And then the commercial motor vehicles, the bigger. Like the tractor trailers, they have designations for steer, axle tires for drive axle tires, trailer tires. Again, the separate designation. And if you're running the super singles, which a lot of the tractor trailers have, and that's when the dual tires traditionally on trailers or the drive axles of a tractor trailer are being replaced by larger single tires. Again, that's a separate designation, so that's the tire class that's on there. The tire size is spelled out on there. We're going to talk about that a little more, but that's something you need, obviously, to make sure that matches up with the rims or the wheels that you have. And there are some small differences there that little nuances that are very important. When you pressurize the tire, you'll need to know about when you're servicing the [00:22:00] tires on the commercial motor vehicles. We'll talk a little bit about the RIM charts in a minute that's specified in the OSHA standard, and you need the information off the dad off the sidewall, the tire to compare to the rims that you have, whether you have single piece rims or multi piece rims to make sure that they're all compatible and it's easy to mix and match those improperly so the tire size information, maximum inflation pressure is on the side of the tire, and this is one that gets really confusing. Having had some huge issues with tires failing on vans, the 15 passenger vans back quite a few years ago, they were inherently unstable and the tires weren't really large enough for the for the weight they were carrying. I found that it was people really struggle to understand that, and the pressure that's noted on the sidewall is the maximum inflation pressure for that tire when it's carrying the maximum load. So the tire pressure has to match the load. The manufacturer of the tire [00:23:00] has no idea what you're going to do with the tire. You might put it on a steer axle or a drive axle. You might put it on an SUV where all the tires are the same. You could put it in a dual tire application where it's different. You could use it on a trailer. They don't really know that. So on the lighter vehicles, you know, the half one, three quarter ton pickups going up through to the commercials, there will be a placard on the door or on the door jam and that'll in the manufacturer of the vehicle knows what the intended use of that vehicle is, and they've specified the tires that go on that. So if you're working within those design parameters, the manufacturer of the vehicle is going to give you the best indication of tire pressure. That's it's going to be on the placard on the door on the end of the door or on the door jam. And it's usually going to be lower than the maximum inflation pressure that's on the tire. And it has a huge difference in the way the tire is going to perform and how it's going to wear as well. If you take the, for example, I've had a, you know, I've [00:24:00] run into that myself and that we just drive half-ton pickups. So there are light duty vehicles. But because of the gravel roads that we travel on, we upgrade the tires to 10 ply tires. The maximum inflation pressure is 80 pounds on those. When I ran when I had a work truck, I ran the maximum deflation pressure was 80 pounds. I ran 80 pounds on this company truck. It's usually just me riding around in the truck with not a lot of weight in there. If you run 80 pounds, I can tell you what happens. The middle of your tread goes bald real quick, because only the center of the tire is being worn. The inflation pressure is so high and there's no weight to counteract that that it wears the tire un-uniformly. So you lose a lot of tire life out of that. So again, you've got to match the tire pressure to the weight that it's beat the application and the weight that it's being carried. So moving on from inflation pressure, the maximum load and the load index is on there, and that's a code that just relates. They have a number that correlates to the weight of the tire is designed to carry. You just need [00:25:00] to look up the chart for the manufacturer to tell what it's rated for. A speed rating is on the tire. Now here in the U.S., we don't really worry too much about the speed rating most people's vehicles unless you bought a high performance. Car, a Lamborghini or a Porsche or something where it's advertised to be able to go one hundred and fifty miles an hour. They might have put speed rated tires on it. For most applications, our speeds are, you know, sixty five seventy miles an hour. The speed rating is not so much. I understand that in Germany, on the autobahn, where there's an unlimited speed limit, speed limit, speed rated tires are important to have. There is one example, though one situation, and I kind of I ran into this myself as well. On the lower end of the spectrum, there are tires that are not rated that have no speed rating and are rated just for off road use. Not off road equipment. But I was looking for some tires for a trailer that I have on the farm and I got looking around for something, you know, it's very occasional use and I didn't want to spend a lot of money and it was on one of the agricultural [00:26:00] websites and they had these really nice tires and I thought, Well, they look pretty good and they're not that expensive. But when you look close, says not for a highway UCS on them, so they're rated for agricultural equipment, something around, you know, something you use in a gravel pit around the farm, but nothing that's rated for highway speed, so that as long as you don't get those into your into your service fleet, you should be all set with the speed rating. The data tire manufacturer is on there and you. Interesting. You mentioned your tires on your tractor are getting a little old, something that's fairly new and I just came across it researching for this, this discussion. We're having the month and year of the manufacturer of the tire is on there. And what the manufacturers are now recommending is that at five years, the tire be dismounted and be inspected inside and outside.

Peter Koch: [00:26:48] Really.

Andy Wood: [00:26:50] If you have a tire that last 10 years, it needs to be discarded regardless of the condition that it's in. So I have a plow truck at home and has almost no miles on [00:27:00] it per year, and but the tires are going to outdated 10 years, whether it's got good tread or not. So that's something that's relatively new, that's come along.

Peter Koch: [00:27:08] Yeah. And if you think about that too, it kind of makes sense. Like the longer the tire just sits out in the sunlight and sits out in the elements, the hot and cold, just from being outside or even inside, you're going to have air changes in temperature changes. The rubber is not going to last forever. So you figure as it degrades, it's going to have less opportunity or less capacity for the intended pressures and for the intended usage where that's going to happen to it. So it kind of makes sense to me that that that's there and certainly something that I'm going to have to budget for next winter.

Andy Wood: [00:27:41] It's kind of like your hard hat. It's got a manufacture date and the manufacturer gives you a maximum life. And at that point, they say it's no longer safe to work. I did have a situation with this. It was kind of a surprising one. I had a it was one of my company vehicles. It's on a three year lease. I got to the I was at the end of the lease. [00:28:00] It was lagging. The new vehicle was lagging a little bit. It was coming a little late. So I had to get the vehicle inspected one last time. And in three years the tires would not pass inspection, not for lack of tread, but for weather checks in the sidewall. And I've never had a tire failed for weather checks in the three year time frame. But you know, just the conditions that worked under or maybe it was an older tire when I got it, or maybe it wasn't that good of a tire, I don't know. But the conditions were such that even though I had tread left, it was out of service.

Peter Koch: [00:28:31] Interesting. It does seem that there's a combination of things that would cause a lot of that to or a tire to be taken out of service. But and I know we had it's something we talked about just prior to the podcast was it would have been interesting to know when those tires were manufactured. So if the age of the tire had been a large component of the weather checking that it had occurred, like are they truly at the end of that 10 year service life? Or is there something else going on with it? Because is it brand? [00:29:00] Is it? Is it cost? Is there something else or like you said, is it actually just use that's causing some of that check to happen? So interesting? And just I think the point there is to know that there are a lot of things that can go into causing that tire to fail. One of those is going to be age. So just because it's never happened before in the tires, been on the vehicle for quite a while doesn't mean that you can just forget about it as something that you need to check in on all the time.

Andy Wood: [00:29:26] Another thing is the manufacturer's plant code. So, you know, some people are getting sensitive about buying American, which is a good thing, but most people have no idea where their products come from. You can look on the sidewall, you can take two letters off the sidewall and you can you can go on the net or the website from that, and you can figure out what plant that was produced in, whether it was in the United States or Canada or Japan or wherever they came from. So again, there's a lot of information on there. Some tires will have more than that, but there's a lot of information to get you started with, for sure.

Peter Koch: [00:29:59] Good. So a good [00:30:00] place to go right on the tire itself to find out what kind of tire you have, what information you can get off of it and how will that or how can that change how you manage or address or service the tire itself?

Peter Koch: [00:30:14] Let's take a quick break. Did you know that MEMIC offers online instructor led OSHA 10 hour outreach courses for both the general industry and construction standards free to our policyholders? Each online 10 hour outreach class is a two day video conference training that provides instruction on key sections of OSHA's standards, instructing attendees about how to identify hazards and effectively implement appropriate safety procedures in the workplace. This program is a must for supervisors, lead persons and hourly employees. Our instructors have spent decades in the construction and general industry fields and are authorized by the OSHA Training Institute to conduct these safety outreach training [00:31:00] programs. Seats are limited, so check out the schedule and register today at www.MEMIC.com/WorkplaceSafety Not a MEMIC policyholder yet well reach out to your independent insurance agent and ask about us or go to www.MEMIC.com To learn more. Now let's get back to today's episode.

Peter Koch: [00:31:25] So let's start talking through more of the injuries and all, we broke it out before where you've got manual material handling or overexertion injuries that are causing frequent injuries out there. So let's start with that. Let's talk about the frequency type of injuries, the manual material handling injuries and what's causing them and what are some of the controls that we see out there?

Andy Wood: [00:31:50] An interesting thing that I do again, trying to manage my statistics a little bit to figure out where I want to put my effort at the close of every year. I get a chance, maybe in January [00:32:00] or February, and I'll pull all my injuries from the previous year and I'll break them down into the categories that you know, the exertions and the slips, trips and falls. And if there's enough information in the injury report, I try and figure out what was the cause of that overexertion injury. So overexertion is one of my top three. I think every year since I've been doing this, so I pull out the overexertion injuries. I read the description of the injury and I try to say, Well, what? What was the person doing when that happened? And an interesting thing. Sometimes I can go to one particular product, one component, and it's in that year that one thing generated more soft tissue injuries than anything else. And several years it's been tires handling tires. So handling hydraulic cylinders is another big one that I have. But handling tires in several years, that one item and it has generated the majority of the soft tissue injuries. And it's been everything from pickup tires all the way up to light duty, medium duty [00:33:00] on road truck tires and then off road heavy equipment tires as well. So it can be it can cover the full range.

Peter Koch: [00:33:07] So interestingly, I think everyone has a sort of a grasp of how heavy a tire is like especially a passenger rated tire or even a light truck tire. But there's some pretty vast difference, even in a tire that would be on your normal half ton or three quarter ton pickup truck. There can be some substantial weight differences even there, so let's talk a little bit about how heavy the tires are. And I'm just going to preface this with if we talk to Al Brown, who's our director of ergonomics here at MEMIC, he's going to tell you that the NIOSH lifting equation is going to say that you can only lift like 50 pounds and 50 pounds is if it has handles and you're only can lift it between like mid thigh and mid chest. And you can't twist with it and you can't walk with it. And if you do any of those things, the weight starts [00:34:00] to go down. So we start looking at what a safe weight is to lift. They're talking like thirty five pounds. There are very few tires that are going to weigh thirty five pounds, and if you get into that, you're going to kind of get into a four wheeler tire or a lawn tractor tire. But anything that's going to be on a vehicle is going to weigh way more than that. So really, we need to be paying attention when we're picking up these tires all the time and knowing how heavy something is can clue you in to how much caution you should be taking. So talk to me a little bit about the difference between maybe the weight of a normal light truck tire that you might find on like a Ford F-150 right out of the showroom versus something that you might be putting on your truck to drive off road or to be putting equipment into to go into the forest with.

Andy Wood: [00:34:50] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the thing is the size of the tire, the physical size or the statistical size, you know, by the numbers, if you don't [00:35:00] read a little more into it, that in itself is not going to give you an indication. You mentioned the F-150, that's a good example. Your average F-150, actually, the almost all year half ton pickups today are specced out as passenger vehicles. A lot of them come with the P tires on them, which is a passenger tire intended to carry, you know, for adults and some garbage on the way to the dump, but not a whole lot more than that. That's why we have to upgrade to the LT tires and go to a heavier and heavier ply construction. I went out to the garage, I took the scale from the bathroom and went out and weighed my tires. Eighty four pounds for one tire. That's the tire and rim assembly. I went online, specced out a 16 inch tire with a standard load, which would be the low end of the spectrum. And then I specced it out as a 10 ply tire, which is what we run with a heavy rim. So if you take the lighter version of that, the standard load and you put it on a lightweight aluminum rim, you can have a tire and rim assembly for a 16 inch tire that weighs forty four pounds.

Peter Koch: [00:35:58] Wow.

Andy Wood: [00:35:59] On the other end of the spectrum, [00:36:00] the same tire, same 16 inch tires backed at a ten ply rating and a standard steel rim is one hundred and twenty eight pounds.

Peter Koch: [00:36:08] Holy cow! Three times.

Andy Wood: [00:36:10] From the same size tire from forty four pounds up to a one hundred and twenty eight pounds, depending on how its the components and how you've put it together. Well, that's huge. And that's one of the reasons that the vehicle, the tires that go on the cars. The light trucks, they have three quarter ton pickups don't get a lot of respect, but one hundred and twenty eight pounds can go back to Al Brown's equation. The only thing you can do with a one hundred twenty eight pound tire is roll it across the shop floor. That's about it. You don't want to

Peter Koch: [00:36:37] Get a hernia, right?

Andy Wood: [00:36:38] So, yeah, yeah.

Peter Koch: [00:36:40] Yeah, no doubt. So that's pretty interesting when if you're thinking about it, if that's what you're used to like that maybe there's 40 to 60 pounds, right? So that's my range of that light truck tie or the passenger tire that I'm used to managing. And then all of a sudden you have a different vehicle that comes in or you've ordered these new tires [00:37:00] they got put on at the shop. You've never touched them before. Now you've got them out in the woods or you got them out in the road and one goes flat on and you've got to change it out. You're going from something that you're used to of 40 to 60 pounds and you're going to double or triple that weight. So without knowing that you're going to go into that thinking, I can manage that, where really you probably can't or really you shouldn't, regardless of if you can or you can't.

Andy Wood: [00:37:26] And one of the problems is not just the sheer weight of the tire, you know, going back to Al's handles good posture and all that. That's a best case scenario. But if the depending on the configuration of the truck that it's going on, or if it's a trailer, it's a very awkward posture, sometimes getting a tire back on the studs. So it's not just the weight of it, it's the awkward posture that you're getting going in that's going to cause problems for your back or your shoulders or your arms. The small vehicle or I say small, you know, the pickup tires 16 18. Even the 20 inch tires [00:38:00] don't get a lot of respect, but the bigger tires. The tires on the tractor trailer are still such that a lot of people are still going to try and handle them, which is going to put, you know again at a greater risk the off road tires for the front end loaders and the skitters and all the off road equipment, you know, nobody tries. When we have the discussion, everyone will say, Well, we, you know, we're not going to handle those anyways because you can't begin to. But even if you have a piece of equipment to lift the tire up, we have a lot of injuries when people are trying to wrestle the tires to get the studs, to line up with the holes on the rim. If you've got a disk type rim and you're just. So even if asked for it stood up and it's right in front of the tire, you still have to get the holes line up. We have a lot of injuries then, and in the case that you have chains on the tires, there's a lot of the off road equipment does. Sometimes the tires will come back with the chains on them and sometimes they'll be off. So you've got to manage the chains which are going to put add quite a few hundred pounds. Some of the tires have ballast [00:39:00] in them. You know, they're weighted with liquids inside. That's just going to increase the tire, the weight of the tire that much more.

Peter Koch: [00:39:07] So what are the options out there for lifting or moving or positioning a tire? What are some of the different options that a shop has or an individual has that that can help them manage the size because you can't change the weight or the size of the tire if that's what you need for the vehicle and that's what you need for the job that you're doing. There's got to be something else out there. You just can't hire a stronger person to lift the tire up. There's going to be something else that you have to do. So what are the options?

Andy Wood: [00:39:35] Sure, in a shop, you do have several options that work pretty good. They do make tire dollies just designed, very convenient. You do have to keep your shop floor clean so you can roll them around, take the lug nuts off slide and right up on there, they'll lift the weight up. They'll pull them directly off the studs. That works pretty well. Some handle are designed for single tires. If you're you, run your tractor trailers, [00:40:00] they have those that are designed to take the wheels off at the same time. You know, those are really slick if you're in a garage. The thing about most of these, I find that if you look at a mechanic who's worked with that particular accessory for a while, he's so smooth. You look at that and it's kind of jaw dropping. You say, Well, that is awesome. You try that yourself and you'll be swearing. You'll think this is terrible. I could do it. I could do it easier just by manually lifting it. But you have to work on your technique a little bit. These things actually work really well. And one of the one of the things that has come out of this, truckers are running the aluminum rims now, so they're putting aluminum rims, which is obviously a softer steel on a on a hardened steel stud on the hub. And the force of the tires sliding on and off over the steel stud wears off the whole of the aluminum rim. So some of the tires have been taken out of service over time because every time you take it in, you've got a dusting of aluminum filings on there. When you're just wrestling the tire [00:41:00] on and forcing it up and down and trying to get it to line up. You get a lot more of that. If you use the tire dollar, you can get it to the right level and you can just slide it effortlessly right straight on and then right straight back out if you're taking it off with no damage to the aluminum rims at all. So that was one of kind of the byproducts, the benefits that until you've done that a while, you don't really realize, you know, might come your way. So in the shop, there's certainly the wheel dollies are good just for lifting a tire that's laying flat on the floor just to get it stood upright so you can roll it along if you have to lift, reach down and lift the whole tire up by the tread. That's again, going to be kind of a tough lift. They have tire bars, some of the tire irons that you put the bar right down in the hole where the stud would come through and you just bend it in. It stands the tire right up. So now all you have to do with your getting mechanical advantage there, so you stand the tire up in no effort and you just roll it along. Then all you have to do is worry about getting it in the back of a vehicle. When you get to that point for the bigger tires, there's going to [00:42:00] be a variety of things. What I have in the garages that I work with, most folks will have a forklift. Sometimes there's a small tractor, a four wheel drive tractor. Skid steers are often available. They do have forks for those, but they do have a really slick attachment. That's it's a tire dolly that goes on the front end of a skid steer or on the front end of a small tractor. It goes on the equipment, quick attach. It's got rollers on it. It looks like forks, but they're rollers. So you come up, you pick up the tire. It's adjustable in and out. When you lift the tire up and you hold it, line it up with your piece of heavy equipment. It'll roll right around so you can line up the stud, the holes that are on the rim with the studs on the hub without having to restless just effortlessly and again. When you see that happen and you see those mechanics putting that on smoothly and efficiently, and they don't even sweat or grunt. And once you're thinking, wow, that's the way to go right there. Unfortunately, the lift aids that we have with the lighter trucks, [00:43:00] the tires, you know, 16, 18, 20 inch tires on the pickups, most people don't bother with them. That's why they're they continue to cause injuries because they still do away a lot, but they don't get the respect at the bigger tires do. And then in the field, what I see where I'm changing tires on a back road, on a logging landing or on a construction site, the newer mechanics, trucks, service trucks all have small cranes on them, which can be used to carry a tire. There's other equipment you might have a front end loader, you might have a Limber or a log loader that you can use to lift up a tire that's certainly going to help. The one thing I would caution against is that you have a secure system to hold the tire up. So one of the things that commonly happens is there's always a chain or a lifting sling around. Usually you run the lifting sling right through the open center of the tire and you choke it and you set that up where it needs to go. But you can't work it on the studs because the sling gets in the way or the chain gets in the way. They actually make tire slings [00:44:00] that go around the outside diameter of the tire so that they're not. They don't get in the way of the hub or when you're trying to line the studs. Up and they have straps that go across so that the tires can't fall out of them. So and we have had a few situations where tires have fallen out of the slings that they were being lifted with. So getting either making or buying a tire sling, whether it's chain or synthetic, that's made for a tire and can be used all the way on and doesn't interfere with the bolt pattern is really the investment worth having.

Peter Koch: [00:44:31] You mentioned that the bigger tires weigh a lot more. We didn't really talk about how much those weigh. We talked about the light truck tires going to like one hundred and twenty eight pounds with the complete assembly. But when we get beyond the light truck tires, you get to some of the off road or the equipment, tires or even a ballast tire. What are we talking about for weight? Because the next injury type that we're going to talk about are struck by, and when you think about a tire falling over like, you know, a passenger tire fallen on [00:45:00] on your foot. Yeah, it may hurt a little bit. If it catches you wrong, it might sprain your ankle or you might break a toe if you've got sneakers on which you shouldn't, should have. That's why we're talking about steel toed shoes. But when you get into some of the larger tires well over a hundred pounds, what are we? What are we talking about there for weight?

Andy Wood: [00:45:19] Yeah. Yeah, a hundred pounds is peanuts, you know, when you get the off road tires, I picked a tire that I see frequently on a skitter thirty five point five by thirty two inch tire. The tire is going to weigh 13 hundred and eighteen pounds. The rim is going to be about five hundred and fifty pounds, so you're going to be at eighteen hundred and sixty eight pounds, so a thousand over a thousand eight hundred pounds. That's no ballast and the chains that have been removed. Wow. So when that tire falls over on you, that's as much as a small car. Eighteen hundred pounds. So that's a lot of weight.

Peter Koch: [00:45:53] Yeah, that's substantial. Do you mind telling the story when you were working in the woods because you had a situation [00:46:00] and this kind of comes in in positioning like, you know, making sure that you have the right tools with you and having a good plan. But sometimes even those plans, the best laid plans don't always work well, and I think you've got a pretty good story that sort of outlines the challenge of having a heavy tire and maybe not having it in the right position when you want it.

Andy Wood: [00:46:21] Yeah, this story ticks off every failure you know along the way that every control that was put in and, you know, both mental and physical. For me, I did. I worked in the woods and I had a scitter and I had had a flat tire during the week and had gone out and repaired the tire. They had the tire fixed and on Sunday I was back in the woods to put the spare tire off and put the regular tire back on. The challenge is when you have a tire that big, if you get it upright, you can move it around a little bit. But if it falls to the ground, you can't get it stood back up again, so you have to be very careful getting it out of the back of the truck. First, you have to find a good spot and these are just gravel roads. [00:47:00] You have to find a good spot where the scitter can be on the side of the road and you can have a place to take the one tire off and roll it out of the way and then back up your truck to unload the tire you're putting back on. Slide it out of the back of the truck, get it stood up, and then work it over to the to the hub of the scooter to put it back on. I had taken the tire off and I had moved it out of the way. I back the truck up. I stood the tire up. I was working it up to the head leaning against the studs, but I couldn't quite get the holes to line up the studs in the in the holes and the rim. So with a skitter, you work the blade in the winch alternately. So the tire was leaning against the hub and I go back to move that up a little bit down and in the process of moving that just a fraction of an inch. The tire fell over and landed on the ground. Oh, and I was I was just ugly about that and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, the tires laying flat on the ground, but how am I going to get that back upright? It took me. I bet, of course, as every self-respecting woodcutter would have. The only tool [00:48:00] is the high lift Jack. I went and got the high lift jack. I couldn't get it under the tire to get started, so I had to use a pry bar and I would put a fulcrum in there and pry it up and throw some rocks underneath it to create a little opening. And I kept working it up and up. And finally, I got the high lift under it and lifted it up a few feet. And then it was out of alignment and I had to block it. There I had I had two five gallon pails of automatic transmission fluid because I was also going to change the automatic transmission fluid. So I'd worked the tire up a little bit. I, I block it, repositioned the jack, go up a little more. I got it up high enough to get the two five gallon pails underneath it, so I thought that was a pretty good way to hold it. I jacked it up a little bit more and I finally, after it was like an hour, I got it stood up straight, got it tipped over back against the hub and again in the process of trying to line up the studs with the holes in the rim, the tire again fell over onto the ground. Only it didn't make it all the way to the ground. It landed on the two five gallon pails and it was like, just stomp it on a paper cup. Those five [00:49:00] gallon pails just blew up and the oil went flying everywhere. And now I've, you know, I'm getting pretty ugly at this point, so I've had a complete failure. I didn't secure the tire, you know, in the opposition like I should have. I've lost a lot of time, mentally I'm getting frustrated. I just lost two five gallon bales, a transmission fluid. I go over to the tire. I reached down, I grabbed the tire. I give you one mighty heave and I stand the tire up. And for just a second, I thought there I've won this time. And then I felt a little a little twinge in my back and I didn't. I didn't think a whole lot about it at the time. But as the repair went on, it kept getting worse and worse. I finished what I was doing. Obviously, I couldn't change the hydraulic the transmission fluid because I lost. You know, that was a frustrating. I hop in the truck to go back to camp. When I got back to camp, it was all I could do to stand up and get out of the pickup. So the in the effort of that awkward posture lifting that tire up, which weighed, you know, it wasn't one of those 18 hundred pound tires, [00:50:00] but it was way more than a person should have lifted. I tweaked my back and I don't know. I've had a lifetime of back issues, and I think that might have been the beginning of it right there. And it's, you know, a person who suffers with back injuries, you know, it's a lifetime condition and you just kind of dread it when it when it cycles around again. So, you know, I like I said, I had all the elements I didn't plan quite as well. Tire needs to be secured when it's in the upright position. I didn't take care of that. I got frustrated. I tried to cut a corner. All those things end up catching up with me and coming back and bite me in a big way.

Peter Koch: [00:50:31] When I hear you tell that story, I've known you for years and you're one of the most patient and forward thinking guys that I know, so you've always got a plan. All the training that we do together, whether it's chainsaw training or whether it's fall protection training, you always are two or three steps ahead in thinking of where things need to be positioned, where people need to be, how things need to work. And as I hear that story, I can just see you getting more and more and more frustrated. [00:51:00] And had I asked you at the beginning, like if I had been there when that was happening, at the beginning when you drove up to replace that tire and the transmission fluid? And I asked you, Would you ever lift this tire, Andy? You'd look right at me. Go, there's no way I'd lift that tire. There's no way I left that tire. I've got everything in place going to do it right. And I think that just the story of stop and think because you may be able to physically do it, but the consequences of you physically doing it could have life changing or life altering or some sort of challenge in your life later on. So, you know, had you not been that frustrated with all those little things going wrong, you may not have ever chosen to do that, but every little thing conspired against you that day, and I could just, you know, I can put your myself in your shoes. And probably a half an hour before that, I would have been lifting the tire and blowing my back.

Andy Wood: [00:52:00] It's [00:52:00] interesting that, you know, we always look at the physical conditions on the job site and what leads to an injury, and certainly employers try and do the same. But, you know, ultimately we come back to the mental conditions. Distraction, fatigue, anger and frustration. Those are contributing factors, I would say, in the vast majority of injuries that we see. So if you can keep your mind clear and focus to know, you can certainly do a lot better, particularly when you don't have ideal conditions for sure.

Peter Koch: [00:52:27] And you know, we talked about one particular situation that occurred to you. But if you go back into the statistics in those the injury stats that you look at every year or even beyond what we see at MEMIC, there are plenty more examples of people being injured because a tire has been unsecured and fallen over or something has happened and the person has been trapped underneath it or something's occurred. So lots of opportunities to be struck by a tire that's not secured, that's being trying to be placed [00:53:00] without the right tools. And you know, they're heavy and you're not always going to be able to catch them. And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, when that tire comes over, there's going to be some substantial injury.

Andy Wood: [00:53:12] One that we had it was it was a tire bigger than the one I had. We were actually didn't happen. This was an injury that I had in my in my employment with MEMIC that I was had to deal with. They were using a log loader to hold the tire up. I mentioned this should be secured well, the log, the grapple of a log loader is not the way you secure that. And the mechanic can't remember if was the mechanic or the operator was trying to line up the studs and the holes. And in the process, the tire was dropped and it fell over on him and it broke his pelvis. So that's a pretty big injury. When a tire, you know, that again, might not have been the 1800 pound tire, but if it was even the thousand pound tire, that's enough to break a pelvis and that's a long term injury, even if it goes well for you.

Peter Koch: [00:53:54] Yeah, very true. That person's not coming back to work anytime soon, and there's probably [00:54:00] significant challenges to mobility and other issues down the road to. It's not something that you're going to kind of quickly come back from and be 100 hundred percent in just a few weeks. Sure. We're going to stop right there. The conversation about tire safety with Andy Wood will continue in the next episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, and that's where Andy and I will cover other tire related injuries. Different ways tires fail, such as bead or rim failure. And then strategies around preventing injuries when servicing tires, so be sure to subscribe and get notified when the episode drops. So thanks again to everyone for joining us. And Today on Safety Experts podcast, we've been discussing the hazards of servicing tires with Andy Wood, manager of our Forest Product Safety Services here at MEMIC. The MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is written, hosted and produced by me, Peter Koch. If you have any questions about tire safety or I'd like to hear more about a particular topic on our podcast. Email me at [email protected]. Also, [00:55:00] check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/Podcast, where you can find more about tire safety and tire safety resources, links to other podcasts with Andy, as well as our entire podcast archive. While you're there, sign up for our safety net blog so you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you would subscribe to the podcast and then take a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, thank you because it truly helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing the show with a business associate friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.

A company's brand is its identity, and it is one of the most valued parts of your business. When brand is done right, it influences what happens inside a company as well how people on the outside perceive it. The brand becomes something that you are, not just something that you do. It is something that can influence behavior.

On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Nancy Marshall, CEO of Marshall Communications about branding and how brand can influence safety behavior at your company.

According to the National Safety Council, forklifts were the source of 79 work related fatalities and 8,140 non-fatal injuries involving days away from work in 2019 alone.

Looking back at the data the National Safety Council has, the number of non-fatal forklift related workplace injuries continues to increase every year since 2015. The top 3 causes of these injuries are Fire and explosion, Stuck by, caught between. Most of these are driven by a lack of situational awareness on the part of the operator or other workers.

On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Chris Burns, the co-founder of Midwest Fleet and Safety, a full service GPS and Safety Solutions company to help us look at a unique solution to the situational awareness problem when operating a forklift.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Hello, listeners, and welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter Koch. According to the National Safety Council, forklifts were the source of seventy nine work related injuries or fatalities, and eight thousand one hundred and forty non-fatal injuries involving days away from work in 2019. So looking back at the data that the National Safety Council has the number of non-fatal forklift related injuries or workplace injuries continues to increase from twenty fifteen. So if you go back to twenty fifteen and you go back a little bit before that, they had been declining. But in twenty fifteen they started to spike and they were jumping up by a few hundred every year. And the top three causes of those injuries are fire and explosion. So most of your fork trucks or forklifts are going to be propane, a lot of propane accidents or injuries, especially if one is going to tip over, struck by injuries and then [00:01:00] caught in between injuries. Most of these are driven by a lack of situational awareness on the part of the operator or other workers that are going to be around the operator. So if I look back at my history and I had the opportunity to operate a forklift or at least a tractor with forks on it way back when in my early work history and I think about how situational awareness played a big part in my being successful or not. It really did. And I can tell you, I didn't have a lot of huge fails, but I had a number of close calls. And one of those, and I'll remember this to this day happened when I was I had just picked up a lift. We were picking up actually lifts of hoses and I was paying attention to the other people who are in the space. And I backed up and I backed up into a pallet that had a replacement water pump for our snowmaking system. Fortunately, I didn't hit it hard enough to knock the pump over and I didn't push the pump. I didn't break the pump, but I did damage the pallet itself and the pallet of hoses [00:02:00] that were on the forks fell off as well, so didn't really have a successful day. But I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't get hurt myself. We didn't have a lot of damage, but certainly there were some issues there and I wasn't paying attention. Or at least I wasn't paying attention to the right thing. I didn't have good situational awareness before I started to move. And I bet you there's a number of people out there who are listening who have either been witnessed to a situation like that or have been in a situation like that. Or maybe you've been in a situation where you've actually had an injury. You might have been struck by someone who was operating a fork truck or unfortunately, you might have been the person who did the striking. Well, to help us look at a unique solution to that situational awareness problem, especially when you're operating forklifts or really any vehicles, is Chris Burns and among other specialties. Chris is the co-founder of Midwest fleet and Safety. There are full service GPS and safety [00:03:00] solutions company. Chris and his partner Rob founded Midwest four years ago to help fill service and communication gaps they identified in industries that they worked with. So with a team of experts that have close to 30 years of experience in the telematics and safety industries, Midwest has grown to deliver products like innovative camera systems that can be used to enhance situational awareness in any industry that uses vehicles to move material. So, Chris? Welcome to the podcast today. I appreciate having you on.

Chris Burns: [00:03:31] Thank you so much for having me. Really looking forward to the conversation today. Glad to be on. And that was a heck of an introduction. Probably better than I would have prepared for you. So I appreciate that very much.

Peter Koch: [00:03:43] Yeah, no worries. I'm excited. You know, we had a conversation a few days ago, you had reached out to me and thinking about different solutions. You were telling me about this camera system that that you have. And I really want to get talking about that and how it's been able to help with safety, quality and productivity since, [00:04:00] you know, that's really what this podcast is all about is to help people understand that there's more ideas out there than they might think about how to provide solutions. But before we jump into the camera systems, I want you to tell me a little bit about Midwest fleet and safety. You're based out of Appleton, Wisconsin, and I want you to just tell me a little bit about your history, how you got there and where you're at today.

Chris Burns: [00:04:25] Yeah. Well, thanks. It's kind of a long story. I don't think it's as interesting as other people might, but I've got a good friend of mine, Rob, who approached me about his business and his industry. And he had been working in this space for about 20 years, and he worked in the space primarily as an installer. So he owns an audio video automotive type business, and he was approached by many of the larger GPS telematics companies to do installation work because most of them, believe it or not, do not have boots on the ground. They [00:05:00] are primarily a manufacturer a seller and then they hire third party contracts to do the installation work, and so as time went on, going into twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, some of these companies, well, we'll leave names out just to be respectful. But what would happen is they would call him and say, Hey, we've got a client in Madison it's two hours away. They are going to have GPS next week. We would like we need two installers technicians to go down to the installation work and have done a one day 12 vehicles. No problem will be there. Eight a.m. So the team would show up. They drive two hours only to find out the client has not received the product from the manufacturer. And so as a business, you have to bill the very large carrier for four hours of your time multiplied by two employees. And so that would happen continuously and sometimes happen twice over the course [00:06:00] of one month. And that would then leave a customer waiting anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks. Because then you have that phone tag game of, well, the client's available next week, Monday and Thursday between eight a.m. and 10 a.m. Well, we're not available, OK, we'll call them back and find out. Tag, you're it. And then customers would then say to robber's installers, Hey, you know, this is this is painful. You know, we're not able to get the training that we want. If we have an issue, we'll call. We'll wait on hold for two hours or four hours. And you can imagine most people, whether it be a business owner or even a receptionist, do not have that kind of time or that luxury in a day. And then they were asking, Hey, can we just work with you directly? And the answer was no, because at the time we were not a GPS company, we were just an installer. And so the question became as well, could we do this? And then we did some research and found out, Well, yeah, we could. We could be a reseller [00:07:00] and we could be the company that sells the technology and the product, but also does the installation. And so moving forward, when companies would say, Yeah, we'd love to entertain the solution, but we've got a three year revolving contract. And then I had to ask, Well, what's the revolving contract? And they said, Well, you know, if we've got 10 vehicles and we add one, all 10 start over. And I thought, Wow, that's pretty tough. So your contract is started over three or four times since you started working with them and they say, yeah, the only way to get out is to buy out of the contract. And that's ten thousand dollars, we'll say. And so we saw an opportunity to not lock customers into a contract. No revolving contracts offer free and unlimited customer service, competitive pricing. And when people call, they can talk to a real person who can solve their issue real time or at least within one or two business days. And so that's how Midwest fleet and safety was [00:08:00] founded. We were just Midwest fleet solutions, but then we got to find that a lot of our customers, particularly in the construction space, we'd sit down and we talk about things like safety. And the question was, Well, we're more interested in the safety. And I said, Well, tell me more. And that that is where we learned about a year and a half ago that the majority of the businesses that we work with, yes, they would love to track their assets. That's important because you want to know where your assets are. You want to know that your people are protected and safe. But ultimately, the number one priority was that businesses large and small wanted to ensure that their people, their most important asset, is safe on the job. And so questions became as, "Well, what can you do to help us with safety? And one client had told us a story both of these clients are in the construction space had said that, you know, look, we had a couple of accidents [00:09:00] where we had some job boxes and some very expensive equipment that was either ran over or ran into that cause several thousand dollars or thousands of dollars in damage. And unfortunately, this stuff happens a lot. How do we prevent that? And so that's where my partner, Rob said, Well, you know, we do a lot of backup cameras, we do a lot of camera systems. Why don't we just put a couple of cameras on your telehandler and, you know, see how that goes? And he's like, I can basically modify or manufacture a system exclusively for you and a two camera system turn into a four camera system. And then next thing you know, safety becomes about seventy five percent of our business, and I'll go on to talk more about it. But I don't want to eat into your next question here. And so we've been doing the safety side of the business for over a year, about a year and a half, and we found ourselves really expanding into things like forklift safety [00:10:00] lights known as blue lights or red lights. Camera systems and a lot of other products in the safety space, and we've just found that as much as, yes, companies want to track their assets. Right now, number one priority is safety and safety of their employees. And from there, you know, once we have set their company up in a position where they feel like they can elevate the safety quality, then they say, Hey, we know you do telematics? Can you help us out with that too? So as a byproduct, we hope that we can earn their business in the telematics side. But it's been a lot of fun because ultimately companies value that. And I'll tell you what, we'll talk about this later. The employees value it, too, and it's been a lot more popular with staff than we imagined and even then our clients would have ever imagined.

Peter Koch: [00:10:52] Yeah, it's a pretty cool story. Like you said, we'll get into that more because there is a really interesting connection between what the [00:11:00] supervisors and how the staff see things and how that information gets back up to management and how that helps to drive some of these decisions. But I really think this is an interesting solution to that problem of situational awareness. You talked about the equipment damage. You talked about the shrinkage and losses from things maybe being dropped off the forks or, you know, you go back to the National Safety Council. Information about injuries that have occurred with forklifts and those struck by injuries are almost guaranteed when someone struck by the forklift is a situational awareness issue with either the person that's operating and or the person that's operating or working around that particular piece of equipment. So I guess let's just talk a little bit in your perspective and it has, as you see it, with the success of those camera systems. And then you had talked a little bit about the lighting systems that you have for [00:12:00] forklifts. Why is situational awareness essential? And then how did those systems really help increase situational awareness for the operator when they when they're picking something up or they're moving material?

Chris Burns: [00:12:13] Yeah, that's a great question, and I'm glad you asked that because when we talk about safety, a lot of times, whether it be in a presentation, sales calls, people look past situational awareness and they focus specifically on the safety and like, how can this increase productivity and efficiencies and stuff? But awareness is really important. People think of situational awareness is, Hey, I know what's going on around me, I know what's going on here. But that's not always the case. And you know, when you ask me about situational awareness, I thought to myself, Well, what does that mean to me? What does it mean to other people? So I googled it. And there's a really quick definition here. And it says situational awareness has been recognized as a critical yet elusive foundation [00:13:00] for success decision making across a broad range of situations, many of which involve the protection of human life property, including law enforcement, aviation, et cetera, et cetera. And then the last sentence is lacking in adequate situational awareness has been identified as one of the primary factors in accidents attributed to human error. So I give you this example, which is I live near a construction site just so happens to be about two blocks down. There's a new development with some apartment complexes going up, and it's been going on for about six months or more. And once they complete one, they got another one already in progress. So there's a lot of telehandlers and construction equipment over there. And I said to my wife the other day, I said, I don't even hear that anymore. I don't hear the backup beeping, I don't hear the trucks, I don't hear the nail guns. I just kind of tuned it out. Now, [00:14:00] put yourself in the situation of any one of those workers on the site and they hear that stuff more than I do. My wife would call it selective hearing, but their situational awareness has probably decreased because they become, let's say, numb to or callous to that sound. Now let's just say, for example, that their situational awareness is heightened. They may see what's happening or be fully aware of what's going on around them. But does that mean the operator of that telehandler is fully aware? So situational awareness is a two way street, in my opinion, the way of an operator or of someone moving or driving, whatever the case may be. So when it comes to situational awareness, you talk about these camera systems. Well, our camera systems in most cases are a four camera, sometimes a two camera system. So if you have, in this case, three hundred and sixty degree visibility [00:15:00] around you. In something that's considered to be one of the most dangerous pieces of equipment in the telehandler, and it's considered that because it has very limited visibility, as you know, well, lots of blind spots similar to a forklift, and you might be doing your best job to look around, to take your time to try to listen, but that doesn't mean people around you are doing the same. And as you know, there are a lot of trucks and equipment and people moving and your head always needs to be on a swivel. And so if you don't have the camera system, an accident can happen because there are those blind spots and you can't account for what someone else might be doing when they see that telehandler coming. And so when you have that camera system, you can have confidence sitting behind the wheel knowing that you know you're not going to have to slam on the brakes. Or if you do, at least you'll be prepared and you [00:16:00] may not have something slide off the front, you know. And so situational awareness is important. It's not something people think of, but the thing that I go back to so often is it is a two way street and you can't always account for the other person, whether that be you, the operator or the people around you. And so I think for so many reasons, having that camera system can provide so much confidence. It can reduce the amount of stress that someone's maybe putting on their neck to twist their body, to look around them. And if you have that, the byproduct is hopefully there's going to be a higher level of efficiency throughout the day in your productivity.

Peter Koch: [00:16:42] That's a great description. When I think about situational awareness around that, I think about it from the perspective of your brain needs to look at What? What's around me, and that's what the camera system helps to provide. And then I've got to figure out, so what? Like, what does it mean to me? So here's all this information. [00:17:00] And if I'm missing a piece of information, my so what's incomplete? And then it's the now what is next, right? So I have to make a decision based on that information based on how important that information is to me and what's happening around there. And it's a really great point around how that camera system can really do a good job at providing a more clear picture or a more detailed picture around the what. And then the so what and the now what, is all about operator training and what the company does to help that operator be a better, be a better operator, be a more qualitative and a more productive operator. But you can't do that unless you have the information and, like you said, tons of blind spots. And if you're focused on the people around you or the other hazards that are around you, you might miss something that's in that blind spot that you're the only way that you're going to see. That is if you get off the teller hand or look around you, you've got someone who can back you up or you have a system that allows you to see 360 degrees [00:18:00] around your machine, which is pretty sweet.

Chris Burns: [00:18:02] It's the same in golf. You know you're a golfer. You admitted that and then you're on the golf course and you're a slicer and you see water on the right and you're focusing on that while you're over the ball. What do you think the byproduct of that shot?

Peter Koch: [00:18:16] Oh, it's going in the water. It's going in the water. Whether I focus on it or not? I'll tell you that, Chris, right now.

Chris Burns: [00:18:21] Yup.

Peter Koch: [00:18:22] That's excellent. So let's talk a little bit more. And you had said this too, around the situational awareness, like the traditional methods of getting someone's attention or understanding that their hazards around you can just come right into the background they're going to, they're going to the person that's hearing them is going to get desensitized to them. So it doesn't become a warning sign anymore, just becomes noise and you don't really pay a lot of attention to it. So talk to me about a little bit about how you set the camera system up. And then maybe can you talk a little bit about some of the training that you might give the operator how easy it is it to use a system like [00:19:00] that as an operator once it gets set up?

Chris Burns: [00:19:03] Yeah. So it typically takes us about an hour to install a four camera system. It's pretty easy given we're not doing it in the dead of winter because as you could imagine, when it's 10 degrees out, we're snapping drill bits and metals a lot more difficult to drill into. Not only that, but you know, guys need to take breaks to keep their fingers warm. But ultimately, it's pretty easy. It's a couple of wires. It's identifying the best installation point, and typically it's a higher point on the vehicle or on the asset that is not likely to be bumped or obstructed with the operator's visibility. So it's not going to get in the way of the regular traditional use of the vehicle or the asset. Not only that, but we want to make sure we also have really good placement of the monitor on the dashboard or near the steering wheel. These are indoor outdoor use, so if you have direct sunlight, [00:20:00] you're going to be able to see them. They're typically anywhere from seven to nine inches, depending on the amount of space that we have. So when you're using the piece of equipment, most people wouldn't even know it has a camera system until they got into the seat, turned the ignition on was like, Oh, there's a monitor here. What's that for? So if you didn't know and this is the beauty of it, you literally turn the vehicle on. The unit will power itself on automatically, and there's very limited to no training required. I say limited, meaning it's nice to know how it works. It's nice to know that, yes, you can make some adjustments to the screen if need be. But ultimately, if you're aware that you have it, it's basically just understanding what does this do for me? What is the purpose of this? Because that is the first question is why do I have this? Why do I need it? But ultimately, once we show someone, Hey, this is the, and it's not so much showing as it is explaining the purpose and why the company invested in it. And [00:21:00] then people say, Oh, OK. And then what's really interesting is that if your company has 10, let's say, telehandlers and two of them, your demoing the camera systems on and you get to try it for a week, you're going to come back and request that. And I've got a funny story about that. When we started working with this first construction equipment and this is how we got into the camera system was, they said, you know, we'd like to try one, you know, we'll just buy it, but we want to see what this is all about. So we installed one and they said, Hey, this is really cool. We had some great feedback on it. Can you come back and install a few more? Yeah, sure. Why not? So a month and a half later, we had four camera systems out on the telehandlers. And what happened was we got a phone call and the guy said, Hey, we need a few more. Yeah, no problem. Happy to do that. And I said, Can you tell me about how it's going? We'd love to get some feedback. And he said, Well, at first the guys were saying, [00:22:00] well, why would we do that? You know, we haven't had any accidents. And it's like, OK, you might not have. The company has seen some accidents and, you know, had some, some misfortunes there, but we don't need that. And so, OK, we'll just give it a try. We'd want to know your feedback. And if you don't like it, we can take it out. Not a big deal. So it got used and there were a couple of contractors who said, Hey, on our next job, can we get those telehandlers with the cameras? And they said, Yeah, sure, why? And he said, you wouldn't believe the productivity we had on the job site and feedback from some of our employees was, I feel so much more confident operating when I have a large heavy load on this, especially when I'm approaching a building. You can imagine the amount of weight some of these carry, and because of that efficiency, we are working faster. We are on schedule and as you can imagine, [00:23:00] being on schedule is like being ahead of schedule in this industry, especially now. And, you know, we want all of them that have the camera systems. We know you only have four and they said, Oh, OK, that's well, that's interesting. Let's get four more. So they got four more. And it repeats same thing. And next thing, you know, they said, Well, you know, we want we want to get 50 of them, then fast forward a year later, they ordered one hundred and fifty camera systems. But that's not even the best part of the story. The best part of the story was, and this happened recently. You know what? Our company has seen such a great improvement of efficiency and a reduction in accidents that we're going to make it mandatory for all of our subcontractors to use your camera systems. So we don't want them going out and doing it somewhere else. We want them to use your company and your technology. And that was a very proud moment for me because, you know, it wasn't that, yeah, we've succeeded and we're making more [00:24:00] money. It was. We are really making an impact with these companies. And I hate to say this, but we're potentially saving lives and we are helping companies save money. And it feels really good going to sleep at night knowing your company is really making an impact with very large companies in your area. And so it's something we're very proud of and it's been fun because the feedback has been nothing but great. And as you can imagine, when you work on construction sites, there are a lot of people who have been with the company for 20 years, 30 years, and they can be a little more resistant to technology. You're laughing. I can see you laughing over there because, you know, it's true. So we've seen some pushback. But if they say, if the company explains it and says, hey, this is why we're doing it, it has nothing to do with you personally. But if we can elevate our safety and our efficiency, here's what we're going to do. And again, I don't want to get ahead of the conversation, but when they're transparent like that, usually [00:25:00] their employees will say, OK, we'll give it a shot.

Peter Koch: [00:25:03] So that I think that story really speaks to the quality of the service and the product that you guys are putting out there and that you're delivering, that says a lot about the company that you're able to not only make an impact with the product just because of the way it impacts the companies that you are providing it to or selling it to. But it says a lot to the service that you're providing. I think those go hand in hand. You can have a phenomenal product, but you might not have the best service or the best install or the best people on the ground. I think that does say a lot about your company overall. Those two things have to go hand in hand. Otherwise, you wouldn't be as successful as you are even just getting off the ground. So hopefully this will this will continue to go. One of the parts there I think it's pretty essential for any product or any investment that a company does is what's the return on investment. Even when we were talking about the internally at our company, we're talking about the podcast [00:26:00] that I'm doing here, about safety, what's the return on investment? If I'm going to be spending a few hours a week, spending time researching and writing and talking to different guests and then recording and then producing and then finally getting the product out there, what's the return on investment? So we had a long conversation about what that would be just about the podcast. So can you talk a little bit more about the return on investment for a camera system if there's a company considering, like, what can I do? What are the what are the talking points around return on investment that you might give a potential customer? Or if you're just having a conversation with somebody on the golf course or in the grocery store about, Hey, talk to me about this camera system, how is it going to benefit my company? What are the what are the key points?

Chris Burns: [00:26:44] Yeah, so, you know, whatever I'm talking to people, I try to stay away from the sales pitch because, you know, I never want to feel like I'm selling somebody, but I tend to go to the stories and I've got one here. I'll share with you in a minute. But when people ask the question specifically [00:27:00] about ROI, I like to kind of give them some high level talking points or even just bullet points of where and how could my company see this benefit or return on investment short term, long term? And there are a couple of things that some are measurable, some are not, and there are some companies that have different ways of measuring their return on investment. And this is something that, like the construction company didn't see happening, but was employee satisfaction. Now, I can't personally put a return on investment on employee satisfaction, but I know that if they have quality assets that they enjoy operating and they're more effective and efficient when using as a byproduct of having the camera system, you know, that says a lot, and I think there is really tremendous value. If you have a large company that has 50 forklifts or one hundred and fifty telehandlers, I think and this is very broad, but you have enhanced safety. [00:28:00] So you have assurance knowing that your people and both your assets are safer are protected. And a lot of times if you have, let's say, a years or more worth of usage of this technology, you might be able to go back to your insurance company and negotiate your premium. So if you can point to the fact that we have fewer incidents, we have greater productivity. Some agencies and your business, you probably know a lot more about this than I do. Are willing to do that. And companies, businesses, I should say, are unaware that in some instances they can negotiate their premium. This is what I've been told. I am not the insurance expert, so don't hold me to that. And there's also, obviously, you know, we talked about shrinkage, loss, loss prevention, and that is where we have the story. A good friend of mine is in the warehousing and logistics industry. He owns several warehouses and a trucking company. And in his [00:29:00] warehouses, each one of them are at least a half dozen forklifts. And I was talking to him over golf one day and lunch. He said, You know, I'm just I've been really stressed out lately. You've had a couple accidents in the warehouse. And I said, What could possibly go wrong? It's not like you have a team of 50 people. You got literally about six to 10 people in each facility. And he said, well, the other day, somebody was just getting really comfortable and careless and they were coming around the corner way too fast with a large load and they went right through a wall. I said what? He said, Yeah, you know, the downside is it's 20 grand to the upside, as it could have been a lot worse. I could have someone who could have been critically injured. But he said, ultimately, here's the deal. It's going to cost me 20 grand to fix it. I've got a forklift that's out for about a week or sooner. And then I've also got a pallet worth of product that I'm going to have to reimburse my client for. So, OK, let's talk, he said, so I [00:30:00] have basically I've lost productivity because I had two to three other employees who had to come over and help this employee out, clean up the mess. And so I had three people out of my six, which is half my staff not working for about two hours. Wow, that does not sound fun. I would imagine, you know, the stress that that would cause on the management team, just knowing that we had an accident. Thankfully, everybody is OK and everything can be fixed, he said. Yeah. The direct cost of the wall alone and the forklift is about twenty five thousand. Ok? He said. For us, it's not a big deal, but that money's got to come from somewhere. And he said, you know, it's at the time this was late September. He's like, that could be coming out of holiday bonuses that could be coming out of the Christmas party, said it. Yeah, we're very highly successful and profitable, but that's I don't have a money tree in the backyard and I said, Yeah, he said, But if you [00:31:00] add it up, we have the direct costs of the forklift and of the wall. He said we also have the indirect costs of the downtime, the loss of products. Unhappy client inefficiency. Forklifts out for a week. He said All in all, I could be, you know, if you count insurance in there too and my insurance goes up, he said, I could be looking at thirty, thirty-five thousand, forty thousand and there are other variables in here too. Like, was the individual injured? Was he hurt? We got worker's comp problems. And so the story goes on and on, and you can imagine this is a small incident as compared to some that are much bigger, unfortunately. And so when I have these stories, it's like, Wow, OK, I thought it was 20. But then you look at your balance sheet at the end of the year and you say, Wow, that really, that really put a ding in our bottom line. And so that's where we talk about ROI. And I don't care how effective, how high your safety standards are. Again, [00:32:00] this goes back to situational awareness with we may have some of the most experienced, highly trained forklift or telehandler operators, but that doesn't mean that the people around them have situational awareness. And if they don't, if they've became, let's say, immune to those beeping noises, the beacons, then we have we could have an incident and nobody wants that. And it can cause a lot of pains in a company. So I think we talk about ROI. That is something that companies say, you know, we're willing to invest in that because I keep going back to the efficiency you have higher and enhanced our employee confidence when they're operating. And we truly feel that we can eliminate the majority of accidents that happen with a camera system. And if an operator sees it two seconds sooner, they can typically stop and they can prevent that. I think a lot of times the beacons, the safety warning lights, the backup beepers, [00:33:00] these things are great for the people around them. But you know, the operator needs to have complete situational awareness. And like I said, it's a two way street. And if we can enhance that for both the people around you and the operator, we're really going to be singing the efficiency song here.

Peter Koch: [00:33:18] Let's take a quick break. Did you know that MEMIC offers online instructor led OSHA 10 hour outreach courses for both the general industry and construction standards free to our policyholders? Each online 10 hour outreach class is a two day video conference training that provides instruction on key sections of OSHA standards, instructing attendees about how to identify hazards and effectively implement appropriate safety procedures in the workplace. This program is a must for supervisors, lead persons and hourly employees. Our instructors have spent decades in the construction and general industry fields and are authorized by [00:34:00] the OSHA Training Institute to conduct these safety outreach training programs. Seats are limited, so check out the schedule and register today at www.MEMIC.com/WorkplaceSafety Not a MEMIC policyholder yet will reach out to your independent insurance agent and ask about us or go to www.MEMIC.com to learn more. Now, let's get back to today's episode.

Peter Koch: [00:34:30] Yeah, that's great, and you're really speaking my language now when we're talking about indirect and direct costs, and we speak about that often with our companies when we talk about safety specifically because, you know, you get somebody who's injured and you see those direct costs, the medical costs of the injury, or if there's lost time involved, it's X amount. Well, when you start to track the indirect costs and a lot of the indirect costs are the same as what you described with a telehandler incident. You're going to have a loss of property, [00:35:00] you're going to have to repair something. You might have a loss of productivity. Then you get back into the worker's comp side of things with an injury and you're going to have to train somebody else to come in. You got to replace that particular individual and just think about all the time that it takes to train a good telehandler. Someone who's really good and really productive with that tool takes time to produce that if they roll it over and they come out of the seat and they're injured, it's a substantial, indirect cost to train somebody anew. So that return on investment like you're talking about, they're increasing situational awareness. Given the individual more information to make good decisions about the environment that's around them is a key part, and you might not be able to quantify those indirect costs so well. Sometimes you can. Sometimes it's really specific. Sometimes it might be a little more difficult, but you think about all the things that come into managing an incident that [00:36:00] happens with the telehandler, whether it's an injury or whether it's a loss of property or product. Statistically, when they talk about indirect costs, there are anywhere between three and 10 times the amount of the direct costs when you add it all up together, and those are the hidden things that you don't normally see. So right on talking about indirect and direct for return on investment, that was, that's a good key point. I hope people take away from this today.

Chris Burns: [00:36:26] Yeah. You know, you're right, this happened to be a situation that thankfully was not as serious as some. And so it happens to be something that hits home with a lot of small businesses that are your two million, 10 million, 15 million dollar companies could be catastrophic for some. And if we can prevent that, you can save yourself a lot of stress, a lot of time and a lot of money.

Peter Koch: [00:36:49] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we've talked a lot about the benefits of the camera system, and I'm going to throw this out there because sometimes there's a downside to it. But [00:37:00] do you see any downside to having the camera system in the telehandler? Or have you have you seen any of that yet or have you had any reports of downsides to it?

Chris Burns: [00:37:10] You know, I haven't had any reports of there being downside, but as anything, I could sell it as being one of the greatest pieces of technology for any kind of construction company or warehousing company, whatever it might be. But a couple of things that come up in conversation is, you know, I'm fearful that our employees might be too dependent on it. So it's just like a backup camera in your vehicle. I drive a large SUV and I'm in a neighborhood with a lot of young children like my own, and I have had the tendency of backing up out of my driveway looking only at the camera. But yes, we have that camera. We have an expensive vehicle that is not better than your situation awareness. So if you pair the camera with your ability to turn your head left, turn your head right back [00:38:00] up slowly. So if there are people passing in a blind spot, you can see them. Then you have full awareness, but you can't be one hundred percent reliant on that, meaning you can't watch it the whole time because having your head on a swivel is just as beneficial as having the camera. So there is that downside. Some people see the initial investment in camera systems as having a downside, whereas you know, how long is it going to take for this thing to pay for itself? But once you see the opportunity, like the construction equipment story, I think you'll find that, yeah, we'll see a return on investment, potentially within the first couple of weeks. But beyond that, not really. It requires very little training, very little communication. But as anything, if you want your employees and your company to embrace it, it does require some communication. Sending a note out an email to your staff saying, Look, we've decided to make an investment in safety technology. Here's what we're doing. Here's the company we're working with, and here's [00:39:00] why. And here's how it's going to benefit us. And if they say, Oh, well, that's great. We're all for this. We'll give this an opportunity and you allow your employees to provide feedback on it, they're going to see that it is a great thing for them. If anything, it's only a benefit. So, you know, beyond that, I don't see a whole lot of downside. A lot of times there are big companies who have concern is, you know, we have one hundred assets. How are we going to install this? And I explain, look it's pretty simple. We'll go out at night or on a weekend if we need to get it installed because we don't want your fleet to be either off the road or off the job site. We want to keep your, your company and your assets working as much as possible. We don't want to interfere with that. So we do the installation after hours, if need be. And so, you know, when I throw that into the mix, they say, you know, there's really not a whole lot of downside because for us to install one hundred systems could take us a week and nobody wants assets [00:40:00] unavailable for that amount of time.

Peter Koch: [00:40:02] Yeah, very cool. I connected really well with that. The first downside that you said about someone being reliant on the camera or becoming reliant on the camera system, we're going through the second round of teaching daughters how to drive. Right. So our 18 year old just got just got a car. She learned to drive on our vehicles, obviously, and we had a backup camera in our vehicle, and she became fairly reliant on using that backup camera. When she got her car, you know, she's 18 years old, not making a ton of money. She's not getting a really expensive car, no backup camera. So the first time she got in the car, she's looking at the dashboard backing up and I'm like, Hey, wait a second, there's mirrors that you have to use. You got to turn your head around. You can't. What are you looking at? You're just looking at the dial on the radio. That's not going to help you get good situational awareness. She's like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And to [00:41:00] this day, she's had it for about a month now, and to this day, she's really been, she laments not having that backup camera, but she's learned really well to pay more attention, especially when she's in that, in her vehicle backing up. So it begs the question, maybe, you know, as you think about that being a potential challenge for employers, what might be a solution like, I'm just some thinking about different training possibilities for the operators so that they are using the camera system not as their only piece of information about situational awareness, but an enhancement for situational awareness. So do you have any input about what companies are doing or could do to enhance or to help their operators use it as an enhancement, rather than the only part of situational awareness that they rely on?

Chris Burns: [00:41:51] Yeah, so I think a couple of things there is one, if a company is going to make an investment, I think explaining why they're making the investment is [00:42:00] important and it doesn't come down to. We're doing it because of a specific employee. We're doing it to increase the safety because we care about our staff. We care about the health and safety of our people. More importantly, and then number two, we want to build efficiency. If we can be more efficient, we can get more done. We can be ultimately more profitable. And if we're more profitable, we can then reinvest into improved technology, improved equipment, potentially bonuses. And if you have that communication and say, OK, we're going to invest, but we're also going to train you and this is something we'll be working on in twenty twenty two is some video production that goes through. Here's what the equipment is. Here's where your cameras are understanding where they are and how the system works, how easy it is. Basically, turn the key, turn the vehicle or the asset on it powers on itself. And then how could you utilize this [00:43:00] to better operate? So again, employees need to know that as much as we don't think we need to explain things we do when you're making a big investment. Yeah, I have this. This is great. I can just look at the camera or computer screen. Well, no, you can't. It's there to supplement what you do and provide a value, because if you are a new operator to a forklift or relatively new to a telehandler, you know that there are a lot of blind spots, and these accidents typically happen less with the experienced operators and more with the newer operators. And so if you can say, you know, when you're in a warehouse, watch out for this. When you're on a job site, watch out for X and giving people an opportunity to say, OK, well, what if I'm in a construction site? What if I've got other telehandlers? What if this and its situations, but also teaching what is situational awareness and how can I improve my [00:44:00] situational awareness? So as I mentioned before, we think, Oh great, we're the operator. We know where everything is. We're clear. Well, not necessarily. And so it kind of goes back to your point earlier about you have some daughters going through driver's training. A lot of times we can teach the operator to be as safe and aware as possible, but that doesn't mean a dog won't run out on the road or a kid won't run out on the road. Or, God forbid, an accident happens in front of you. And if you don't have complete awareness or you're not paying complete attention, you could get caught and it may not be one hundred percent your fault. So just teaching the operator how they can best utilize that and what to look out for in the future. Now, some of these things will come in their training when they go through driver training or forklift training, whatever it might be, but continued education as to how to best utilize the technology. And as I mentioned, we're hopeful that we can get into that in 2022 And [00:45:00] beyond.

Peter Koch: [00:45:00] Yeah, that's really cool and a good recommendation that communication getting people to understand how this tool can enhance your own personal situational awareness and that as a new operator or a new driver, you know, your situational awareness is relatively small because you don't have the experience to draw on for that, and this tool can be used to enhance that. But it's not the only, it's not the end all, be all of your situational awareness or the only tool that you should be using to make decisions. So really, really good points in there and good luck with putting that training together. I think that's a great opportunity for employers and companies to take advantage of that, because any time that you get to have the expert come in and teach you a little bit more about how to use the tool more effectively is invaluable. So hopefully that'll work well for you guys.

Chris Burns: [00:45:51] Yeah, thank you.

Peter Koch: [00:45:52] So a couple more questions here before we get to the end of the podcast and as you, you know, as you see [00:46:00] this like this is it's not a brand new technology, but it's certainly something that you are making work in a really good way. What are some other applications? What are some other vehicles that you might see this system be good for? So we've talked about telehandlers and maybe forklifts, but where else do you see this system being installed that could be a benefit to other employers?

Chris Burns: [00:46:23] Yeah, that's a good question. It can start with something as simple as a box truck. You know, we started with backup cameras as a supplement to our GPS, and the big application was box trucks. People say, Hey, you know, I've got a box truck it's 10 years old. Obviously, there's very limited visibility, and in some cases, your mirrors may not be as wide enough as you'd like them to be. And your rearview mirror you may as well not have one because you can't see out the back, right? And having one or two cameras in the back of a box truck can give you great visibility when you're backing up. [00:47:00] And there might be instances where you know you might just have the vehicle in reverse to see if anyone's coming your way. You can turn the cameras on without having the vehicle in reverse, which is nice in this situation. But we've seen cranes. We've seen a wide variety of construction equipment because we talk about the telehandler a lot, because it's considered the most dangerous piece of equipment by many in the industry. You don't see as many forklifts in the construction field, but you will see them in a lot of warehouses and a lot of other places. And so, you know, those are the big ones, but construction box trucks? We've done some semis and semi trailers. We've even done some on the backs of pickup trucks. If you're often hauling trailers or pulling trailers, especially large, boxy trailers, it's nice to have that visibility. So you can see maybe how close you are if there's other people. Typically, when you're driving a truck, you have an employee or a colleague with you. So making sure if that person [00:48:00] is not in the cab with you, you can see where people are and see your surroundings. We've installed cameras on cars just about everything. It's becoming more and more popular as safety continues to grow and companies look at how can I save money? How can I build more efficiencies? How can I be profitable? But the number one talking point is how do I keep my people safe? Because as you can imagine, it's hard to find good people right now. It's hard to hire good people, and the onboarding could take days to weeks to months. And so if you have an employee out, you know that could be that could set you back. And so companies are starting to say, I want to invest in safety and they're excited to invest in safety because they're seeing that. Yeah, there could be a huge return on investment.

Peter Koch: [00:48:54] Nice. When you were talking, this just clicked for me. So most of my experience in industry [00:49:00] has been within the ski industry. I've worked for a number of different ski areas, done all sorts of different work with them. And when you're talking about the big box truck having to see behind, whether you're in reverse or not, I'm thinking of groomers, right? So one of the biggest injuries that we find and you had referenced this before, and I really didn't tag on to it until right now. But with the 360 backup camera, you really prevent a lot of neck and shoulder strain. And if I think about the groomer in my experience with a groomer or actually the groomers and some of the really nice new brand new technology groomers that are out there, you spend a lot of time looking back over your shoulder through that big window trying to see what the tiller is doing and to make sure that that's leaving the path that you want. So any time that you have to be looking behind you, it seems that might be a good application for this particular camera system.

Chris Burns: [00:49:54] You're right, but the physical strain is something that's also very true with forklifts telehandlers, construction equipment, [00:50:00] even box trucks, because you're often doing this. People do rely on mirrors, but they also rely on their physical awareness, their eyes as well. And so we've seen that I don't use that as much as a selling point because it doesn't sound as believable. But as someone who's been in the industry like yourself, who's operated this type of equipment, you'll start to recognize that, yeah, that is a pretty fantastic benefit. And that's where the employee satisfaction comes in. Where I mentioned the construction company, they started requesting it well, it's a lot easier for me to operate. Some of these guys are working, guys and gals, working 10 hour days doing this, you know, twisting their neck in their body that can get old after a couple of days or a couple of weeks. And so, yeah, I think there's great benefit. You mentioned other applications. We recently installed some camera systems on party buses because as you kind of mentioned, not a lot of visibility, a lot of obstructions there, in addition to [00:51:00] the people on the bus.

Peter Koch: [00:51:01] Yeah. And interesting application. I would not have thought about that, but it makes total sense. So we're getting right to the bus at the end of the podcast here. If some of our listeners want to find out more about camera systems in Midwest fleet and safety specifically, where would they go look Chris? Where would they look to find more information?

Chris Burns: [00:51:22] Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that one of the best places to find us is online on our website, which is Midwestfleetandsafety.com. You can also connect with us. We're on Facebook and LinkedIn at Midwest fleet and safety. Otherwise, you can feel free to email me personally. It's [email protected] You can give me a phone call 920-205-9644 and whether you just want to chat about fleet and safety stuff, certainly open book, we'd love to have those conversations. If you have questions, you want to pick our brain and just kind of know, Hey, what's going on? I want to talk [00:52:00] to you more about this or that. We're certainly open to it. We're pretty relaxed casual company. We really just enjoy helping people and educating people. And if it results in business, great. If not, that's OK, too. But we're a young small company. We're trying to grow and forge relationships. So if you're interested in connecting with us, please do so. And I hope everyone enjoyed listening to the episode today.

Peter Koch: [00:52:21] Well, I know I did. I really appreciate this conversation. I always take something away from the conversation that I have with one of the guests. So thanks today and kind of that connection between the camera systems, situational awareness, reduction of injury, reduction of not just the struck by injuries, but one of the injuries that the National Safety Council didn't put in there is that soft tissue injury, which I think more and more our, you know, our workforce, especially here in Maine. I don't know about how it is about by you, but our workforce isn't getting any younger. So that little personal satisfaction, the employee satisfaction of having a tool that allows them to work more [00:53:00] productively, longer and just longer in their lifetime is a good tool and a take away from me. Thanks for that.

Chris Burns: [00:53:08] Yeah, you're welcome. And you know, when it comes down to it, Peter and I don't want this to be a sales pitch, but companies can invest in this technology. If you're talking about telehandler, one forklift for less than a thousand dollars in most cases. So think about the return on investment you could possibly see by spending a thousand dollars.

Peter Koch: [00:53:28] Yeah, it's not. It's almost a no brainer when it comes down to it, but you got to be in the right mindset for it. You got to understand it, and sometimes you have to have a reason for it. So as you know, as our listeners out there are thinking about, so where have our incidents been? Do we have telehandlers? Have we had productivity issues? Have we had or do we see an opportunity where we want to increase productivity? Have we had incidents or accidents? This might be the time for you to think about what technology can you use to try to eliminate some of those or increase your productivity, your quality [00:54:00] and your safety? So again, thank you for that.

Chris Burns: [00:54:04] Thank you for having me. There's one last thing I want to say.

Peter Koch: [00:54:07] Sure.

Chris Burns: [00:54:07] A lot of times what I'm talking to people like yourself or potential clients and say, You know, what advice would you give a company who's considering this? And I hate to say this, but people say, I should say it more. And so I'll say it to you. But if you're thinking about it, invest because you want to, not because you have to. And I say that is that the majority of our clients are doing it because they've previously had a serious accident or incident and they don't want it to happen again. And they say this, I swear to god, every single time, is if we only would have done this sooner. And I don't like hearing that because, you know, I don't want anyone I do business with to have had gone through something terrible like that, whether it be a simple twenty thousand dollar wall that they need to fix or something far more catastrophic. And so [00:55:00] do it because you want to prevent injuries and accidents, not because you have to do it.

Peter Koch: [00:55:06] Yeah, that's really, really good advice. Invest because you want to, not because you have to. I think that's great and maybe a key takeaway for a lot of folks out there thinking about how can I invest in some technology that's going to make me better? And if you want to be better, here's an opportunity that might take you to the next level. So perfect for that. Thanks again, Chris, for coming on the podcast. This time, I appreciate talking with you.

Chris Burns: [00:55:29] Peter you rock. It's been a lot of fun, as always, and hopefully we get to do this again soon.

Peter Koch: [00:55:32] Yeah, I think we will. We'll have to connect again sometime. And I appreciate you being there and good luck with your company and we'll catch up again in the future, I guess.

Chris Burns: [00:55:41] Good. I look forward to podcast episodes right on.

Peter Koch: [00:55:44] Thanks again, Chris, for joining us and to all of our listeners out there today on the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, we've been speaking about how camera systems can enhance situational awareness with Chris Burns, co-founder of Midwest Fleet and Safety. The MEMIC Safety Experts podcast [00:56:00] is written, hosted and produced by me, Peter Koch. If you have any questions about camera systems or situational awareness, or would like to hear more about a particular topic on our podcast. Email me at [email protected]. Also, check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/podcast, where you can find additional resources, as well as our entire podcast archive. And while you're there, sign up for our safety net blog. So you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you would subscribe to the podcast and that take a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, well, thank you because it really helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing the show with a business associate friend or a family member that you think will get something out of it? And as always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast [00:57:00] is good, but using what you learned here is even better.

The word resolution implies a steadfast intent to succeed or change something. While this may be true for the New Year, the word is better used to describe the movement or change between things.

On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I discuss how a resolution should be a living thing, especially when it comes to safety.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter Koch, manager of digital technology for Lost Control and a safety management consultant here at MEMIC. I'm recording this episode as we transition into two thousand twenty two and wow, what a whirlwind it's been. One of those eddies of that whirlwind has really been this podcast. It's hard to believe that the podcast has just celebrated its two year anniversary in November of 2021. It's not something that we could do without you listening, and because of you, we've resolved to keep it going. And you know, that got me thinking about the word resolution. And at this time of year, more than any other, it's a word that gets tossed around a lot at one that I expect some of us have been less than successful with over the years, myself included. In general, that word has come to represent that a decision has been made around an intention like the New Year's resolution. Of [00:01:00] course, like I firmly resolved to change or I firmly resolved to do or not to do whatever. However, that tends to be a fairly narrow definition. The word resolution has more uses in depth than what we have come to connected with this time of year. So get beyond the New Year's resolution, and the word connotes something opposite of an unwavering decision to do something. Consider, like in music theory and composition, the term resolution means to progress a chord from dissonance to consonants, or from something that sounds unstable or creates tension to a note that is more stable or creates a sense of release. This clip that you're going to hear next is Howard Shore's Score The Hobbit and is a good example of movement from the tension of dissonance and the release of resolution.

Peter Koch: [00:03:11] In [00:03:00] this case, this is a part of the theme from The Trolls from The Hobbit, and that their bad guy status has really made clear, by the use of a semitone dissonance at the end of the musical phrase and I'm sure you heard it, and if you were paying attention to it, you might actually get that emotional sense of movement, of tension, of something that's going to happen and that doesn't resolve. And then finally, it does resolve. Another definition of the word resolution is used when analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones or solving. Again, this has a feeling of movement. I'm going from a bucket of stuff, lots of complex things together, and I'm trying to break it apart into its component parts. So going from one state to another, like when separating a chemical compound [00:04:00] into its constituent parts through process of distillation, chromatography or even extraction, another use for the word resolution is for the subsidence of a pathological state, such as inflammation. So like, it goes away, it's resolved. It's change. It's gone from a painful area to something that's no longer painful. Last, the use of the term resolution is used when making something more distinguishable or to make individual parts clear, such as in optical resolution. And we hear that all the time in photography, especially digital photography, or when you're trying to pick out an LCD projector for your presentations or a television, right, you're looking at the number of pixels per inch or the resolution of the particular device that you're trying to choose.

Peter Koch: [00:04:48] The higher the resolution, the better clarity that there's going to be for the detail that you'll have. These alternate uses of the word resolution describe much more than a decision to [00:05:00] or not to do something, and more often than not, resolution describes the movement of something or a change. I see the word resolution being one that describes the dynamic relationship between one thing and another. It refers to the release of the tension between the state of what something is and what you want it to become. In my opinion, this is how we should see our resolutions. Not a concrete decision, right? I'm going to stick to this and nothing is going to make me waver because I know in the past that has not been a successful place for me to start. Whenever I do that, I tend to fly off the handle sometimes or things will change. Circumstances in my life will change. Circumstances around the resolution will change and all of a sudden, I'm no longer firmly resolved the way I was before. So it's not a concrete decision, but it should be the journey between where you are and what you want to become and the path that you're going to take. That's the resolution. How do I know [00:06:00] where I am and where am I going to go?

Peter Koch: [00:06:02] So with that in mind, and as it is the season for New Year's resolutions, I think it's a good time to reflect on what safety resolutions we can make for the coming year. And the way I see workplace safety is that it's a journey and all of the things that we do to help us move or our company move in one direction or another. That's the resolution. And because safety has everything to do about the human being and how they interact with the workspace, that journey is not always easy, nor is it exponential. However, in order to move forward, we do need to recognize the reality of where we are and where we can go. So consider again the example of music. If you've ever heard dissonant chords or the musical phrase never resolved, you would be in constant tension, but kind of like a frog in the pot. You wouldn't realize that you're in constant tension, but there would be all the effects of that constant tension. You would have, you [00:07:00] know, maybe an increased heart rate or increased anxiety, or you would get really focused on what's going on in front of you instead of seeing what's happening around you because you have nothing to compare it to. You wouldn't realize that you could change your circumstances or even want to change it because, well, some people like living in tension and an overall living in tension sometimes isn't a bad thing, but we want to make sure that we're able to recognize the tension that we're in and maybe that there's a better place for us to go. Because while some tension is good, constant tension fighting against the desire or the need to produce and the looming potential for injury or death is not good. So first, recognize where you are. Do you know what your injury rate is? Well, how does it compare to your injury across the nation? So, for example, it's an interesting story. I was at a workplace discussing with the leadership what I had found to be an inordinate number of injuries for that particular [00:08:00] company. And while we were talking, I was really surprised to receive a true lackluster or a resigned response from the team. And when I had asked them how they felt they were doing, their response was that they felt they were doing the best they could. And of course, most of the injuries were the fault of the workers, not their particular issue. So I left it in. We continued our discussion and it was clear as we went on that they believed that they were a top tier business when it came to what they produce and the quality of the product that they had, and that they had a team of workers that were critical to the mission of the business and the success that they were enjoying. Well, I asked the safety questions again in a different way. I asked if they felt that they were in the top ranking nationwide for their company and how do they think they compared to their peers in safety? The response was that other businesses like theirs had just as many injuries and they were right in line with everyone [00:09:00] else.

Peter Koch: [00:09:01] Well, this was in February, so I asked them what their OSHA injury rate was or their DART rate. So they pulled it from their OSHA 300 log and what they found was a five point three. So their injury rate was about a five point three. So not huge. I've certainly worked with other industries that had a much greater OSHA overall injury rate. However, five point three is still a significant number of people when we pull the BLS data for their NAICS code. That rate was two point five, so two point five nationally for the NAICS code, where theirs was specifically a five point three for their company, more than twice the national rate. So when we dropped that bomb, you would imagine that there might have been a pause and there was. And then right afterwards there was a rash of excuses and all the normal ones. Well, it's the employee's piece. They don't listen, we have to we really have to push productivity in order to maintain our [00:10:00] income levels and our business levels. But as we kept going through those excuses, they gradually realized that they were not in the place that they should have been or really could have been. And it was only then that we started to discuss the inconsistencies in the safety, culture and what was said or written down in policy and the reality of what was happening on the ground level where employees were actually doing the work.

Peter Koch: [00:10:28] The leadership's resolution was to start work at identifying what was causing the disconnect and make changes that would positively affect the safety culture. We didn't discuss what incident rate they should resolve to get to, but we did make a point to evaluate the incident rate every year to see if the results of what they were changing affected the injuries at the company. And sure enough, in three years they had a safety culture survey result that was more positive and that their injury rate or incident rate had dropped to a three. It [00:11:00] still wasn't below the national rate, but what was much better than where they had started, and they really recognized how they got there and that they still had some room to grow. So what kind of safety resolutions should you be making this year? Well, no resolution should be made in a vacuum, and I need a little more creativity. So I pulled our team of safety management consultants here at MEMIC to put a wish list together for what resolutions they want their policyholders to make. The first suggestion that was given to me, I think, hits the beginning of movement, from dissonance to consonants or from chaos to order. It asks that a company should identify what to measure and what success would look like. This first resolution comes from Laurette Wright, who works closely with our policyholders in the health care industry.

Laurette Wright: [00:11:47] Hi Pete it's Laurette, I would like my policyholders to identify two or three KPIs or leading indicators that measure [00:12:00] safety performance for 2022.

Peter Koch: [00:12:04] The next suggestion for a resolution comes from Jason Hebert. Jason works with multiple industries here in Maine and makes a recommendation that, if so implemented, will help normalize the understanding of the importance of safety and help with buy in around the safety procedures and policies that need to be followed for success.

Jason Hebert: [00:12:25] If I was able to choose a resolution for my insurance, it would be to implement a learning process for their safety training programs. Learning must be a process versus an event, starting with identifying business needs or knowledge gaps within the workforce. Next, to find the training objectives to address each of these gaps and provide training to educate and reinforce safety expectations. Equally important, and follow up to the training, managers and supervisors need to circle back to ensure that new knowledge is transferred to the job. In my observations, oftentimes training is provided with no [00:13:00] follow up. Learning needs to be a process, not just an event, to be effective. With that, my resolution for twenty twenty two is for each of my policyholders to review the current training programs, identify opportunity to improve effectiveness and improve to ensure that business needs are met.

Peter Koch: [00:13:18] Deb Willard Webb, who works with all industries on our ergonomics team, is up next. She has a penchant for connecting the vision of leadership with the insight of the front line staff. Again, she provides a resolution that involves gaining clarity, not just an unbending rule or focus on a number.

Deb Willard Web: [00:13:37] I'd love to hear policyholders resolve to include line staff in development of corrective action once they identify root causes for injuries, and to do that with enthusiasm, believing they can identify actions that will make a difference to [00:14:00] recurrence. So I'm not sure how to make that more concise, but that's the gist.

Peter Koch: [00:14:05] Al Brown MEMIC's own director of ergonomics, has a suggestion that can have a significant effect on injuries and on employee work capacity. This involves an understanding of your current situation and what your workplace would look like if implemented. Sometimes a change like this one requires you to break down your process and illuminate areas that small changes can be made too, to best facilitate the whole.

Al Brown: [00:14:31] My resolution for two thousand and twenty two is that all industries that handle material don't put anything on the ground, they don't have too. Keep it between your knees and shoulders and 35 pounds in between.

Peter Koch: [00:14:48] The next suggestion for a resolution comes from Natalie Campaneria and really highlights the role of leadership and safety. Natalie, like most of the safety management consultants here at MEMIC, came [00:15:00] from the industry that she serves, and she has experience with how company leadership can make or break workplace safety. Again, a resolution to move.

Natalie Campaneria: [00:15:10] I have a resolution that I would love to have all of our policyholders make, and that is that the leaders make safety part of their priorities when they're walking around. Be a good example. If you see something on the floor, pick it up, reinforce positive behavior related to safety and just let the staff know that you're thinking about their safety, their health, and that you care about them.

Peter Koch: [00:15:37] Last for this reflection on what we can do to change safety for the positive. I look back at the challenges that 2021 has dropped into every business across the nation, and this recommendation for a resolution comes from Rob Sylvester, and I think it really hits home. So regardless of whether the challenge is COVID or reduced production or supply chain problems [00:16:00] or the aptly named great resignation, Rob suggestion is at the heart of every resolution that brings a company safety program or process into harmony with its other business goals.

Rob Sylvester: [00:16:13] My message to all is lead with compassion and with empathy and always, always be genuine. Take care of your people and they will take care of your clients, your customers, your residents, patients or whomever they work with. You're happy and healthy employees are the key to your company's success and always be present in the moment, especially in your personal life. Here's to a happy and successful 2022.

Peter Koch: [00:16:38] Take care of your team and they will take care of your company. No, no, you can't please everyone all the time. But if your resolutions connect the well-being of your team to the results, then you are on the path to long term success. So what's your safety resolution for twenty twenty two? I know most of us have room to grow or [00:17:00] move from a place of tension to a place of order in our company safety programs. So if you have an idea for our resolution or your company has made a safety resolution for 2022, then send them into me via email at [email protected]. We'll do a future episode looking at what different companies have done and maybe even reach out to you to get some more detail. Well, that about wraps up this week's Safety Experts podcast. Thanks a lot for joining us. The MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is written, hosted and produced by me, Peter Koch. I'd like to thank all of those other folks here at MEMIC who have supported this podcast like Rod Stanley, who does a lot of work with coordinating guests, or Kelly Barton on the communications team, which helps with the promotion of the podcast. So if you have any ideas for a safety topic that you would like to hear an expert discuss on the podcast, email me that as well at [email protected]. Also, check out this episode's show notes at [00:18:00]MEMIC.com/podcast, where you can find more safety resources, as well as our entire podcast archive. While you're there, sign up for our safety net blog so you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it. If you would subscribe to the podcast and then take a minute to review us on Spotify, iTunes or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, thank you because it really, truly helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing the show with a business associate friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Peter Koch wishing you a great start to the New Year and reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.

Peter Koch: [00:18:55] Before you sign off from the podcast, listen to a little bit about MEMICs loss control services. [00:19:00] Integrating workplace safety into your business is a key part of the long term success for any company. And like most components of success, there is no one size fits all solution. MEMIC is committed to partnering with employers across all industries for workplace safety, and we recognize the key to that partnership is understanding the unique demands of the industries that we insure our safety experts bring experience from the industries that they serve. And this experience provides unique perspective through a critical eye when it comes to understanding the particular exposures and challenges of an industry from construction, retail and manufacturing to hospitality and health care. Our team of experts will work with policyholders to identify opportunities to improve safety. Interested in finding more about MEMIC? Check us out at MEMIC.com or better yet, contact your local independent insurance agent for more information. If you're already a MEMIC insured, [00:20:00] then check out our safety resources at MEMIC.com/WorkplaceSafety and sign up for access to our video lending library, our LMS platform, or our Safety Director Resource Library. Thanks very much for listening.

Respirators are one of many controls to consider when addressing atmospheric hazards.

Choosing the wrong respirator can have deadly consequences. The results could be immediately fatal or lead to a long-term debilitating disease or condition.

On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, Steve Badger, CSP and Safety Management Consultant with MEMIC shares information about respiratory protection and what goes into choosing the right respirator.

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Hello, listeners, and welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter Koch and today the topic is respiratory protection. The topic of respirators and air quality in the workplace has numerous paths in an atmosphere of misunderstanding can make it challenging for a business to navigate questions like How do I know which respirator to choose? Or isn't a paper mask a respirator to or why do they need a medical evaluation? Are all questions that have I have heard in the field, especially if I ask, why is that worker wearing or maybe not wearing a respirator? Add to this most airborne hazards do not pose an acute hazard, but can negatively affect you when exposed to it over a long period of time. So think about asbestos or say silica. These hazards can cause damage to your respiratory system and over time, and repeated exposures have proven to cause different cancers and other debilitating [00:01:00] conditions. Other airborne hazards like hydrogen sulfide, chlorine or carbon monoxide have an immediate or an acute life threatening effect. So regardless of how quickly a hazard will cause damage, the worker must be protected when the exposure is identified. So to help us clear the air around respiratory protection and returning to the podcast today is Stephen Badger, CSP, OHST and safety management consultant right here at MEMIC, Steve has a ton of experience with different industries and specializes in industrial hygiene and indoor air quality. You can check out his full bio at MEMIC.com. So, Steve, I wanted to welcome you back to the podcast. Thanks for being here, and I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you about respiratory protection today.

Steve Badger: [00:01:48] Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here again.

Peter Koch: [00:01:50] Awesome. So it's great to have you back. It's been a while since you've been on. It's been a number, well, a month or so at least. What interesting things have you been up to lately in the world of industrial hygiene? [00:02:00]

Steve Badger: [00:02:01] Oh yes, very exciting stuff. You know, I've been doing a lot of silica monitoring, silica testing for respiratory protection purposes, doing lots of noise testing as well. People, you know, wanting to protect their hearing, which is also a very important subject. And that really, really has been the gamut. The last month or so, there's been a lot of focus on both of those subjects.

Peter Koch: [00:02:25] That's cool. And I don't think people consider so much. You know, the silica standard has been out for OSHA now for quite a while, and it continues, I think, to surprise people that they have silica in the workplace and doing some of that atmospheric testing. And we'll talk about that specifically as we get into the respiratory protection program elements and how you determine what type of respirator is. But figuring that out is really important. The testing is really important to get people to understand where to target their efforts for that fairly dangerous substance that we have in the workplace.

Steve Badger: [00:02:58] Yes, it is. It absolutely [00:03:00] can cause some long ranging health effects, breathing issues as well as it's been linked to cancer and some other debilitating health effects. So yes, it absolutely is important to not just monitor, but also, you know, make sure that your employees are protected appropriately.

Peter Koch: [00:03:17] Right on. So let's jump right in to talking about respirators. And I think the use or maybe even the misuse of respirators is more common than we think, and you probably would agree with me on that. What are some of the common respiratory protection mistakes that you see when you're driving around?

Steve Badger: [00:03:36] Oh, certainly some of the most frequent ones that I see are the employer is trying to help their employee by giving them a respirator, something that they have found at one of the local stores. They purchased it, they've brought it in, you know, they give it to the person thinking that they're doing a really good thing, that they're helping protect this person. And in all actuality, depending on what the type of respirator is, [00:04:00] if the person's been fit tested properly, they've been medically cleared and so on. Some of these things we're going to talk about today. If these haven't gone on, this person could actually have some medical issues that occur because of wearing that. Or it may give that person a very false sense of security, that they're being protected when it may not be the proper respirator to protect them from that specific hazard.

Peter Koch: [00:04:26] Yeah, really good points. I've seen that, too. I've also seen this just happened a little while ago. They were replacing a segment of bridge around my house, and after they've finished laying down the concrete or pouring the concrete and it cured, they were scoring the concrete. So they had a big demo saw out there and they were scoring the concrete. The guy who was operating the saw was encased or enclosed, almost in a cloud of silica dust, basically, or concrete dust. And the paper mask that he had was on top of his hard hat. So you could see it fairly [00:05:00] easily driving right past them. And. You know, you talk about a mistake like that. I think that's more of a mistake in training and getting that employee to maybe understand what the true hazards of the atmosphere that they're exposed to are. So both sides, you know, the employer, like you said, trying to do the right thing and give the employee the proper protection, but they're not really hitting the mark. And on the other side, you know, giving somebody maybe what would be the proper protection truly for that, but not educating the employee properly on what the hazards are and the true importance and how critical it would be for them to wear it in the workplace or in that exposure?

Steve Badger: [00:05:40] Absolutely. You know, one of the other mistakes I see, you know, when driving around is, is that somebody one person or two people will be in respiratory protection and there's other people around them. And that's kind of the downfall of using respiratory protection as your first line of defense is [00:06:00] that anyone that's not wearing it is not going to be protected. And so that is another one of those areas that people have to be concerned with is that anyone not wearing it or if it fails or, you know, or if somebody leaves it on the top of their hard hat that it's not going to protect them the way that it would be actually removing that contaminant from the workplace.

Peter Koch: [00:06:23] Yeah, that's a really great lead in actually to this next topic and you think about that individual could be a supervisor, could be someone visiting the job or another employee that has just been assigned to the job but hasn't done the training for respiratory protection, standing within the hazard and not having the same PPE. And I think when people do think about respiratory protection, they do think about respirators like that's the only thing that we have to protect ourselves from the airborne hazard, something that you wear that can protect you at the workplace. And even though we're going to talk about the respirators specifically, I think it's best that we start [00:07:00] someplace else. So continue that thought. Explain why personal protective equipment or PPE isn't the place to start and what process or how should we look at controlling and atmospheric hazard differently?

Steve Badger: [00:07:14] The direction that we want to really hit on this is to determine, first of all, do we have an atmospheric hazard that needs to be our first step? And when we look at the respiratory protection standard, the very first line is that the idea? The objective here is to control those. So we need to know what they are before we can even start to control those. So when we go to control these things, one, the very first thing that we need to really be looking at is can we eliminate that hazard from the atmosphere now in the case of something airborne, you know, maybe like silica or something like that, maybe we have to look at, you know, can we keep this stuff from becoming airborne in the first place? [00:08:00] Can we eliminate that hazard? Really, the next step is, you know, typically in these hierarchy of controls that we talk about is, can we substitute it for something different? Well, you know, when it comes to airborne hazards, you know, if we're talking about a chemical, perhaps we can substitute that for something less hazardous and therefore we would not need to do anything further as far as protection goes. Our next step would be engineering controls where, you know, we may have this hazard in the air, but can we engineer it out? Can we, you know, pull the pull the contaminants out of the air think a lot about like welding and welding fumes when people are working with that, you know, we use local exhaust to try to keep that out of their breathing zone in the beginning so that it's not being drawn up through their breathing zone. So they're not getting that contamination in their lungs. So we do the local exhaust, we have general exhaust. [00:09:00] And then if that does not take care of the hazard as we would expect or reduce it to a level that's acceptable, then we look at administrative controls. That's where the training, the programs, the inspections, those types of things come in. And then last but not least, is the final resort, which is the personal protective equipment, the respirator itself

Peter Koch: [00:09:26] And the hierarchy there, starting with elimination. Or if you back it up, like you said at the beginning, you have to know or believe that there's a hazard in the workplace and then determine what that hazard is. And you talked about that briefly. As you're doing silica testing and monitoring in the workplace, you have to test the atmosphere to determine whether or not there's a hazard there to begin with. And I think even more importantly, to determine how much is there, especially when you get into the chemical side of thing, there's the, you know, the permissible exposure limits [00:10:00] and different things. So there are. Are certain limits that we can be exposed to over time that are OK, not great, but they're OK, and those levels will dictate what we do next. So then can we eliminate it? And so give me an example, if we were going to eliminate an airborne hazard from the environment, what would an example be about how to eliminate an airborne hazard

Steve Badger: [00:10:26] By eliminating it? Perhaps that we're going to use a certain type of process? Maybe we're using a very potent cleaner, something that's giving off a vapor that that certainly isn't good for us to be breathing in now. If we take and, maybe eliminate that from the workspace. Maybe, we're taking that in a different direction that is taking it away from people and where people are working. We've eliminated that hazard in the work environment. Maybe we take it outside or, you know, maybe it gets [00:11:00] piped differently or something, something along that line, we isolate it from the person.

Peter Koch: [00:11:05] Sure, that's a great idea. Can you do the process in a different part of the area if you're exposing a lot of people to it? Can we do it outside? Can we do it in a different space? So in that case, you are only exposing a few people or the people that are immediately doing the process. So a great idea. Would doing something like in a wet method like for the control of silica or other dusts, would that be considered in an elimination? Would that be an engineering control?

Steve Badger: [00:11:36] Well, that would really be an engineering control because at this point here, the hazard is still there. It is in the work environment. So we've done our part. We've tried to eliminate it as much as possible. Now we're looking at engineering and wet methods, especially with something like silica, asbestos, lead. Keeping that from becoming airborne becomes the primary objective at that point that [00:12:00] we're keeping it out of that person's breathing zone. So any kind of wet methods, whether it's a continuous flow water system or if something that's attached to the tool itself, you know, depending on the on the you know what you're doing and how you're doing it, they're certainly tools out there that will help us with that. Whether it's vacuuming, you know, keeping that dust from coming in the air that way or by watering, keeping it wet.

Peter Koch: [00:12:25] It's great and a good differentiation there, where elimination removes the hazard from the workplace or from the immediate area where people are would be exposed to it while engineering the hazard still exists. It's still there. You're just trying to knock it down or to bring it to a level that is not hazardous or you're not exposing that particular person to so great, great differentiation there. So I think that's a good process to think about. So you have elimination, then substitution engineering and then the two parts that that come together, [00:13:00] but one before the other administration and then PPE. So if we've gone through the whole hierarchy and thought about it well, I can't eliminate it. I have done all I can to engineer the space in order to reduce the hazard. But the hazard is still there. Now I've determined that I need a respirator. So what is required for a company to have in place before they can put people into respirators once they've determined that a respirator is a functional way of managing the hazard?

Steve Badger: [00:13:33] Now, the very first thing that they have to look at is having an actual respiratory protection program. This program as OSHA's states has to have certain elements within it. And you know, those elements include, you know, procedures for selecting the respirators in the workplace. This is obviously one of the most important parts of this because without knowing what types of respirators you need, you'd be shooting, you know, shooting in the dark as far [00:14:00] as guessing as to what you need to have. This has to include medical evaluations for employees. This step is absolutely critical. Absolutely. So important for the employee themselves because they have to be cleared to wear that respirator before they're even fit tested for it to make sure that they're not going to have any type of adverse conditions that may be exacerbated by that. Maybe something like asthma or some type of breathing issue that they have that could cause them to have a medical event because of wearing this respirator. So, you know, how are we going to clear these people to wear this? A third section is the fit testing procedures. How are we going to make sure that this respirator is going to be needed by this employee? You know, they come in different sizes and different shapes and different brands and that sort of thing. The procedures for proper use of respirators, when do we use it? When do we do not have to use it? When you know, if there's [00:15:00] an emergency, you know what situations are going to require us to be using these respirators? Procedures for cleaning and maintenance and taking care of these things, inspecting them, making sure that if it's a supplied air breathing type of respirator that we have you know the proper type of air, you know, the proper type of location that is coming from, that it's not being contaminated by something outside. Training of employees needs to be addressed in this program. You know, not just the training on, you know, what are the hazards in the workplace, but also training on how to properly don and doff, which is the proper terms for putting on and taking off your respirator. You know, all of those types of things, the proper inspection of them to make sure that all the parts and pieces are there and working the way that they are supposed to be. And then also, you know, procedures for the regularly evaluating the program, making sure that you're using, you know, [00:16:00] your best resources, that if there's new technology out there that you're implementing that. And so all of those things together are required by the employer have to be in writing so that the employees can be trained properly on it and that it can be evaluated and looked at on a regular basis.

Peter Koch: [00:16:18] Great. And I think a key point there that you brought up at the end is that this is a required written program. So if you have an atmospheric hazard that needs to be controlled by personal protective equipment, that a written respiratory protection program must be in place at your company and I have all those components, you have to have to a way to be able to control or do your best to determine whether or not you can control it any other way or reduce the exposure amount than to have medical evaluations. Require those fit testing, training, care, maintenance and then finally, the program evaluation. All of those are critical parts and pieces and part of the OSHA, you said right at the beginning part [00:17:00] of the OSHA standard. Correct?

Steve Badger: [00:17:01] Correct.

Peter Koch: [00:17:02] Awesome. All right. I've got the hazard. I can't do anything else with it. I determined that I need to use some sort of respirator. I've pulled a respiratory protection program off the internet, and I've made it my own awesome. So now I'm all set and I'm going to do what a lot of folks will do. I'm going to Google respirators and what kind of respirator do I need for the hazard? And if you just Google respirators, the bots at Google return sixty one million results, so Google is not going to be your friend when you're trying to figure that part out. So what types of respiratory protection are out there from a respirator standpoint and what sets them apart? So how do I figure out which one that I need for a particular hazard that I have in the workplace?

Steve Badger: [00:17:49] Now, that's a great question, and you're absolutely correct when you Google something and you get 61 million hits. It's certainly a very daunting thing. So when we're looking at respirators, [00:18:00] you know, you really let's break it down into some, you know, some maybe more handle-able. I'm going to make a word up there, but handle-able pieces here. First of all, there are really two types of respirators that we have to be concerned with. There's what's called an air purifying respirator. And then there's also atmosphere supplying respirators. Now, the first being the air purifying respirators is just like what it sounds is that this respirator takes the air that's already in the air and it filters it through some type of medium, whether it's through a half face mask. Like we talk about the N95 respirators that we've talked about over the last couple of years, you know, with COVID and with silica and with other things that they fit over your face and they act as the filter. You're not adding anything to the, you know, you're not adding any oxygen, you're not adding anything to it, you're just really filtering that air that's being drawn in through that filter by your lungs. You know, [00:19:00] when you create that negative pressure within it, you start to inhale, you're creating a negative pressure. It draws the air through and filters out certain particulates depending on what you're trying to filter out. And then you get that air into your lungs, then you exhale. Most of the respirators will have some type of exhalation valve, which opens and allows that air to escape. And as soon as that pressure stops, it closes in. The process starts again. So with that, I'll jump into a little bit into the atmosphere supplying ones. And it's just like, it sounds it. It's actually supplying you air. And it may be from tanks. It may be from the outside air, clean source of air, and that's being pumped into your respirator is being is being actually being forced into your respirators. So in this case, here you're adding beyond what's in the atmosphere itself. So those really are the two types that you really want to [00:20:00] be thinking about, depending on what your concentrations are. And when we talk about the air purifying respirators, those can be broken down into further classifications.

Peter Koch: [00:20:12] Could I stop you for just a second? I want to clarify a point, so I think this is a good point. So you were putting these into manageable categories and you've got the air purifying and then the air supplied. So that's the first step that you're going to or the first choice point that you have to determine what type of respirator. So generally, when would you need to use an air purifying versus an air supplied respirator?

Steve Badger: [00:20:38] Oh, great question. As far as using an air purifying respirator, you would want to use that or can use that in atmospheres that have plenty of oxygen that you have. You do not have an oxygen deficient atmosphere. You can use these filtering air purifying respirators in atmospheres up to a certain level of contamination, [00:21:00] depending on what that contamination is, what type of respiratory that you're wearing. Now, when we switch to the atmosphere supplying, we're talking typically situations that might be immediately dangerous to life and health. If you think about like firefighters wearing SCBA's or, you know, people that have to remain behind in a fire situation where you know, they may have to shut down critical machinery such as a boiler or something like that where we know the atmosphere is going to be hazardous, it could be immediately dangerous to their life. So we need to supply them with proper air to let them finish that process and then escape from that, that situation.

Peter Koch: [00:21:40] It's a really good point, and I think it goes back to truly knowing what the hazard is, which is why the standard starts with understanding the hazard because it's not just the what, but the how much is really important as well, because you can get into a situation where you have a environment that's immediately dangerous to life and health in a confined [00:22:00] space or in an enclosed area, depending on the type of chemical that you're exposed to and the stratification that happens within that, that particular space, I might be fine if I'm working in the upper level, but it may have displaced all of the oxygen in the lower levels. So lots of different potentials down there. So understanding not just the what, but the how much can help you determine whether I need to go the air purifying or I need to move to the air supplied respirator. Great description. Thanks, Steve. So jump back in and talk more about you were going to talk about the different types of air purifying respirators.

Steve Badger: [00:22:41] Sure. Yeah. And the very first thing I wanted to really point out here is that any respirators that we're going to use in the work environment. Really need to be NIOSH approved, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health has to have an approval. We've been through, you know, the COVID situation and therefore a time. [00:23:00] There was some emergency use authorizations for some non approved ones. Those have since ended. So we really need to be focusing on making sure that you're using an appropriate respirator that has been NIOSH approved because if it has not been approved, we don't know how good it really is. We don't know if it's really meets the standards. So that's the very first thing I would like to point out. Second of all, there are different levels. There are what they refer to as N respirators, R respirators and P respirators. And essentially what it is that the N respirators, you know, they can be in different levels, but the N really stands for that. There's no oil in the air that you can use that type because there's no oils in the air. The R stands for that. That's oil present, but it may only be for one shift. And then the P means that there could be oil present, you know, at any given time. And you really must follow the manufacturer's [00:24:00] recommendations when it comes to this. Because, you know, certainly when you look at it, the variations between the P and the N, the P respirators are always going to be a little bit more expensive, but that may be exactly what you need to have. So that is that is something that people have to realize is that it's just not the cost, it's the type of respirator and the environment that you're going to be using that. And then within those, you know, you can have P one hundred, P ninety nine and N ninety five. And typically what that means it is telling you within that type of respirator, how much is it really filtering out if it's an N95 respirator, that means it is filtering out ninety five percent of all the particles that would be outside of your mask. And so I always like to clarify that because there's lots of these numbers and letters out there, and it can it can be very confusing.

Peter Koch: [00:24:56] And those in particular are for particulates, correct? So the N95 [00:25:00] or the P 100s that you would have out there, there, that's the percentage of the particulate down to a particular size that the mask is rated to pull out of the atmosphere before it gets into your lungs.

Steve Badger: [00:25:13] That is correct. And the other aspect of this is that when we start talking about, you know, tight fitting respirators, the elastomeric respirators are just like what they sound. They fit tightly against your face may have cartridges, and those cartridges will be different colors depending on how they filter out things or what they're supposed to filter out. I do caution people making sure that you have the right cartridges when you use those, because a P100 filter may look really great and wonderful. It filters out a lot of particulates, but it may not do very good about filtering out organic vapors or things that you know, come from paints or solvents or things like that. So you really have to know your colors. You know, you have to follow your training and making sure you're using the right respirator cartridge.

Peter Koch: [00:25:59] Yeah. So [00:26:00] in that you have that filtering face piece, right, the paper mask looking thing, which would give you an N95 or a P100 rating or an R 99, and then you have the elastomeric or the tight fitting respirators, which will have a cartridge, which will have something or a cartridge, which might have a pre-filter that could be N95 or P100. Or it could have an actual particulate filter, which that's all it's going to do is filter out the respirators, but not so much the organic vapors or other chemicals that that you might need. So going back to understanding the what and the how much which is important for your selection for respirator. So, yeah, all right. We have the filtering face piece, the P 100s, the N95. You started talking a little bit more about the elastomeric respirators. You want to talk a little bit more about those and maybe some of the types and how you might choose the filtering face piece versus, say, a tight fitting respirator like the elastomeric ones.

Steve Badger: [00:27:00] When [00:27:00] it when it comes to the respirators, you know, choosing which type that you're going to use, it really comes down to, you know, is this going to be something that you're going to be using every day? Is this going to be something that you're going to be using intermittently? And, you know, something like an N95 filtering face piece respirator are good for, you know, like a single use where you're going to go in and you're going to be doing some, maybe some work with silica or something like that and you use it. And when you come out and you and you decontaminate and you can just throw that away, you don't have to worry about cleaning it or taking care of it because the filter, the respirator itself is the filter, and you certainly don't want to be taking that home with you. You don't want to be reusing that. Now, the elastomeric, on the other hand, is the type of respirator that you can use multiple times. Yeah, you keep it clean. You keep the, you know, the pieces and the parts to it. You may end up changing those filters more frequently because one of the things with using filters that you have to be [00:28:00] very cautious of is that most of them do not have what we call an end of service life indicator. There's nothing to tell us when it goes bad. So we have to really rely on ourselves and our training to recognize when that end of life has come. And it may be that it has gotten wet, maybe that you've gotten sprayed in the face with some water or something like that while you've got this respirator on. That would be an indication that this filter, which is very, very fine, very thin filter could tear. Once it becomes ripped, once it becomes wet can rip in and lose its functionality. The other thing is that we want to be conscientious. We want to be thinking about, you know, how difficult is it for us to breathe through? As that burden becomes more on the filter. It's going to become harder for us to draw that ear through. We need to be able to recognize that and say, OK, you know what? It's time for us to change those filters. So those are two situations where you really want to be paying attention to that. So when we talk about the different types [00:29:00] of respirators, we got those filtering face pieces. We've got the half face negative pressure respirator, which is the elastomeric version of that filtering face piece. Those are probably the lowest type of respirator that we really want to be considering to wear in the workplace. When properly fit tested, they have an assigned protection factor of 10, meaning that for every 10 particles outside that that one might get through. Ok, so it's a good filter. It definitely does. It does its job, but it's not perfect. It's not 100 percent. It still will allow things to go through. And the caveat here is that these respirators do not have any assigned protection factor until they've been properly fit tested to the person that respirator itself. Just holding it up to your face does not mean anything. It's not going to protect you. We don't know that it's going to protect you the way that that it should be doing. When [00:30:00] we move up to the full face negative pressure respirators, that's the type you see where people will have a, you know, full face that covers your face, it'll have a shield in front of you typically has one or two respirator cartridges, that type of respirator when properly fit tested. Will give you a protection factor of 50. So now we're moving, you know, into a direction where, you know, very few particles are actually getting through into the respirator. So you were talking very, very minute amount of that are getting in there. It's also really good eye protection. If you're working with chemicals or working with particles, things that could get into your eyes, this can certainly help filter those out. And then we, as we move down the line, we get to what they call powered air purifying respirators. Those respirators that have a little motor with them that are forcing the ear in many people have seen these, you know, maybe in a medical [00:31:00] setting, maybe they've seen them in the workplace where, you know, people are evaluating something, it's forcing air in all the time and these can be tight fitting or they can be loose fitting. And depending on the type that you have, the protection factor can vary greatly. We moved down into the supply to air respirators. Those can be anything from working with remote tanks through a manifold or something that's pumping air in from a remote location. Those again can the depending on the type that you're using, the protection factor can vary greatly. It can be as little as 10, or it can be as much as a thousand, depending on the type of system that you have. And then we move into the highest level, which is the self-contained breathing apparatus SCBA and those in the pressure demand mode can be a protection factor of ten thousand. So we, as we move up in line, they become much more protective. Because [00:32:00] they're pushing year in and not allowing that stuff to be coming into your mask into your breathing zone.

Peter Koch: [00:32:07] Let's take a quick break. Integrating workplace safety into your business is a key part of the long term success of any company. And like most components of success, there is no one size fits all solution. MEMIC is committed to partnering with employers across all industries for workplace safety, and we recognize the key to that partnership is understanding the unique demands of the industries that we ensure our safety experts bring experience from the industries that they serve. And this experience provides unique perspective through a critical eye when it comes to understanding the particular exposures and challenges of any industry from construction, retail and manufacturing to hospitality and health care. Our team of experts will work with policyholders to identify opportunities to improve safety. Interested in finding more about MEMIC? [00:33:00] Check us out at MEMIC.com. Or better yet, contact your local independent insurance agent for more information. If you're already insured by MEMIC, then check out our safety resources at MEMIC.com/WorkplaceSafety and sign up for access to our video lending library, our LMS platform or our Safety Director Resource Library. Now, let's get back to today's episode.

Peter Koch: [00:33:28] Great, so again, going back to knowing the what and how much in the what, how dangerous is that particular piece and how much is are you exposed to that fit factor of for every 10 particles one will get in? That's OK. I guess if it's wood dust, then maybe it's pine and it doesn't have any allergens in it or it's not dangerous to you. But then if you get up to silica or you come into lead fumes or something else, that's [00:34:00] happening all of a sudden one particle in 10 and you're breathing that for a number of hours throughout your shift becomes a little more scary. So you really want to know what and how much are you going to be so that you can not only choose the proper type of respirator, but the proper type of cartridge that you might need for that particular hazard. So great explanation Steve, that helps quite a bit. So you talked a little bit about this, about the medical clearance. And so I've understood, I understand I have a hazard. I've got a written program that I've made my own. Now I know the type of respirator that I need, but I can't just hand the respirator to the guy who's going to be in there. There's a few more steps that need to happen, so before I can give it to the person to even be fit test with, what do they need to do first

Steve Badger: [00:34:48] Before anyone can put on a respirator, even for fit testing process or procedures, we have to make sure that they are medically cleared and that starts with a medical [00:35:00] evaluation, meaning a questionnaire that can be found in Appendix C of the standard. By the way, that standard is 29 CFR 1910.134. If you look at the Appendix C, there is a questionnaire that the employees have to fill out and that that questionnaire has to be evaluated by an evaluator that can make the decision on whether or not, you know, can this person safely wear a respirator or do we need more information? And a lot of times, even though you can find these online, one company in particular that does these online for companies is 3M. You can go and you can do these. They'll evaluate them for you and then tell you whether or not you need to go to that next level. They may look at this and you know, there might be some red flags that come up because of past exposures. Or maybe that they have some type of medical issue with asthma or something that [00:36:00] may require them to be seen by something a little further up the line.

Peter Koch: [00:36:03] So why? Why is it important, though? So I mean, I think I understand somewhat, but maybe elaborate on that. Why? Why even have the medical clearance? I mean, so what's the big deal if I've got some pulmonary issue before? I've got some respiratory issues before, maybe even I've smoked before. I know those are some questions that are on the evaluation. Why is it important to evaluate that even through the questionnaire before you move on to the next step?

Steve Badger: [00:36:29] Certainly the most important part of this really is that the person that when you put that respirator on, the very first thing you're going to notice is there is some more force that's required to be able to draw in the amount of ear that you want. You know, whether it's a, you know, air filtering respirator, air purifying type of respirator, you need to make sure that you're going to be able to breathe properly so that when you go to take that breath that you're not, you know, putting adverse effects on your heart, your lungs, [00:37:00] circulatory system that could cause you to have some type of medical event while wearing that. And that is a serious effect because it does happen. You can read about it frequently where people have put these things on, then they're not used to them. Maybe they're even claustrophobic and that just that action of putting that on can cause that, that to happen. So it's absolutely critical, something that OSHA absolutely is going to ask one of the very first questions. Has this person been medically cleared to wear this respirator? And so the very least that you're going to see is this questionnaire that's going to ask all kinds of questions about your past. You're smoking your, you know, to evaluate, are you a good candidate? What are you going to be using this respirator for those types of things? And then they may recommend that you have a an actual physical exam to make sure that you're physically capable of wearing it and to go along with that, depending [00:38:00] on what the contaminant is, whether it's asbestos or lead or cadmium, there may be requirements within those individual standards that require you to have a physical evaluation as well. So it may not be directly involved with the actual respirator use, but it could have to do with the standard of the contaminant. So it is important to make sure that your employees, if you're an employer, that they're going through this process. And if you're an employee, make sure that you go through this process is extremely important for both of you.

Peter Koch: [00:38:33] Right. I think that's a really important point to make. And if you're listening out there and you're a business owner or if you're a safety person, or even if you're the person that's going to wear one of the respirators, if you're not breathing right, you're certainly not going to last very long in the workplace or in this world. So putting something on that's going to change how you breathe is a big deal. And if you've got underlying medical conditions that could exasperate that, it's important for us [00:39:00] to identify those things and make sure that if you're wearing it, you're not being put in a situation where it could make a condition worse or put you at risk of making a mistake that could get you injured in another way within the workplace. You had mentioned being claustrophobic. You know, if you put on a full face respirator, it cuts down some of your vision. Or even if you're in a positive pressure respirator, a hood based respirator, it really does feel very claustrophobic. And if that's changing your mentation, even if it's not changing how you breathe, it may be changing how you make decisions out there. So it could very well be an issue for you going forward or making critical decisions while you are working. So good point. Medical clearance is a is important part. People don't understand the importance of it, so they just kind of gloss it over and then they move to kind of the next step. So if someone's been medically cleared for it, then I now I can give them a respirator, but they still can't just take it and go [00:40:00] off into the workplace. You talked about fit testing before, so take us through the steps around testing and why it's important and the different types.

Steve Badger: [00:40:07] Sure. Before I leave the medical clearance, one other thing that I want to remind people of is that this is not a one and done thing. People have to be reevaluated at least yearly for these. Now with COVID, there's been some, you know, extension of that. But for most of us outside of health care, we really need to be checked yearly to make sure that we are still capable of wearing that. That's a critical point because, you know, as we get older or maybe we've developed other issues as time has gone along, we need to make sure that we're that we're accounting for those to make sure that we're not going to be adversely affected.

Peter Koch: [00:40:50] Great point. So definitely you have to have that medical evaluation every year.

Steve Badger: [00:40:55] So yeah, moving along to the fit testing here, really, there's two types of fit testing [00:41:00] that we have to be concerned with. One is called a qualitative fit test, and the second is a quantitative test. The qualitative test is really only used for the half face negative pressure respirators. Those you know, N95 respirators as long as they, you know, they're for the proper type are the only ones that we're going to be using these for because it is a qualitative test, as it says it is, it is designed to test a person's ability to detect whether or not there has been a breakthrough on that respirator. So there are certain challenge agents that are used for that one of them happens to be if we're using particulates is irritant smoke. Some people have heard of that. It's or maybe you've seen people fit tested with it. It's just this nasty smoke that they put in front of your face and it causes you to cough, [00:42:00] you know, ninety nine percent of all people that take a breath of that start coughing immediately. It is very, very offensive and people start coughing so they know that they're sensitized to it, so that if they put this negative pressure half face respirator on and we're spraying this around them, we are going to know as well as they are going to know that whether or not there's any breakthrough, whether or not it's fitting properly. Now some of the other types, there's one called Bittrex, which I equate with salt and vinegar potato chips. It's got that taste to it, that acetic acid taste you test. You have to again test people, make sure that they're, that they are sensitive to it. But the problem is, you know, with using something like Bittrex is that the person can be tasting it and tell you they're not. There is no way to positively know that they're telling you the truth. They may want to just get through this fit test. They may want to just get it done and get it over with get onto the next thing that they've got to do. [00:43:00] It's not that it's bad, it's just you just want to be as an employee you want to be honest. If you're tasting it, you're tasting it. You know, there's breakthrough. You do not want to play with this, you know, you don't want to, it's your health, you know, type of thing. And a third one is saccharin. They do use this saccharin type stuff. It's a very sweet tasting stuff. Again, you test this person's sensitivity to it ahead of time. My problem with. That is, once I have that taste in my mouth, I can't get it out. It takes forever to get that taste out of my mouth. So, when I'm being fit tested, I'm not sure if I'm really still tasting it from before or am I getting some breakthrough. So, you know, they both have their pros and cons. They're not certainly not as offensive as the urchin smoke, but I hate to word these cheap, but you can. You can cheat with those things if you're using that respirator for vapors purposes only. There is another test called another substance called isoamyl acetate, which more commonly [00:44:00] known as banana oil, because that's exactly what it smells like can be used as a challenge agent. I typically don't like it only because not only does the person being tested have to wear the respirator, but so does the person doing the test as well, because it has a very strong odor to it and a very strong narcotic effect. If you breathe too much of it and it can, it can really be very detrimental to yourself as the tester or anyone else in the room, anywhere else in the building because it will flow along with the air. So certainly something I'd recommend, but it is certainly out there. So those are the challenge agents. And once you establish that a person is aware that they can taste it, they can smell it off. Whatever it is, then you have to run them through a series of exercises through a series of tests to make sure that that respirator is going to stay properly on their face while they are doing their everyday activities, including [00:45:00] talking. So part of this is called the rainbow passage. It was a it was a paragraph created back in the 1950s for the Air Force to mimic different movements with your face that you might do while you're talking and explaining things to people.

Steve Badger: [00:45:15] And so you have to read through this rainbow passage, you have to do some turning your head from side to side things like that to make sure that that respirator is going to stay where it is supposed to be and not break that seal as you're using it. That, in essence, is that qualitative test, the quantitative test, on the other hand, it's a lot more numerical, just like it sounds. It's actually done by a device most typically called a port account. There are some other ones out there, but port account is the most common one. And typically, you know, in essence, simply what it is that it's monitoring the fibers and the particles outside your mask and also the fibers and particles inside your mask. And it gives you a fit factor. It gives you a number [00:46:00] while doing these tests that you're doing the turning your head from side to side and up and down and back and forth reading the rainbow passage. And it gives you these fit factor numbers and for a quantitative test, you have to have a minimum of a 500 fit factor for it to be considered a successful test. So every respirator beyond that half face respirator needs to be fit tested in that manner with a quantitative test.

Peter Koch: [00:46:28] So you can still do the quantitative test with the half face respirators, but it's required to do with the full face or the air supplied respirators, correct?

Steve Badger: [00:46:39] That is correct. The only one that is not required for is the loose fitting PAPRs, because there's no way to make sure that the that the person is, you know, it's not enclosed, totally enclosed. So that's why those types of respirators cannot, cannot be fit tested that way.

Peter Koch: [00:46:57] Fantastic. And I know from having administrative both [00:47:00] tests myself and having had both tests done or doing both tests myself for being fit for a respirator while I was in the in the workplace. Qualitative, I think you hit the nail on the head. It can be something that gets, I guess you could say, spoofed by the employee. The quantitative actually provides some really good information to you. I don't know. And when we've both done it, I don't know if I'm sure you do this to. The person can see the difference in the particulates inside the mask versus what's outside the mask, and they can see the changes when they're doing those different exercises so they can see what's happening to the seal on that respirator while they're doing different things. And that just that education, I think for that individual is can be priceless because prior to them seeing that, they just think it's a piece of PPE and I'm going to be protected from it just because it's a piece of PPE. But it goes back to how you use it, how you understand its use [00:48:00] and how you understand the hazard, which really does make that piece of PPE either work or not work so interesting,

Steve Badger: [00:48:09] Right in this poor account will really show the importance of being clean shaven as well for the respirators. Because when you think about, you know, a human hair that might be protruding out from underneath the seal of that respirator, a human hair is about one hundred and fifty times thicker. Then an asbestos fiber, for instance. And so wherever that fiber, wherever that hair is sticking out, fibers can get through. And so by seeing those numbers and seeing that, oh wait, I'm not clean shaven, it's been a couple of days since I've shaved. You can see where the air leakage is happening because of that and that they really do need to be clean shaven at all times because the expectation is when you're fit testing, yes, you're clean shaven. But once you get out on the field, maybe you skip a day or two, you know, with three or four. And all of a sudden you've got, you know, these here [00:49:00] that are sticking out wherever those are sticking out, it's letting those contaminants in. So it's really important to understand that.

Peter Koch: [00:49:07] Yeah, very true. Your beard is only a food filter. It's not an air filter, right?

Steve Badger: [00:49:11] Correct.

Peter Koch: [00:49:13] So thinking about frequency, you talked about that a medical evaluation has to happen every year. How often does someone need to be fit tested?

Steve Badger: [00:49:22] Yeah. The fit testing also is on a yearly basis, although there are some standards out there that do require every six months, depending on what you're working with, because they want to be sure that that fit is maintaining and you may be required to be fit tested more frequently. There are some things within the standard that if you gain or lose more than 20 pounds, if you've had some type of dental surgery or facial surgery, something that may affect that fit on your face, you certainly want to get another test.

Peter Koch: [00:49:55] Yeah, that's a good point. And going back to that conversation about the types of respirators [00:50:00] every company has their own way of, of molding the respirator. So the last of the respirator, how it's created, and not every person will fit into a particular brand of respirator based on its kind of like a shoe, you know, every you might fit into a size eight shoe for this company, but you won't fit it into a size eight shoe for that company, or it won't fit the same so different sizes of respirator based on your facial structure. And then sometimes even different brands of respirator, depending on your facial structure, would need to be chosen or tried to see if you will actually pass the fit test. Is that correct? That sound right?

Steve Badger: [00:50:39] That does sounds exactly right because, you know, and I have found this in countless times when doing these fit tests, whether it's qualitative or quantitative, is that I will I will get to there. I will start doing a fit test in. The person obviously has too big of a mask. You know, we're looking at the seal and hairs, you know, not the issue. It's just not [00:51:00] sealing to the person's face. So we have to go down in size or we have to go to a totally different brand. You know, there are three M's this north, there's Scott. There's a whole bunch of different brands out there and that they do all fit a little bit differently. And you know, one of the things going along with that is that the care of these respirators is you go through time. You want to be taking really good care of these. You want to be keeping them clean. You want to keeping them dry. You want to keep them out of the sun and out of the heat as much as possible. Because we, especially with the elastomeric ones they tend to dry out. They'll tend to, you know, like keep anything in the back window of your car in the summertime gets very, very hot and it will start melting and become really unwieldy, and it may not form to your face any longer. So care of these things are absolutely critical, especially if you're only going every six months to a year. Without that fit test, you want to be sure that it's fitting [00:52:00] you properly. So in between times, one of the things that we that we do is every time you put this respirator on, you want to be doing what we call fit checks. We want to do a positive and negative fit check, which a positive fit check would be. Where you cover the exhalation valve, you blow on that, you know, semi forcefully. You don't want to, you know, blow to hard, but you want to fill that mask up in that seal wants to hold. If you if that seal will hold for 15 to 20 seconds, that means that that check is doing OK. Then you want to try the other, you know, depending on if you've got cartridges or, you know, some way to cover the filtering piece of that and then you inhale and it should collapse the respirator and the seal should hold for 15 to 20 seconds, and that will indicate that the negative fit check is working the way that it's supposed to. That's a good rule of thumb to do every single time you put that respirator on.

Peter Koch: [00:52:55] Yeah, and so I think it's part of it required with the standard as well. So you're supposed to field fit [00:53:00] or fit check once you put it on to determine whether or not the seal is still functional because again, you know, lots of stuff could happen. It could be old. It could have lost its some of its elastomer properties, or it could have been damaged. And you don't know. And there's other pieces inside the respirator that could have been damaged that would allow air to come in or not be filtered correctly. There's there is one way valves, little flaps inside the respirators that have to be looked at and maintained and made sure that they're in good shape in order for that respirator to work properly. So if we think about the care and the maintenance, you know, in the field and someone's using the respirator, what are some of the mistakes people make when they finish with the respirator? Like what? What are they doing that's not helping them when they want to go put it back on again?

Steve Badger: [00:53:55] Yeah, there's a there's a few things that that don't help them. First of all, you know, they take it off, [00:54:00] they hang it up, you know, they'll hang it on a nail somewhere. That really is not helping that respirator any. It needs to be cleaned and needs to be taken care of just like any other piece of equipment. And, you know, and when we clean these things, we want to be very careful that we're, you know, we can use a little bit of disinfectant, but we don't want to use too much because it will tend to dry these things out greatly. And again, that elastomeric ability of that thing to be able to move and fit with our face gets greatly affected the more it dries out. And so we want to make sure that we, you know, use no more than a 10 percent bleach solution. But I would make sure that you clean it every single time. Make sure that it's dry, make sure it's sealed in a Ziploc bag, something that keeps the dust and the contaminants off from it in between times because you may not use it every day. But even if you do, you want to make sure that that thing is in clean and a good condition. The next time that you go to put that thing on the other problem [00:55:00] with hanging these things up, the straps that hold the respirator to your head will tend to stretch or they could get damaged and then break. You know, there's lots of bad things that can happen from that. So hanging those things up absolutely not the way to go. You want to treat that. As you know, as it is, it's a device that is protecting your life.

Peter Koch: [00:55:24] Yeah. What about the practice of removing the canisters from the mask and sealing the mask separate from the canister when you put it away? Is that a good rule of thumb or required or? I've heard that spoken about at different companies.

Steve Badger: [00:55:38] Yeah, it really depends on a couple of factors one, you know? And again, this comes down to the company policy that part of the program where we, you know, if you're using this, maybe you're stepping into a place, you're looking at something coming right back out. That's one of those situations where you might reseal those. You might put tape over those [00:56:00] cartridges and reuse them. You know, the best practices, honestly, is that they get removed every time because we don't know, you know, if this can take a certain burden, it can take a certain load. How much have we given that, you know, buy that few minutes that we were in that we just don't know. And so, you know, it's always better to err on the side of caution when you when dealing with respiratory protection. So, you know, taking those off, disposing of them properly, you know, not just leaving them, laying around for someone else to grab or use because they can't find other ones, make sure those get disposed of properly. And as Peter said, you know, perhaps, you know, storing those separately, you know, from your respirator is certainly a best practice.

Peter Koch: [00:56:45] Great. So you know, you take it off, put it away or clean it really well outside inside. Seal it up, protect it from damage. There's a lot to the standard. There's a lot to doing this. So you know, you can't just hand the respirator to an employee and expect them [00:57:00] to have the knowledge to use it correctly. So this goes to the training part. What training is the employer required to provide to the employee for respirator protection or respirator use and respiratory protection?

Steve Badger: [00:57:16] The very first training that is required by the OSHA standard is that they are trained in the hazards and the recognition of the contaminants that are that they are being protected from. You know, what are the you know, what does this smell like, look like, taste like, you know, whatever, so that they can recognize that if they're being exposed to it, that's the very first training that they have to have. Second of all, they have to have the training in the respiratory protection program, which is all of those pieces that we talked about earlier and knowing how to properly put on a respirator. It was one of my favorite things to do when doing respiratory training for a group for the very first time is handing them a respirator and telling them, OK, go ahead and put it on, [00:58:00] and you'll be amazed at how many different ways a respirator can be put on improperly. And so, you know, it's always a good way to start by showing people how many different ways this can go wrong, but there is one right way of doing it. So we want to make sure that they understand that we want to make sure that they know how to inspect it, to look for those pieces and parts, those inhalation valves, those exhalation valves, those all of those little pieces. Those that are inside that are required to be there to make sure that that respirator is functioning the way that it's supposed to be. We want to make sure that they are trained in how to the proper care of it, proper storage, maintenance, if something does need to be fixed or replaced. You know, how are we going to do that? Do we have one person that does that? We have to report it. You know, how does that whole thing work has to be put into that program so people have to be trained on that as well?

Peter Koch: [00:58:53] Awesome. And then I guess finally around the training part, does the standard require that there is a program administrator for respiratory [00:59:00] protection?

Steve Badger: [00:59:01] Yes, there has to be a program administrator listed in the program at the very front of the program. And that program administrator is the ultimate authority when it comes to that program. That's who has the final say in what's in there. That administrator has to go through that program at least annually to make sure that it is up to date, that everything that's within it is still current, that we're still doing the same things. Or if there are things that maybe we're doing differently, that those are addressed in that program.

Peter Koch: [00:59:33] Perfect. There's a lot of moving parts to this piece. And well, I guess before we come right to the end of this, is there anything that our listeners should know that I haven't asked about yet for respiratory protection, Steve?

Steve Badger: [00:59:49] Well, I don't think so, I think the only other issue that I would really want to talk a little bit about is in areas where respiratory protection is not required [01:00:00] and an employee wants to bring in their own respirator and wear that. We really have to be careful as an employer about that. We can't just say, OK, you know what? We're going to close our eyes and then in and let that happen. We really have to make sure that the employer provides the employee with Appendix D of the standard, which requires, you know, which states that you know, it's a voluntary use only you can wear your own respirator, that sort of thing. But you may still have to implement parts of the respiratory protection program to make sure that those people are still going to be properly protected and that they are medically cleared to wear them. Because it is your workplace, you're allowing them to wear them. You have to be sure that they are medically cleared to wear them. The only exclusion to that is if it is a dust mask, one of those like an N ninety five type respirator [01:01:00] that is used just for that purpose, then that does get excluded from having to do the all of the bells and whistles. But if they're wearing any type of elastomeric respirator, they do have to make sure that they are medically cleared and that they are following the company policy on those.

Peter Koch: [01:01:21] So I just want to clarify that. So if someone voluntarily brings in a paper mask, a filtering face piece that maybe it's an N95. So not just the dust masks, the single banded dust mask without a rating on it, that's a whole other category and doesn't fit into the respirator standard at all.

Steve Badger: [01:01:38] Correct

Peter Koch: [01:01:21] So if it's the N95 filtering face piece paper mask, the employer is not required to do medical evaluations with them. Is that correct?

Steve Badger: [01:01:51] That is correct. That is the exception. Anything beyond that, like those elastomeric ones they do have to go through all the bells and whistles to [01:02:00] make sure that because it is their workplace.

Peter Koch: [01:02:03] So if they're wearing voluntarily wearing an elastomeric tight fitting respirator, then they have to be medically evaluated and still fit tested for use. But if it's a filtering face piece, a paper mask, then they just need Appendix D. So that they understand the risks and hazards of wearing a respirator.

Steve Badger: [01:02:25] Correct.

Peter Koch: [01:02:26] Thanks. So we're right at the end of the podcast here. So if someone had more questions about respiratory protection and we're looking for more information and they didn't want to just do the Google thing, where could they go to find out more information about respiratory protection?

Steve Badger: [01:02:42] Well, I would certainly hope that they would approach us. Our lost control consultants are certainly well aware of the standards and you know, I can refer people to standards all day. But you know, if you're not sure of the context, it can be very daunting to take a look at. So I would certainly recommend, [01:03:00] you know, going or coming to us, you know, asking those questions, you know, reaching out, asking an expert. I would also, you know, want to, you know, if you've got a company that has a safety director already. That would be a good resource. And also, if you are using resources, using respiratory protection, already taking a look at, you know, say, for instance, 3M and their website and their different types of respirators that they have available and those sorts of things because they do have a lot of really good information on respirators themselves.

Peter Koch: [01:03:34] Fantastic. So the manufacturers for the respirators, whether it's 3M or North or Scott or a number of them out there certainly have a lot of respirators and OSHA has a good resource page for the respiratory protection standard itself. Is that is that correct?

Steve Badger: [01:03:49] Yep, they do. They absolutely have some, some really good resources. They have some nice handouts that help explain some of that information there. But again, it really is going to come [01:04:00] back to, you know, having somebody that really is an expert to get you to step one of the process, which is finding out, do we have an air contaminant and what can we do about it before we get there?

Peter Koch: [01:04:13] Yeah, that's a really great point, Steve. And I think it's a point or a step that a lot of people miss. They move right to. We've got to have a program, but you might not know what you need the program for yet. So that step of evaluating the hazard, trying to get some air sampling done, possibly to determine the what and the how much can give you a lot of great direction and that's not easy to do, so certainly reach out to us. There's other companies out there that will do air sampling. I know a lot of the states here in Maine Safety Works, which is an educational support arm of OSHA here in Maine. They will provide some help and other states have similar programs that you could reach out to for them too. If you've got some questions about atmospheric hazards and what you might need to do [01:05:00] to reduce the hazard or eliminate the hazard. Fantastic.

Peter Koch: [01:05:05] Thanks, Steve. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise with us. There's we really just kind of scratched the surface. The respiratory protection standard or just respiratory protection in itself has a lot of moving parts and there's a lot of things and it can get pretty complicated. I think that you helped provide a fairly clear path through some of the clouds today, but there's certainly more that we could talk on, I'm sure.

Steve Badger: [01:05:30] Yeah, there certainly is. And you know, and this is one of the reasons why it's always in OSHA's top 10's number of citations that they give out every year because it is very complicated even for people that are trying to do the right thing and follow the follow the rules. It can still be very daunting, and you only have to miss one step to be in violation. So. So absolutely.

Peter Koch: [01:05:50] Yeah, for sure. Well, perfect. That about wraps up this week's Safety Experts podcast, and thanks for sharing your expertise with myself and all of our listeners out there, Steve.

Steve Badger: [01:06:00] You're [01:06:00] welcome. Thank you.

Peter Koch: [01:06:01] Awesome. So to all of our listeners out there, thank you very much today on the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast. We've been speaking about respiratory protection with Steve Badger, safety management consultant here at MEMIC. The MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is produced by Rod Stanley and written, hosted and co-produced by myself, Peter Koch. If you have any questions about respiratory protection, send our team of safety experts an email right through our website at MEMIC.com And look for workplace safety and our safety experts. If you'd like to hear more about a particular subject or you have an idea for a safety related topic for the podcast. Email me at [email protected]. Also, check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/podcast, where you can find additional resources, links to other podcasts with Steve, as well as our entire podcast archive. And while you're there, sign up for our safety net blog so you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and [01:07:00] if you haven't done so already, I'd really appreciate it. If you would subscribe to the podcast and then take a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, thank you because it really helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing this show with a business associate friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMICs Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.

Called by many different names: Man lifts, boom lifts, cherry picker, scissor lift, or bucket truck, mobile elevated work platforms are everywhere. They are replacing the traditional ways people work have worked at height.

On this episode of the Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with Joe Gagne, Division Safety Trainer at United Rentals to discuss the changes to the Mobile Elevated Work Platform standards.

Resources:

https://www.forconstructionpros.com/rental/lifting-equipment/article/21104458/accident-data-directs-best-practices-for-mobile-elevating-work-platforms

https://www.ishn.com/articles/111059-new-ansi-standard-covers-mewp-design-training-safe-use#:~:text=The%20new%20ANSI%20A92%20standard%20was%20developed%20to%20improve%20safety,officially%20effective%20in%20December%202019.

https://constructionexec.com/article/understanding-new-ansi-a92-standard-changes

Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Hello, listeners, and welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host. Peter Koch, called by many different names, could be a man lift, boom lift, cherry picker, scissor lift or bucket truck. Mobile elevated work platforms are everywhere. They are replacing the traditional ways people have worked at height places where in the past you may have seen a ladder or a lift or two of scaffolding or even a man in the bucket of a loader, unfortunately. You now see a MEWP or a mobile elevated work platform. As a matter of fact, just yesterday, as I was leaving a safety conference, there was a scissor lift in the median, with two men standing in it and fixing a messaging sign. They had all of their tools with them, and they were able to easily move the length and the height of the sign. Contrast that with the workplace accident I investigated not too long ago, where a maintenance worker was replacing a lighted sign at the front of the business, where he worked [00:01:00] and fell from the stepladder that he was using. Another example I have a policyholder that's planning to use an electric scissor lift to repair and maintain their indoor climbing wall and some other elevated features in their adventure center. The MEWP that they're looking at had to not only extend to the twenty five foot height necessary to reach the upper holds on the wall, but the data from the Market Insights website shows that the high growth potential for area work platforms is due to rising worker safety concerns across the globe. And no wonder there are much more stable platform for someone to work on than, say, a ladder. And these really aren't the old bucket truck or baskets on a forklift or a loader that we have seen in the past in the construction industry over the last 30 years. The introduction of advanced technologies such as tilt and active load sensors that warn the operator or halt the machine operation when safety guidelines are approached or exceeded, as well as an incredible number of equipment. Configurations and options make these an indispensable [00:02:00] tool for accessing any work area that could be at height. The article for Market Insights goes on to state that one factor that continues to stem the use of MEWPs is the lack of skilled operators and the incidents with these machines that are caused by misuse or lack of proper training. To help us explore more about mobile elevated work platforms. Is Joe Gagne, division safety trainer for United Rentals? Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe Gagne: [00:02:26] Thank you for having me, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here.

Peter Koch: [00:02:28] It's great. And we were talking about this before your voice. I'm jealous right now because it's it sounds great on the microphone. It's going to sound awesome on the podcast.

Joe Gagne: [00:02:37] Maybe I'm in the wrong line of business.

Peter Koch: [00:02:39] You might. You might be. You give Joe Rogan a run for his money, I guess, right? So you work for United Rentals as a division safety trainer. So tell me about your tell me, tell me a little bit about United Rentals and then tell me about what you do for United Rentals and the scope of the work and how far you travel to do that work.

Joe Gagne: [00:02:58] Thanks. Well, [00:03:00] United Rentals is the largest equipment sales service company in the world. We have over 1400 branch locations throughout North America, and we're starting to expand into Europe and Australia right now. And as a division safety trainer, I work with our customers and our employees to ensure that they can operate our equipment safely. A large component of what I do is training and certifying operators, so we bring our folks in and we ensure that they know what the rules and regulations are with the parts and components of the equipment are and what are the best operating practices. So at the end of the day, what's most important is they go home.

Peter Koch: [00:03:33] Yeah, absolutely. And we're on the same page. We talked to that as a safety consultant, and I talked to our clients about that all the time. Like the most important thing is your employees go home in more tired than they were when they get in today, if they are going to give you an honest day's work, but they have to go home safely to their family, their loved ones and do other things, not just work. It's the really important part.

Joe Gagne: [00:03:54] Absolutely. And that's really where we have to make safety personal. And if we can establish personal [00:04:00] aspect of what they're doing and that's always in the forefront of their mind why they're working, it will keep them safer throughout their workday.

Peter Koch: [00:04:06] Yeah, beautiful. And we were talking just before the podcast, some interesting psychological effects that are out there. So we're talking about the Dunning Kruger effect and that interesting notion that people don't know what they don't know until someone comes in and helps them know. And that's your job.

Joe Gagne: [00:04:22] Exactly. Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation out there in the industry. Folks are told information from somebody that might have been working for their organization for a long time, and they were told from somebody prior to that may not have been fully aware of what the standards, regulations, rules and laws were. So that's where I step in as a subject matter expert for my organization.

Peter Koch: [00:04:42] Right on. So let's go down that road because I think it would be interesting to talk about this and let's talk about the myths that you encounter when you get on the job site and you bring a piece of equipment in and or you go to do training with somebody and they are trying to explain to you what they [00:05:00] think the right thing is and. What are some of those myths, so what's the maybe the most popular myth or misunderstanding or misconception that you get when you go to a job site?

Joe Gagne: [00:05:09] So the number one myth is I don't need to be certified or trained on this piece of equipment. And the reality is you've always had to be. It's just important to again know what the requirements of training are because different organizations have different standards for training. So we want to make sure that your organization's training is up to the standard that's been published by ANSI, and that's where we ensure that the training that we provide actually exceeds that.

Peter Koch: [00:05:33] Yeah, that's awesome. And that's actually my top myth, too. When I go and talk to a client or a policyholder about the, well, fall protection, and inevitably it gets to aerial lifts and we talk about their training. The most frequent training that I find is that, oh yeah, I've got trained. So who did your training? Well, the guy that dropped the piece of equipment off did the training. Well, who did he train? Well, he trained the guy that signed the piece of paper that took the lift in [00:06:00] tow. Well, that's not training like you as the operator have to have training. And it's not just here's the machine. Those are the controls go forth and prosper. It's not that it's more complex than that because they're a very complex machine.

Joe Gagne: [00:06:14] Absolutely. And with the new ANSI A ninety two point two for that specifically addresses what constitutes training. It really more clearly defines what training and certification is, and it requires two components. The first is a theory portion of instruction where we go over everything from rules and regulations to parts components to best operating practices fall protection. Once we complete that portion of the instruction, we move on to the practical portion of instruction where each operator is required to get on the machine and demonstrate their ability to operate it competently and safely. When you compile both of those aspects up, then you have a certified operator at the end, provided they can prove that they can complete those skills in the course correctly.

Peter Koch: [00:06:56] Yeah, because the beginning part is a more general training, [00:07:00] right? So we'll have specifics to the piece of equipment that you are providing them, but it covers aerial lifts in general.

Joe Gagne: [00:07:07] Absolutely. We want to establish a foundation of knowledge that pertains to all aerial lifts, and a lot of that involves, again, the rules and regulations, the stability characteristics of the machine. And just make sure we're clear that there are two different types. There is actual certification training, which the operators require, and then there is specific training for the machine that you're operating and that's called familiarization training. So not only do you need to be certified to operate the machines classification, generally, you need to be familiar with the specific machine that is being operated.

Peter Koch: [00:07:38] Good. And I think we're going to get into that a little bit more when we talk about familiarization and what goes into that particular part. But let's get back to the certification piece and you had, you talked about one of those pieces of stability characteristics. What are some other things that might go into that certification, part of the training for an operator?

Joe Gagne: [00:07:58] Well, we always want to make sure that the [00:08:00] operator selects the right machine to begin with for their assigned task. Not all the machines are the same. They have different capabilities and characteristics, so it's important to understand the scope of your work first. So you select the most appropriate machine for that task. We often find folks end up on machines that are not best suited for the task they're assigned, and that's really where the domino effect starts.

Peter Koch: [00:08:22] Yeah, that's a really good point. It comes up with another myth. I think that we could talk about. When you choose a machine that's not quite suited for the job, you find people either modifying or using the machine in ways that it really wasn't intended. And that's one of those myths. I think that people think that they can make changes to the machine so that it better fits the job. And that's not quite true, is it?

Joe Gagne: [00:08:45] You are correct. A lot of folks will try to modify the machine so it suits their need, but you are not permitted to modify the machine in any way, shape or form that isn't approved, designed or engineered by the manufacturer of the machine.

Peter Koch: [00:08:57] And good luck with that.

Joe Gagne: [00:08:58] Exactly. So that's [00:09:00] where really we want to part with our customers and make sure that they are selecting the most appropriate machine for their task, and we can make recommendations on certain accessories that may aid them and completing their job in a safer manner.

Peter Koch: [00:09:10] Yeah, that's perfect. And we were talking earlier too about there is a myriad of accessories that are available. So it's not just the stock machine that you see in the catalog and you have to know like how big it is, how tall it reaches, how stable it's going to be. Will it be able to articulate in the way that you need it? But there's a number of other things that you can get with the rental that will allow you to modify it to be more particular to the task that you need to do. So what are some of the most common accessories that people need?

Joe Gagne: [00:09:40] Probably the most popular accessory that we outfit our machines for customers is what we call a glazing kit, and that is simply a shelf unit that is bolted on to the front of the work platform, and it allows the operator to place any type of plated material, whether it be insulated glass, sheetrock or plywood on there, secure it in place and lift it up to a height where it can be mounted or [00:10:00] installed. And again, it's important you're using the manufacturer provided accessory because all of those accessories have capacity limits and you want to obviously make sure you adhere to those limits to make sure you don't tip the machine over.

Peter Koch: [00:10:12] Right. So taking a couple of bolts in a drill and adding some framing onto the machine is not the way you want to go.

Joe Gagne: [00:10:21] Absolutely not. Some of the things I've seen people construct over the years on these machines would frighten some folks. Oftentimes, we find more modifications occur in the wintertime when the operatives are trying to protect themselves from mother nature and the elements. But really, when you start modifying the machine, you're adding additional weight to it. You may be compromising the guardrail system by drilling holes into it, and you may be creating a kite or parachute or sail in the air to catch the wind and potentially tip the machine over.

Peter Koch: [00:10:48] Sure. And you bring up a really great point where any modification done to the machine is not done out of bad intention. It's done out of necessity. There's the individual doing the job is looking at the job and thinking, [00:11:00] Hey, I would be safer. I would be more comfortable if I could have this or do that. And so they're going to try to make it the way they want it. But what I'm hearing from you is a better way to look at that is not once the machines on the ground at the job site to make those changes, but is to do it early on when you're having the conversation with the sales guy from the rental company to figure out what exactly do you need? And there's a particular term for that, I think within the standard correct.

Joe Gagne: [00:11:30] There it is. It's called safe use planning.

Peter Koch: [00:11:31] Right, I couldn't remember that. So I'm glad you did.

Joe Gagne: [00:11:33] And one of the new regulations that was just published or standards from ANSI specifically addresses safe use planning and that falls under ANSI. A ninety two point two two. And really, what you want to do is get a complete scope of what the task is and identify hazards and come up with a risk assessment for those hazards and make sure you select the right machine and do some forethought into what tasks are going to be performed, how they're going to be performed and [00:12:00] what accessories we may be able to put on the machine for you when you do rent one so that you can work safer and within the manufacturer's guidelines.

Peter Koch: [00:12:07] Yeah. And I think that's another myth that you've run into is that when people get a particular piece of equipment, they figure that they can use it anywhere on the job site. And I think that it's a misunderstanding because the operator might not have been the person that received the training about the capacity of the machine and how it's supposed to be used. So you find scissor lifts that are designed to be used on flat, hard terrain, outside on rough terrain, and then we wonder why it feels unstable or falls over.

Joe Gagne: [00:12:39] Right and one of the nice things is they've actually are now requiring what we call supervisor training, where it eliminates the practice component of the training curriculum. But anybody that supervises or selects or picks out a machine for use on a project needs to be trained, so they need to know what type of equipment is available. They have to do the risk assessment to ensure the work environment [00:13:00] is going to be safe for their folks. So it's really important that those people that are selecting calling in the rentals are aware of all the various different types of machines that are available, so they select the most appropriate one.

Peter Koch: [00:13:11] So does the standard. Does the standard require supervisor training now?

Joe Gagne: [00:13:17] It does.

Peter Koch: [00:13:18] So has that been a change from the previous standard and the update for the new standard?

Joe Gagne: [00:13:24] It has been. So that's something we've trying to communicate to our customers that anybody involved with the process of selection, use of the MEWP needs to be trained to the regulation. So oftentimes we find the folks that are responsible for calling in and picking out a machine for rental or reserving one for rental may not know anything, if at all, about the machine and what their capabilities and characteristics are. So it's important to convey that information to them, and they have a full understanding of the scope of work that is to be performed so they can select the most appropriate machine for that task.

Peter Koch: [00:13:59] Does [00:14:00] the standard provide tools? Because I think in a lot of places, the person that may be doing the ordering of the machine is not the guy that really has the best idea of what the worksite is going to look like. He might be the parts guy he might be just he might be there to order and reconciliation for the for the company. So are there tools whereby the supervisor can put all the required information together in a form and then get that to the guy who's doing the ordering so he can order the right machine?

Joe Gagne: [00:14:33] Absolutely. And that's really where our outside sales representatives for our organization step in and they can provide that type of subject matter expertise and make suggestions based on the findings after the risk assessment that has been conducted for the job site.

Peter Koch: [00:14:46] Cool and go back to. So does the, does the standard have a sample risk assessment in there or is it something that the company would need to come up with on their own?

Joe Gagne: [00:14:56] It does provide a guidance and outline for what things should be looked for and what [00:15:00] type of hazards should be added? And mitigated.

Peter Koch: [00:15:03] That's cool. And I think that's it's a good suggestion, and we'll refer to that later on in the podcast, too, but managers, supervisors, companies who are going to be utilizing these MEWPS need to get access to the standard. They need to know what's in the standard so that they can figure out what they need to do. And if they don't get access to the standard, then the next best thing, or maybe even the better thing is to contact someone like yourself or their rental company so that they know what's required of them.

Joe Gagne: [00:15:33] Absolutely. Sometimes we find standards and regulations can be a little confusing to some if they're not used to reading that type of jargon. So I always recommend to reach out to a subject matter expert so we can clarify any information or questions they may have and make us suggestions. And we can also essentially let those folks know what is expected, what they can do to identify and mitigate certain hazards and circumstances on their job site and come up with a comprehensive plan for them so they can work [00:16:00] as safe as they possibly can.

Peter Koch: [00:16:01] Perfect. What other new changes are in the standard? So we talked about the supervisor training, we talked about the familiarization training. We talked about the certification. There's been some changes in those. What other changes are in the standard that our listeners need to know about.

Joe Gagne: [00:16:17] So probably one of the more impactful one falls under ANSI A ninety two point two two, which is the safe use standard, and that requires that there be a MEWP rescue plan documented by an organization. And on that rescue plan, you have to have two processes or procedures outlined. The first being what process or procedure will be followed immediately following a fall arrest from a work platform. The other process of procedure that needs to be clearly defined and outlined is what will be done in the event you have somebody stranded in an elevated position on a platform. The time to figure out what you're going to do in those scenarios are not when they're happening. You want to have a plan in place and minimize the amount of time that the person [00:17:00] is either suspended because of suspension trauma or the person being stranded in the elevated position.

Peter Koch: [00:17:07] Yeah, right on. And there are many organizations out there that don't have those two pieces in place, and they will rely on the user's manual that comes with the piece of machinery to guide them into what the procedures are. And that's not the time you don't want to be rifling through the book when the guy's either dangling off the side of the MEWP or is stuck in the basket, or worse yet, is stuck in the basket and has just been stung by a bee. And he's allergic and you've got to get him down. What do we do? That's not the plan,

Joe Gagne: [00:17:39] And the standard clearly states that all folks involved with the operation of the MEWP, whether it's the supervisor, the operator or the designated ground person, have to be familiar with that rescue plan. Again, you want to rescue them in a timely fashion, so the time to figure out what you're going to do is not when those circumstances are happening.

Peter Koch: [00:17:59] Right? We'll get [00:18:00] back to rescue in a second because it's one of something that's near and dear to my heart. And I find that in Maine and all across New England, we insure people that are geographically isolated in their work. So you can't always rely on your local fire department to show up to help you, and you might be working by yourself, which is not where we want to go so near and dear to my heart. We'll talk a little bit about rescue in a second, but I want to get back to a term that you just used that designated ground person. So the guys that I saw in the scissor lift working on the sign the other day, there is nobody else around. It was just those guys. The only other guy that was around was the traffic flagger who was directing traffic. And he's not the designated ground guy.

Joe Gagne: [00:18:42] He probably was not.

Peter Koch: [00:18:44] So tell me a little bit about the designated ground guy responsibilities and what they need to be trained to do.

Joe Gagne: [00:18:49] Now you're required to have a designated ground person within visual proximity of the machine at all time during its use and operation. And that's to ensure if something does happen, that that person can come over and render [00:19:00] aid so that ground person is required to be certified as well as familiar with the machine that's being operated. So in the event there is something wrong, they can come right over, provide aid as necessary,

Peter Koch: [00:19:11] Right on really important part. And I don't I think it's probably something that a lot of companies aren't thinking about, like if they do seek or reach out to someone for training, they're going to put the worker who is going to be in the basket through the training, but they're not going to put the laborer who is going to be the designated ground guy typically through the training, because for whatever reason, typically it's a cost thing. We've talked about that, that productivity safety rub, there's always friction between

Joe Gagne: [00:19:40] Always competing interests.

Peter Koch: [00:19:40] You got it. Totally. So aside from saying, hey, it's part of the requirement and yeah, the designated ground person will be able to rescue them. How do you encourage the business owners or the supervisors to get those designated ground guys into the training?

Joe Gagne: [00:19:56] Well, first we start by educating them, letting them know what the standards [00:20:00] are and what is expected of them. And again, trying to convey the importance of safety and how impactful it is to their organization, not only from a cost perspective, but from a personnel perspective as well. All it takes is one injury and that could throw the whole project off schedule. One of your key employees are sidelined. So prevention is key. Coming up with that safe work plan and eliminating the likelihood or potential of an accident occurring. So by doing a comprehensive, safe risk assessment. Likely you'll mitigate or eliminate any possibility of anything going wrong.

Peter Koch: [00:20:36] Perfect, now and that designated ground person, not the same type of requirement that you would have for, say, permit required confined space like that guy, the attendant his only job is to watch the hole and be in communication so that can that designate a ground person, have other duties like to be the laborer to move supplies and material up to the guys that are in the basket? [00:21:00]

Joe Gagne: [00:21:00] Absolutely. They don't necessarily need to be staring at the operator like in a trench situation. They could be doing other tasks, but it's important they stay within visual proximity of the machine while it's in use and operation, and they can act as the designated ground person for multiple machines on a job site as long as they're staying within visual proximity. There may be an event where the operator somehow becomes medically disabled and is unable to communicate his need. So it's important that that designated ground person always have his eyes on the platform to make sure the operator is safe and doing what he needs to do up there.

Peter Koch: [00:21:31] Right on. And if there are multiple platforms in that scenario, the designated ground person would need to have familiarization training in each of those machines Correct?

Joe Gagne: [00:21:43] Correct. And the nice thing about the regulation here in the United States, comparatively to say Canada is operators are allowed to familiarize themselves with the machine by using the manuals, whereas that's not the case in Canada. So every machine. One of the most integral parts [00:22:00] of that machine is the manufacturer's operating manual. It's a required item and it's going to be located in the black weather resistant storage compartment inside the work platform. I like to call it, your mom. I call it your mom. Because if you take the first letter of each one of the words manufacturer's operating manual, put those three first letters together. It spells mom. So I always tell folks when you're a little kid and say, Dad was at work and you had a question, who would you go ask? You would always go ask your mom and your mom was always riding with you on a machine. So if you have any questions about what an icon means, what a switch does, or what a process or procedure requires of you, you just ask your mom.

Peter Koch: [00:22:37] That's perfect. I love it. Can I steal that? Because I might very well use that the next time I go to a policyholder

Joe Gagne: [00:22:41] Absolutely and I have to give credit to my colleague, Suzette, who is the division safety trainer in our southern New England area. I actually stole that from her.

Peter Koch: [00:22:51] Perfect. All right. Well, kudos to Suzette, because that's a pretty awesome acronym to use, and it's a great way to remember and to also you think about it, I go to a lot of job sites [00:23:00] where they're not renting the piece of equipment. They've owned it for years and mom's not present anymore.

Joe Gagne: [00:23:06] That's generally where I find the most deficiencies on equipment is customer owned equipment. And again, it really comes down to lack of knowledge. They don't know what the inspection requirements are. They don't know what is required equipment on the machine. And they generally sometimes fall into disrepair because as long as it's working and getting the platform up to the height, they need to perform their job or task at, then everything's groovy for them. But the reality is, there are some very specific requirements for inspection and maintenance on these machines, and it's important to keep those inspections up to date because things do come out of calibration. Things do wear down. Things do get stressed. So by implementing a proper inspection program and following the intervals of inspection that the standards require, it really cuts down on the amount of maintenance, wear and tear on the machine. And it lessens the amount of downtime you may have on that machine on your job site. All it takes is [00:24:00] one machine to go down, and again, it can throw totally throw off the entire schedule of your project. So by having a robust inspection and maintenance program on your machine, that will eliminate a lot of those problems before they even occur.

Peter Koch: [00:24:13] That's great. So what happens if you don't have the manual in there, which is going to give you the operation parameters, it's going to give you capacities, it's going to give you the inspection parameters around that. How do you go about getting another one? I know if one and this would never happen if I got one from United or really any of the other companies that reputable companies that are renting equipment out there, it's not going to come without a manual. But if I own a piece of equipment and I don't have it anymore, who do I reach out to how do I get one?

Joe Gagne: [00:24:42] Well, you're more than happy to reach out to any United Rentals local branch office and just request one will be happy to provide you with one at no cost. That's part of us partnering with our customers and other people that are users of these machines to ensure they can work on them safely. Another resources you can actually go right to each one of the machines manufacturer's website, and usually they're going [00:25:00] to have a document library on the website for training manuals, maintenance manuals and generally you can download the specific manual for your machine if you don't have one.

Peter Koch: [00:25:09] Yeah, perfect. And I think that's a good point. So reach out to the rental company, but also go back to the manufacturer and see if you can find it there. And it's a critical piece of equipment to have on board with the piece of machinery. So as a business owner or a superintendent of a larger company, you need to make sure that those are present because it gives the user the operator. An integral tool, and I know you provide a really robust training when you come on board, but in reality, what do you expect that operator to remember from the training that you give them? Like how what's the percentage that you expect them to take away and then be able to remember if you came back in a month, what would they what would they have retained?

Joe Gagne: [00:25:51] The adult learner? So I do recertification all the time as well and people that I've worked with three, four or [00:26:00] five years ago. And I find that oftentimes if they're not using that information on a daily basis or very often they often compartmentalize that information and they don't access it very often, so it doesn't come right up to their memory. So I always encourage our folks to always read the operations chapter, which is generally the second chapter and the manual, and go over all the various nuances and unique things for that specific machine. I like to joke around with my trainees, and I tell them next time they're headed to the porta potty, grab the manual and it gives them some light reading to do while they're busy,

Peter Koch: [00:26:32] Right, there you go. Perfect. That's a great piece because it's right and I do the same thing. I'm sure you would do the same thing with a task that you maybe had training on before or, you know, could be anything from chainsaw operation to hiring a rescue for myself. Like when I get into the rescue season, when I'm doing high angle rescue with my ski areas for the maintenance groups, I've got to spend some time going back through and re remembering operations, [00:27:00] sequences, procedures, how everything functions and works so that I know what I'm doing when I get into the when I get onto the job site. So same thing is going to happen. If it's your construction season and you've been laid off for the winter or you've been transferred to plowing for a while and you're coming back in, it's spring and you're starting to gear up for construction. I mean, your job is to be in that lift. Great suggestion. Find some. Find some quality time with your manual.

Joe Gagne: [00:27:27] Quality, quiet time with your manual, wherever that may be.

Peter Koch: [00:27:30] Yes, find some quality time with your mom, right?

Joe Gagne: [00:27:32] Exactly. Spend some time with your mom.

Peter Koch: [00:27:35] Perfect. We should have done this on Mother's Day would have been perfect. So let's get back to the standard a little bit more and talk about some of the other changes that the standard has driven. Maybe. Is there anything that the standard has required about the machine itself?

Joe Gagne: [00:27:53] Sure. So that is specifically addressed in ANSI A ninety two point two zero, which evolves around the design requirements of [00:28:00] the machines and the safety features that have to be incorporated into the machines by the manufacturers. Probably the most impactful one we've seen come out of this latest batch of standards is the act of load sensing requirement in platforms where there is sensors mounted on the substructure that the platform was mounted to, and it is constantly and consistently monitoring and evaluating the amount of weight in the platform. And at any point that those sensors detect that it is over its designated weight, it's going to lock out or prevent future or further movement towards greater danger. It will still allow relief functions to be performed, though, because there may be an instance where something heavy falls on the platform. The operator has no way to get it out, but he still needs to be able to get himself safely down to the ground. So it's still allows those relief functions to put the machine back into its most stable configuration.

Peter Koch: [00:28:44] So with those with the active load sensors that are on there, they're there to tell you when you are approaching or have exceeded or it won't let you exceed, but you're approaching the limits of that piece of equipment. You don't want to ever get to that scenario, right? [00:29:00] So this comes back to the safe work planning that you have to do ahead of time and making sure that the piece of equipment is going to have the capacity that you need. And when I talk about capacity, it's not just weight. I mean, they'll sense other things as well. So besides the amount of load that's in the basket, what are some of the other things that those sensors are going to take a look at and then provide some feedback to the operator?

Joe Gagne: [00:29:25] So a lot of the newer machines have a safety system called the EMS, and that stands for the envelope management system. And depending on the machine, it will allow the platform to be positioned at a certain point within the elevation arc and depending on how much weight or capacity is in that platform, is going to determine how much that platform is allowed to go into the area where it's safe to use prior to these new regulations. It would be up to the user to select the mode or operational envelope the machine could be in based on their assessment of the weight and capacity. Now [00:30:00] the sensors essentially determine it for you. The machines are getting smarter every day to keep you safer every day, and that's a really nice thing to see because we do find most accidents that occur on these machines are generally caused by operator error, and the operator doesn't understand the theories behind stability on the machines. So that's something we really like to focus on in training is to ensure they understand those theories of physics to ensure they don't put them in a situation where it could result in devastating outcomes.

Peter Koch: [00:30:32] Yeah, for sure, I don't I don't believe people see, especially, say, an articulated boom lift in the same way that you would see a crane. So when you think about a crane and how much it can lift is going to be based on how big the stick is and how far the stick is away from its center. So it's the same thing with a man lift when you get a boom lift and you're extending farther out from the center. There's a lot that goes into understanding that, so it's good to know that there are some [00:31:00] computers and mechanics in there to help us figure it out. But you never want to rely solely on the computer to make sure you're safe, so you've got to understand what load you're going to have. So when it goes into figuring out what capacity of lift you need, what are some what some of the information that you might need to give the rental person so that they can help you choose a lift that would be configured appropriately?

Joe Gagne: [00:31:25] So the first thing we always ask if a customer calls and makes a reservation for a piece of equipment is how high exactly do you need to work? We need to make sure we provide a machine that will get them to that height. We also take into account the horizontal reach capability of the machine. Just because a machine will reach a certain height at maximum platform extension does not mean it's going to have that same extension horizontally. So it's important to understand where you're going to set the machine in relation to the work task to ensure you have the appropriate amount of horizontal reach for the angle that the boom is going to be at.

Peter Koch: [00:31:57] Let's take a quick break at MEMIC, [00:32:00] while we strive to help our policyholders prevent workplace injuries, we also understand that they're going to happen. No workplace is immune and when the injury does happen, a solid injury management program must be in place, including reporting and a return to work program. Statistics show that returning an injured worker to work in a temporary modified duty capacity instead of keeping them out of work until there are 100 percent, will reduce both the length and the cost of the claim, as well as increased the likelihood of a positive outcome for the worker and the employer. Did you know that MEMIC has created a seven step process for developing a return to work plan, as well as a matrix to rate your current plan against what our team has found to be the gold standard in return to work? Check out our claim, reporting and return to work resources atMEMIC.com/employers. Now, let's get back to today's episode.

Peter Koch: [00:33:01] Right [00:33:00] on, so just because it's a 30 foot boom lift doesn't mean that you're always going to get 30 feet out of it.

Joe Gagne: [00:33:07] Correct if you're at a lower boom angle, you're likely only to get 70 to 80 percent of the maximum vertical reach in horizontal reach.

Peter Koch: [00:33:15] Yeah. And then the terrain itself will have limiting factors for the piece of equipment as well, right?

Joe Gagne: [00:33:21] Absolutely. You've got to make sure the area that you're going to base the chassis of the machine on is firm level and will in fact support the weight of that machine. So you have to take that into account. Often job sites are rough disturb type of terrain, and they may have slopes or grades on them. So it's important to do that preplanning ahead of time. So you make sure you have an asset on site that will actually allow you to complete the tasks that are assigned.

Peter Koch: [00:33:43] Yeah, because an all-terrain man lift might be a little misnomer. It's not truly all terrain. There are some limitations.

Joe Gagne: [00:33:50] There are certainly limitations. They do have four wheel drive, but I tell people they're not swamp buggies, so you want to make sure that you're going to able to get the machine where you need it. And just because [00:34:00] that machine has four wheel drive capability, it generally only pertains to the machine being in its stowed configuration or transport configuration. Once you actually get the boom up in the air and start scoping out to perform work, you generally don't want to drive and reposition the machine, especially over rougher, disturbed terrain that could cause a lot of what we call a cantilever effect where any type of motion or movement is amplified through the platform all the way up through the boom structure into the platform. And the higher up you are, the further out you are away from the machine, the more cantilever effect you're going to experience.

Peter Koch: [00:34:32] It's amazing. How physics can gravity always work?

Joe Gagne: [00:34:35] It is, and that's actually one of my favorite aspects of the training that I provide is the theories in the physics behind the stability characteristics. I try to make it as interactive as possible. I get the guys up in the classroom and I have them hold a box or a heavier object close to their chest, and then I'll have them hold that box further out at a 45 degree angle and lock their elbows. And they can see for themselves that the three characteristics [00:35:00] that negatively affect stability height reach and motion they can see with their own eyes and their own body that those three factors do negatively affect stability, so it helps to put things in a context for folks that they can understand. And that's really, in my opinion, what makes a trainer a good trainer?

Peter Koch: [00:35:16] Yeah, absolutely. That's a really great point. The more that you can get hands on, the more that they're going to take back with them and they'll remember that activity well, more than they remember the PowerPoint slide that you might have spent 30 minutes on trying to make it look really nice.

Joe Gagne: [00:35:30] Absolutely. I try not to use any PowerPoints or audio visual aids in my training. I think we've all probably sat through training before where we had to concentrate really hard not to fall asleep because the subject matter actually wasn't very exciting or the instructor themselves wasn't very engaging. So I really try to make my training's fun interactive and get the guys laughing. And the way I look at it is if they're having fun and they're learning at the same time, that's a recipe for success.

Peter Koch: [00:35:57] Yeah, absolutely. We're right on the same page with it. Can I ask you a personal [00:36:00] question about how you got into training? So what got you interested in doing training?

Joe Gagne: [00:36:05] Well, actually, it all started off. I come from a construction family. My dad owns a construction company in Windham. And I was very fortunate in the regard that he allowed me to operate a lot of his really big, heavy equipment at a very young age. I owe it really all to my father. He was always the type of dad that showed me how to do things rather than did things for me, and I really found that that was instrumental in leading me to do what I do now. I've always been very technically orientated. I like to pay attention to details, so I like to master tasks. So combining that type of guidance from my father throughout my life and the exposure I was fortunate enough to have around his construction equipment, I'm able to do what I do now.

Peter Koch: [00:36:51] Now that's fantastic. It's great to have a mentor in your life like that, whether it's your dad or it could be a teacher, or maybe even a supervisor or someplace [00:37:00] that was able to give you opportunity to learn like that. And then you can see it's paid off in spades for you.

Joe Gagne: [00:37:08] It has my parents love to tell the story about whenever there was a snowstorm growing up. I grew up here in the Lakes region, Sebago Lakes Region, and I would always look forward to snow events because I would actually go and ride with my dad and go plowing with them. And I would just always be fascinated by the mechanics of the equipment that was being used and operated, and I would just study things and commit to memory what he was doing, why he was doing it, and how different factors and things affected what he was doing. So I've always really enjoyed understanding at a deep level how things operate.

Peter Koch: [00:37:41] Yeah. And then having the opportunity to be able to transfer that information to someone else. I mean that background that you describe is truly a background of someone who can take that information and then find an outlet with somebody else for it, whether it's learning on your own. And then it really seems like you have a love not only [00:38:00] to learn something new, but to transfer or transmit that information to somebody else.

Joe Gagne: [00:38:05] It's one thing to become a subject matter expert on something. It's another thing to become a subject matter expert and then be able to convey and communicate that information to other people. So it's understandable, digestible and committed to memory.

Peter Koch: [00:38:18] Yeah, interesting. You know, you talk about what makes the most impact on someone. We're going to get into the fall protection conversation. So you think about how to convince someone that, well, you need rescue right away. Yeah. Yeah, fine. Fine. Bring it up to a bunch of construction guys or a bunch of maintenance guys are like, Yeah, fine, fine. We'll take care of it. It'll not be a problem. Well, the sequence of events that I try to do when we're doing a fall protection rescue training is when you go through the limits and capacities and design and function of the fall protection equipment. And then you have them inspect it and then you have them put it on. Get it, fit appropriately, body check [00:39:00] them and then suspend them. So hook it up to the dorsal d ring. Lift them about six or eight inches off the ground and say, How's it feel now? And so if your rescue was 30 minutes away, how do you think you'll feel in 30 minutes? Guaranteed. The answer is going to be it needs to happen now. Rescue has to happen now. And so all of a sudden, the urgency of kind of like holding the box at 45 degrees with your arms locked really connects them to the physics of what the machine's feeling. The same type of deal. That's what they're going to remember. And that's what makes it real for him.

Joe Gagne: [00:39:35] Absolutely. You have to connect either a physical or an emotional response to the information you're trying to convey to the people. So one of the things I like to do when I started training session is I like to start off by doing introductions of all the course participants. I asked them their name and I asked them how much experience they have on each piece of equipment. I also asked them what they like to do outside of work. And that's my way of sneakily asking them why they work safely. [00:40:00] I think we all know if you ask somebody, why do you work safely? They might kind of grin at you and give you a snarky answer. But if you ask them what they like to do outside of work, nine times out of 10, I find people mention their family or loved ones spending time with their children, grandchildren or significant other, or maybe even a pet. And I'm looking for that motivation that they might need if I get down the road with them further in the training session where they might need a little more guidance, or I might need them to channel why they want to do this task correctly. And that's my way of knowing why people work safely.

Peter Koch: [00:40:35] Yeah, it's great because it really does help you connect, and some of the stuffs can get kind of dry. And if they're not used to using the procedures that you're presenting to them, like, why do I have to go through all of the checks every single day? I just use the piece of equipment yesterday. Why do I have to go through the basket checks in the ground floor? And why do I have to do all that? Why can't I just check it off? Because I knew it worked before? Well if [00:41:00] you need to go home to deal with your family or your friend or whatever, make it real, and I think that's a good way to help. If you need buy in, it's a really good way to get that.

Joe Gagne: [00:41:10] Absolutely you need to establish that personal connection with your course participants. And there are a few times where I've had to say, You know what? I know you may not be being very successful right now, but I really need you to take a few moments to compose yourself and focus on the task at hand. And then I may bring up if I remember from the introductions that morning that he planned on going hunting or fishing with this child this weekend. And I'd say, you know what? It really be horrible if you got hurt or injured and weren't able to take your son or daughter hunting or fishing this weekend, wouldn't it? And then you really see those connections, the light bulb moment go off in their head and they realize why they're truly there that day. And it's to learn to make sure that they walk away from our training with the skills and knowledge to operate these machines safely because it can significantly impact their livelihood.

Peter Koch: [00:41:59] Yeah, it's not just [00:42:00] the box to check. It really, truly isn't a box to check. Let's talk about the rescue part. So you described that there's requirements for two scenarios or two types of rescue plans that need to be in place. And one is if the machine itself is no longer operable and then the other is if someone actually falls outside of the machine and what has to happen? So what are some of the requirements around each of those? If I had to put a plan together this week for a piece of equipment specific to my company, what things would need to be in it for each of those plans?

Joe Gagne: [00:42:32] So there's generally three solutions. The first solution is self rescue. If the person is stranded in the work platform, they would rely on the auxiliary lowering system to bring the platform down to the ground. If the auxiliary system wasn't working, you would rely on your ground person. Now, if self rescue is not viable, you would next bring in a machine of equal or greater size in the platform stranded at, or if the person is suspended, you would do either a platform to platform transfer [00:43:00] or you would literally place the platform underneath the person that is suspended and literally scoop them out of the air. The third option is technical rescue, and that would be provided by EMS. You would have to call your local fire department. Describe the scenario or circumstance you find yourselves in. I always tell folks, let them know specifically how high the platform is because not all ladder trucks the same size. So you want to make sure that the public safety sends the appropriate asset that is going to be able to solve the problem that you find yourself in.

Peter Koch: [00:43:29] For sure. And not all local EMS companies have a ladder truck. You get out in some of the more rural areas and that call for heavy rescue because that's what they're really going to be looking for is going to might come from a neighboring town, which extends the amount of time that the person is going to be suspended and there are significant consequences for someone's health. The longer that they're suspended in that in the harness. So you had mentioned suspension trauma. One of my colleagues was [00:44:00]doing a fall protection training actually at one of his one of his policyholders, and he went around the group and started asking them about their experience with fall protection. And one of the typical questions he always asks is so has anybody taken a fall? And you know, after a while, you see somebody in the background who's kind of nodding his head and said, Can you want to tell us about that? And the description that the guy gave this time was it wasn't a far fall, but he was connected to his dorsal d ring fell and actually took about a six foot freefall until the shock absorber connected with him. And he actually pulled back his T-shirt and he had bruises around his traps and through his collar bones because of the force of just that six foot fall. So it's not just suspension trauma. There's other injuries that you can sustain by coming out of the basket or falling off any platform truly.

Joe Gagne: [00:44:54] Absolutely. And that's really where it's important to understand the different types of lanyards that are available for fall protection. [00:45:00] There are two different types of lanyards. There's fall arrest that stops a fall that's in progress of what you just described. You're going to fall the length of the lanyard before it begins to catch you. The other and more preferable and safer lanyard style is what we call a self retractable lanyard, which falls under fall restraint that prevents a fall from occurring. So if you slip, trip or lose traction on the platform as soon as your body accelerates, there's a centrifugal break that locks the lanyard in place, and that's going to prevent you from actually falling. So I highly recommend the use of fall restraint, self retractable saddle lanyards over fall arrest lanyards all day, everyday.

Peter Koch: [00:45:35] No great, and let's talk a little bit about that piece as well. So if I'm going to connect my fall restraint in my MEWP, where am I going to connect that to?

Joe Gagne: [00:45:49] You always want to connect to one of the manufacturer provided designated anchor points. You can't just connect your lanyard to any old guardrail or connection point on the machine. Every single designated anchor point is designed and engineered [00:46:00] to support the. All of a falling person and actually more than a falling person, if you do not connect to the right point, it's not going to do its job the way it's designed to do.

Peter Koch: [00:46:09] So are those points designed to where are they located? Are they typically located, you know, waist or chest high? Or are they located on the floor?

Joe Gagne: [00:46:18] On most boom lifts, they are generally located at the mid rail and intersection of the vertical stanchion on scissor lifts, depending on the brand and model. Sometimes they may be lower down near the intersections of the toe board and the vertical stanchion. It all depends on the machine.

Peter Koch: [00:46:32] Perfect. And in that from a standard standpoint, there's a requirement to have fall prevention or fall protection in a boom lift. How about in a scissor lift? Is there a requirement by the standard to have fall protection harness and lanyard within the scissors lift?

Joe Gagne: [00:46:50] There is no standard that requires that in the operation of a scissor lift, although I do highly encourage everybody to always wear fall protection in a scissor lift, specifically [00:47:00] using a safe, retractable style lanyard. Oftentimes, we find that machines tip because the operator goes over the railing, and if he's wearing a fall arrest lanyard, the lateral side force applied to the top of the railing from the lanyard going over the top of it can be enough to pull the machine down on top of somebody. So I highly encourage the use of fall protection using a self retractable style lanyard on a scissor lift at all times,

Peter Koch: [00:47:23] Because that's going to help you stay inside the basket, which is the goal because your true fall protection in either is your primary fall protection is going to be your guardrails to begin with

Joe Gagne: [00:47:33] Correct. There's two types of fall protection. There's fall protection that's built into the machine itself, which is the guard rail system, and there's self worn fall protection. So it's important to understand the differences between both of those and make sure you use both to your advantage.

Peter Koch: [00:47:46] Yeah, capabilities and limitations, for sure. And that's one of the questions that comes up often. And actually, that was witnessed by myself while looking at a couple of guys in that scissors lift. So you could see they had fall protection. [00:48:00] They were wearing a harness, they were wearing a lanyard. But you can see where the lanyard was connected to and they actually had it tied back to itself around the upright corner stanchion of the guardrail. So not at the floor, but it was in the middle. So if they had fallen, the connection point would have slid up into the basically a foot below the top rail and then it would have gone over. So he would have been fairly. That would have been a pretty sizable fall for that scissor lift to have to withstand,

Joe Gagne: [00:48:29] Yeah, the safest place always to be on that machine is within the confines of the guardrail system. It's your primary means of fall protection.

Peter Koch: [00:48:36] Yeah, 10-4. And so that's one of the things to familiarize yourself with when you get in where your connection points, because I almost guarantee it. I didn't look, I couldn't see it from there, but I would imagine that there were some manufacturers designed and installed fall protection points within that machine.

Joe Gagne: [00:48:51] There always is, and they're generally going to be located with a decal letting them know that it is an improved attachment point. You're required to have all decals [00:49:00] that are provided by the manufacturer when the machine is manufactured to be present on the machine. And oftentimes we find as machines, age decals, some bleach or they get peeled off or they fade. So it's always important to ensure that all safety decals on the machine are visible and legible.

Peter Koch: [00:49:16] Yeah, it goes back to your conversation about inspections and having a robust maintenance program, because if I can inspect it all the time and I'm recognizing that, hey, some of these stickers or these decals need to be replaced, not quite illegible yet, but they're getting close. You can get them ordered, you can have them in a month. And then when it comes time for annual maintenance or monthly maintenance, they can be replaced.

Joe Gagne: [00:49:41] Absolutely. If you do own your own equipment, you can call any United Rentals branch throughout North America. Let them know what make and model machine you have, and we can order up the decals required for that machine.

Peter Koch: [00:49:53] Cool. Very cool. So we're getting towards the end of the podcast here, so I got a couple of questions for you. But [00:50:00] before I jump to those questions. Anything else that we need to talk about that we haven't discussed so far that you want our listeners to know about the standards or about the MEWPs themselves. That would be a key point that they could take away.

Joe Gagne: [00:50:14] Well, the biggest thing is that now with the new standard, they've broken these machines down into different types based on their classifications and capabilities. So it's important that they're trained specifically on the type in group that the machine falls within. It's not generalized across the entire board, so you want to make sure that your training is going to comply with the standard and regulation and that you're being trained on the type and group of machine that you'll actually be operating great.

Peter Koch: [00:50:42] And that goes back to the safe use planning of, you know, making sure that you have all the information and you're going to go back to your rental person, your rental company, give them that information, answer the questions forthright so that they can not only get you into the right piece of equipment, but then provide you the [00:51:00] training that. Necessary for you to become certified and familiar with the equipment.

Joe Gagne: [00:51:04] Absolutely. Most folks use self-propelled boom lifts that you can operate and control from the platform. The other type of machine that's pretty popular in the marketplace is the towable type of boom, and those fall under a different group and type. So therefore you need specific training for that type and group. Just because you've been trained on a self-propelled boom lift does not mean that you're certified to operate a towable boom.

Peter Koch: [00:51:28] So you had a towable boom and you see those often, especially in the small contractors and painters love those, especially so the towable boom lift. You've got a self-propelled boom lift. What's another class or type of boom if that's out there?

Joe Gagne: [00:51:42] The other class is the scissor lift, which falls under Class 3A, and that allows the platform to elevate directly over the circumference of the chassis. So it's again important that you have training that is specific to the type of machine you're using.

Peter Koch: [00:51:56] Perfect. Awesome. And again, there's a lot to this. I'm [00:52:00] sure that if you have an industrious group of people at your company and they're really familiar with the standards, they can go through the user's manual, they can create a training program, but it might just be a better use of time, effort and money to reach out to someone like yourself or your company to have them come out and do training for you so that you're taking care of that and then you can come back and do recertification or re familiarization training with them.

Joe Gagne: [00:52:32] Absolutely. A Lot of times customers will want to designate somebody within their organization as their trainer and send them to our train the trainer program. It's important to make sure that the person that you do designate for that role, somebody that has a lot of experience on the machine and they are a subject matter expert. I caution organizations from just sending. A certain guy that they might feel might be the best person. And that's because if they're not training or providing that information on a daily basis and staying up to date [00:53:00] on what the current standards are with the best operating practices are and what the new rules and regulations may be, they may not be providing the highest level of training that's available in the marketplace. So that's where it's really important to reach out to somebody that is a subject matter expert on these matters so that they can provide you with the highest level of training that's available.

Peter Koch: [00:53:19] Yeah, and it's not just being a subject matter expert about the piece of equipment, and you talked about it before in your interest of training and how you got to be the trainer that you are. Normally, when you get in a company, you get the position of training someone. You're really good at your job, which doesn't mean you're really good at training people. And it really needs to be the relationship of subject matter experts and good trainer needs to be, well, merged in that particular person so that you can assure that the people are coming out of that self training, or that the self-driven training from your company is as functional and as good as it can be. Because at the end of the day, like [00:54:00] you said earlier on, the vast majority of incidents that occur with the MEWPs come from operator error and lots of times it comes because the person's not as familiar as they should be with the piece of machinery or they've missed the piece of the training. So I can't state it enough that having a good trainer and that trainer understanding everything about the piece of equipment being that subject matter expert, it's a key thing. Truly key thing.

Joe Gagne: [00:54:33] Absolutely, and I consider myself a constant learner. I am always trying to learn more about these machines. I rely on our technicians a lot for information because they are working on them day in and day out. So oftentimes I'll find a few minutes and go into one of the service technicians in our organization's bay and just kind of pick their brain a little bit and ask them different things. And the wealth of information that they have is incredible. So I consider myself a constant learner. I'm always trying to [00:55:00] gain new information or to come up with different ways to be able to communicate that information to my group of trainees so that they can digest it, understand it and apply it to their circumstance or scenario.

Peter Koch: [00:55:11] That's pretty cool. So that kind of transitions to my one of my final questions. So this is a I think it's an interesting question. I had asked me once before when I was working for the ski industry in a particular area. So if cost and technology were not an issue and you have the opportunity to design something yourself, what would it be like? What kind of man lift would you design? No, like talking to the technicians and seeing how they're used all over the place. Like what would be the thing that you would design?

Joe Gagne: [00:55:44] Oh, wow, that's a great question. I think a lot of the things that I would incorporate into these machines generally would not be feasible because of the use in nature.

Peter Koch: [00:55:52] Ok,

Joe Gagne: [00:55:52] That the machines are used for. I would love if there was a laser sight on a platform so [00:56:00] that the operator could appropriately line themselves up and establish trajectory on the boom before they scope out to the work surface. Another thing that I've kind of just thrown around my head, but I know it's not feasible as an airbag system. So if the machine begins to tip, airbags would deploy around the work platform to protect the operator. But again, those are likely unfeasible given the nature and use of this type of equipment in construction environments. But there's some things that I've thought about and I'm like, How can I make these machines safer? So maybe one day I'll come up with a great idea, patent it and become a millionaire.

Peter Koch: [00:56:35] Yeah, you never know. I mean, those are two great ideas right away. Just like I didn't. I wasn't even thinking about the basket. I was thinking about airbags just around the base of the machine that that blows up and keeps the machine from tipping over there. So I hadn't even thought of the laser sight, but what a great idea to be able to line up where you're going to go. That's a phenomenal idea.

Joe Gagne: [00:56:54] We oftentimes folks get themselves in the most trouble when they move or reposition the platform while they're scoped out to their work surface. [00:57:00] Any type of movement, the higher up and the further out you are, it creates a large amount of sway, swing and bounce. So I try to impress upon my course participants that it's imperative that you line yourself up correctly and make any changes to your trajectory sooner than later. You don't want to be making big movements while you're scoped away from the machine, because that's where that cantilever effect comes in and can really cause some problems. The last thing you want is to smash through a window you might have just mounted or replaced for your customer.

Peter Koch: [00:57:28] I was just talking to a client of mine that had a contractor that just did that. They were about seven stories up and they were the contractor had come in. They were painting the side of the building and they put the corner of the man left of the boom lift through a window. So yeah, on movement, right? So it wasn't because it was stationary. The guy was trying to reposition and moved made a larger move. And it came smashing back through the window.

Joe Gagne: [00:57:53] Exactly, and that's really one of the things I like to focus on during the practical portion of the training that I provide [00:58:00] is the correct positioning procedures. Oftentimes we find people just assume they can scope out and then boom themselves up. And next thing you know, they're swinging around and swaying six or eight feet as soon as they let go of that controller. So there's methods in this processes that I like to teach and share with my folks. So that doesn't happen.

Peter Koch: [00:58:19] Yeah. And so it brings up a great point. You know, it's not just the certification training, but it truly is the familiarization training and even more than that, being a competent operator in their understanding, the limitations and the capacities of that machine because they all go into your plan, how I'm going to get from point A to point B, where am I going to move? How is it going to function? Can I get there? What do I need to do? So great points.

Joe Gagne: [00:58:42] Absolutely. That's really where the whole safe work planning is so integral. You want to evaluate whatever your task is and you want to think through the contingencies that could occur. You're always going to be better off solving or coming up with a solution to your issue. If you've already [00:59:00] thought through the various scenarios that could present itself, given your circumstance.

Peter Koch: [00:59:03] It's always easier to do it and design than retrofit, right? So I

Joe Gagne: [00:59:06] Always have a Plan B, C and sometimes even a Plan D for everything I do.

Peter Koch: [00:59:10] A man of like mind with me, for sure. Hey, so one last question for you till we get to the end of the podcast here. So what's one thing that you know now about training people that you wish you knew when you started out?

Joe Gagne: [00:59:23] So one thing that I wish I knew when I first started was. You can only give somebody so much information in a training session and expect them to commit it to memory. So I've really refined and sharpen my pencil on the information and the training that I communicate to my folks to hit on the high points. The things that are most impactful to them. If you provide somebody with too much information in a short amount of time, they don't have the ability to compartmentalize that information and then pull it back up when needed. So I really focused on certain key things in my curriculum that I hope my folks will remember and [01:00:00] key things that are going to make the most impact on them working safely and getting home at the end of the workday.

Peter Koch: [01:00:06] That's an awesome point, and I think it's a really great point for any trainer out there to remember, especially if you're just starting out because you are the subject matter expert. You've got all this knowledge floating in your head, you've got all these great resources and you get an hour or two hours or three hours and you came to this information over years and years of having hands on and learning and understanding, like you said, being a constant learner. And now you're trying to impart that years and years of information in just a short period of time. And you know, the mind will only absorb what the buck can withstand. That's the idea. And the brain will only absorb so much information. So being able to compartmentalize it and sharpen the pencil, like you said, is a great it's a great suggestion and thought for new trainers.

Joe Gagne: [01:00:53] One of the other strategies that I've implemented in my curriculum is I try to establish habits, one specifically involving the worksite [01:01:00] hazard assessment, where any time you step on to a new worksite or a new environment that you'll be working in. You always want to be looking for certain types of hazards. So throughout my training, I have them do that exercise several times because I'm trying to get them to develop and form a habit. So something that they're going to do subconsciously without having to think about it. So every time they step on that job site, they're looking for those five specific types of hazards.

Peter Koch: [01:01:26] Cool. That's great. Establishing and especially establishing habits, especially when you have a skill that you're trying to impart and when you start thinking about operating a man lift, there's a skill involved. So there has to be a habit in understanding your work environment needs to be something that you just do out of habit. Great suggestion again for that. So we're getting to the end of the podcast here. And the final question truly, the final question this time is so where can our listeners find more about MEWPs and then more about [01:02:00] United Rentals?

Joe Gagne: [01:02:01] Well, folks can find more about United Rentals by going right to our website www.UnitedRentals.com, and if they're looking for a specific training resources, there is a menu on there where you can select training. But if you want to go directly to our training website, it's UnitedRentals.com/training. And if they're looking to schedule or book any type of training for their folks, all they would need to do is call their local United Rentals branch, request that and they will put you in touch with folks like myself.

Peter Koch: [01:02:29] Perfect. That's awesome. And if I'm looking for just information beyond that and I'm not quite ready yet to call the rental company, where do I find more information about mobile elevated work platforms?

Joe Gagne: [01:02:41] Another great resource online is IPAF.org. IPAF is an organization that stands for international powered access federation, and there are a group of stakeholders in the industry. There's folks from my organization that sit on their board of directors, as well as representatives from the manufacturers of these equipment. [01:03:00] And they're really the trade group that is really trying to push safety and establish best practices and come up with training curriculums that in the end. Turn regular folks into great equipment operators.

Peter Koch: [01:03:16] That's awesome, great resource. I was just checking that out the other day to prepare for the podcast, and there are a ton of great resources on that website. So I think between that website and then reaching out to you guys, there's not a whole lot else that you would need to become that good equipment operator for a mobile elevator work platform,

Joe Gagne: [01:03:35] Just have to seek out the information

Peter Koch: [01:03:37] Right on. So thanks again for joining us today. I really appreciate you being here and sharing your expertise with us, Joe.

Joe Gagne: [01:03:42] Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Peter Koch: [01:03:44] Right on and to all of our listeners out there. Thanks for joining us. We have been speaking about mobile elevated work platforms with Joe Gagne, division safety trainer for United Rentals. If you have any questions about mobile elevated work platforms or would like to hear more about a particular [01:04:00] topic on our podcast. Email me at [email protected]. Also, check out our show notes at MEMIC.com/podcast, where you can find additional resources around maps and our entire podcast archive. And while you're there, sign up for our safety net blog so you never miss any of our articles or safety news updates, and if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you took a minute or two to review us on Spotify, iTunes or whichever podcast service that you found us on. And if you've already done that, thank you because it really helps us spread the word. Please consider sharing this show with a business associate friend or a family member who you think will get something out of it. And as always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Peter Koch reminding you that listening to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast is good, but using what you learned here is even better.