By Pat Furr, VPP Coordinator & Corporate Safety Officer for Roco Rescue, Inc.

At the start of nearly every rescue class, I'll ask, “Okay, who here is afraid of heights?” Usually a few folks will raise their hands, but the vast majority don’t. I then qualify the same question by saying, “By afraid, I don’t mean that you are so overcome with fear that you cannot function – only that when you are at height you get a little case of the butterflies…” Then a few more hands will go up, but typically still fewer than half the class. I continue by adding that I’m always am a bit concerned for the folks that didn’t raise their hand as it means one of two things. First, it may be they are not being totally honest, but more concerning to me is they truly are not afraid of heights...and this is scary.

Human beings are born with an innate fear of heights. This is natural, and quite protective. I’m certainly afraid of heights, and I still get butterflies. It’s just that I’ve learned how to get those butterflies to fly in formation, so I can then function just fine at height. The day I climb atop a wind turbine tower or get that first peek over the edge of some serious exposure, and I don’t get that familiar feeling, that’s my sign to hang up my harness and ride the keyboard full time. This feeling is our not-too-subtle reminder that we do not have wings…and it is a healthy reminder!

There is a point to this, and I’m about to get there. Over the years, I've had some students with a serious case of YMIC (young male immortality complex). They will insist that they are not afraid of heights – or anything else, for that matter. I've found, when it comes time to go over the edge while hanging from that skinny little ½” kernmantle rope, backed up with a ½” safety line, our superheroes tend to freeze like the statue of Michelangelo. They won’t budge, can’t speak, or look any direction but down! Most often, these individuals gradually gain trust in their equipment; in the techniques they’ve learned; and perhaps, most importantly, in themselves. While they may never be "comfortable" going over the edge, they can still be valuable members of their rescue team. Some can be very strong in many other rescue skills such as knot tying, rigging, friction control, mechanical advantage, etc. They can also be excellent in logistics, developing action plans and other key areas.

First, know your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Then, identify your weaknesses and strive to make them your strengths.

A second tenet I live by is to enter a rescue knowing that you will be an asset to the effort. But sometimes, it’s not possible to do this, and having an unusual fear of heights may be one of those times. Avoid crossing the line from being an asset to becoming a liability – creating a situation in which your team would then have to deal with “two” victims. This is huge – especially in an emergency. And that’s what this article is all about. 

Before I go any further, a bit about egos. There is simply no room for egos during a rescue. When the call comes in, it’s about one person and one person only, and that is the victim. We all have our pride, but we need to “park it” until everyone, including the victim and the rescuers, are safe and sound. As trained rescuers, we all have something to contribute. Each of us has a role to fill in the rescue effort and be an asset to the overall effectiveness of our team.

So, how do we learn what our best role as a rescuer may be? Here’s one way. Practice as a team in simulated rescues that are scenario driven and mimic the types of rescues that your team may be summoned to perform. It is during these practice sessions that you will discover your strengths and your weaknesses. It is important for ALL team members to honestly critique each other as well as themselves to help determine the best way to fill the different roles on the team.

As your team practices more often, trends will start to surface. One rescuer may be particularly strong at climbing and can rig cleanly and efficiently while hanging from work positioning equipment. Another rescuer may be your “ace in the hole” for rigging anchors. A third may be so good at converting lowering systems to haul systems, that it’s an obvious choice. Then, there may be some that don’t shine at any particular skill, but are reliable haul team members or can run the SAR cart with the best of them.

All teams have a spectrum of performers, whether it’s a football team, a production assembly line or a team of cooks and chefs in a large restaurant. The same holds true for a rescue team. Some of the factors that affect performance may be physical. Let’s face it, our 5’4” 150-pound “Hole Rat” can pass through tight portals and operate in congested confined spaces easier than most 6’ 6” 280-pounders. Sometimes it’s mechanical aptitude. We see it all the time in training rescuers. Some folks have a natural mechanical aptitude and can understand and build rescue systems as if it were second nature, while others struggle to get it right on a consistent basis.

And, yes, a pronounced fear of height that may inhibit a rescuer’s ability to perform effectively at height is yet another factor to consider. Other things include leadership qualities, attention to detail, general physical strength, comfort with breathing air systems, the presence or lack of claustrophobia and the list goes on. The only way to realize and understand these abilities and limitations is to practice as a team – and practice often – while staying attuned to these individual abilities and limits. Understand them and use them to your advantage in determining who is the best fit for the various team member roles on any given rescue effort. And please, please do not take it personally. Again, we all have our pride and want to shine; however, we all can shine as a team! And the best way to shine as a team is to understand, as best we can, where each member best fits and can contribute most.

Remember, so much of rescue is about mechanical systems, safety, victim packaging and other easily defined considerations. As rescuers, I invite you to take it to the next level. Think about the harder-to-define factors such as individual team member skills AND limitations. Help each other as a team arrive at the best mix of the right people in the right positions – and all for the good of the victim!

Special thanks to The Leader/VPPPA magazine for publishing this article in the Spring 2016 issue. 

When I heard mention of “The Grim Reaper of Complacency",^* it struck a chord in me especially considering my line of work as a safety officer and rescue instructor. In working at height, complacency is something we warn students about continually. However, when it comes to our personal safety, it can happen to all of us. No one is immune to complacency, and its effects can be devastating depending on the nature of the work being performed.

It is also not my intention to get up on a high horse and preach to you about your individual faults or shortcomings in your work or safety practices. As I said, we are ALL guilty of becoming complacent to some degree, and my hope is to remind you of that very fact so that you can find some tools that work for you to help you stay out of that grim reaper’s grip.  

There are so many factors that can lead us to become complacent. Routine work tasks and outcomes, assuming that we are doing things as safely as possible, self and team satisfaction, overconfidence, the attitude that it “won’t happen to me,” contentment, unrealistic deadlines, multi-tasking, high stress, low morale, and fatigue are just some of the primary and cumulative factors that may lead to complacency. In addition to these influences, the complacent behavior of others can be infectious and possibly cause you to think – if it’s ok for them to take shortcuts, it’s ok for me to do the same.   

Without quoting statistics, I can say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of workplace accidents are not caused by unsafe equipment or processes, but are indeed caused by unsafe worker behavior. And complacency, in its many forms, is at the root of that behavior.

Probably the most important thing that I would like for you to gain from reading this is to recognize those moments when complacency is creeping in and stop it in its tracks! Complacency places us in an emotional state where we become oblivious to danger, and therein lays its insidious nature. I will not pretend to give you all the tools you may need to beat complacency, as different tools are required for different folks for different situations. Again, the most important piece of the solution is to recognize complacency’s onset, and the second most important is to understand the potential outcome if you were to succumb to it.   

Here’s one early sign that complacency is creeping in – you find yourself distracted while performing your job. This applies not only to individual workers, but in a more global sense can happen within the company culture. When worries start to crop up, be it individual workers, or within management, the focus may center on issues other than the task at hand. When you feel this happening, stop and evaluate whether you are paying the required attention to the task at hand; and if you are not, what could the possible consequences be? Think worst case, because that is quite likely the end result!

Look for instances where you catch a misstep in your performance that you normally would not have made. For example, in my line of work as a rescuer, I’ve always used a systematic safety check of a rescue system before life loading. Once in a while I might find an unlocked carabiner, that’s one thing, but if I find that unlocked carabiner at the conclusion of the rescue scenario, that, my friend, is a red flag! My tried-and-true system failed me for one reason and one reason only…I became complacent.

Talk about the perfectly designed distraction – cell phones – you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. I like to call my TV set a “one-eyed-brain sucker,” and fondly refer to my cell phone as a “hand-held brain sucker.” There is a time and a place for it – and, yes they are very valuable, but if you find it has any chance of distracting you from your work and can be the cause of an unsafe condition, tighten up, don’t be complacent! Put that cell phone away until you can use it safely.

Here’s another example – observing your co-workers complacency and not addressing it. That’s being just as complacent. And worse, if an accident were to happen and your co-worker’s complacency caused them harm or harmed others, you will have to live with that missed chance to have stopped it. Fight the good fight. No one can fault you for that, and if they do, they are flat wrong.   

“The Devil’s Circle” is a term I learned from a group of Austrian mountaineers many years ago. It goes something like this. During a climbing expedition, you evaluated a slope for avalanche and determined there is a high potential for a slide. But the weather is closing in and you would have a more dangerous situation if you were to retreat the way you came versus crossing the avalanche slope to the safety of a protected camp site. You made it across the slope without triggering an avalanche. 

The very next season, you were confronted with a nearly identical situation, but with the added factor that you forgot your avalanche shovels. Based on the safe outcome of the previous year, however, you went ahead and crossed the slope. Again, without incident. And the circle begins. As the years go by and you encounter the same situations and have the same results without incidence even in the presence of adding more and more unsafe conditions, the Devil’s Circle is lulling you into a false sense of security.

The circle turns every year without an accident and you push the envelope of safety further for every lap of the circle you make – until your complacent behavior ultimately catches up to you and the avalanche occurs. You have no shovels to dig your climbing partners out, you have no avalanche beacons to locate them, you have no means to radio for help and you haven’t told anyone of your planned route. The many laps you have made along the circle with many unsafe mistakes while thinking you got away with them in the past so you’ll get away with them in the future – all of this has led to an unrecoverable disaster.   

Avoiding complacency is not automatic. We need to understand that it is always lurking, waiting to walk through that door you left open and to exert its sometimes very dire effects. And it isn’t like in the movies where it warns you of impending disaster by changing the music to the “Jaws” theme of dun tunt, Dun Tunt, DUN TUNT!, DUN TUNT!!! We need to remain alert for the signs of complacency, recognize when it is setting in and do whatever we must do to stop it. And it’s not only a personal challenge to stop it within ourselves, but to recognize and stop it within our co-workers. 

Here are just a few ideas that you may want to use to avoid complacency.

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• 1. Perform a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) before starting a task. And don’t limit this to new tasks only. You might surprise yourself by taking the time to re-accomplish a JSA on a task that you routinely perform. By breaking a task down into individual steps and isolating the hazards that are associated with each step as well as how to mitigate them, you will oftentimes realize that there is a safer way that you have been missing. Performing the JSA will also refocus you and your crew on the fact that there are hazards present and that you must be diligent in protecting yourselves from them.
• 2. Take a minute to refocus on the hazards of the task at hand before starting. That brief pause goes a very long way in reminding you that what you are about to take on requires a level of focus that will ultimately prevent you from making a mistake.
• 3. Report all near misses. This is the often forgotten final opportunity to share information that reminds us that many of us at times can have dangerous jobs. “Scared Straight!!”
• 4. Challenge yourself and your co-workers to stay in the moment. Everyone wants to shine and no one wants to let the team down, so just remind each other occasionally.
• 5. Develop new habits. Think about any and all the near misses you may have had or some you may have heard from your co-workers. Is there something that could have been done to have averted that close call? If so, share that information and practice the step(s) you would employ to avoid it going beyond a near miss.
• 6. Actively decide to act. Hopefully deciding to do the task in a safe manner, but the point is, don’t act on auto-pilot. Instead, stop, evaluate the course you are about to take, and then “DECIDE” to proceed or not.
• 7. If you say to yourself, “I need to remember to do this,” and it’s a critical step in ensuring safety, is it enough to rely on your memory or should you create some type of reminder? This may be your last chance, so take action to make sure you do include that critical step.

Finally, in order to avoid complacent behavior that may lead to an accident, we must first accept that we are all prone to complacency – it’s human nature. The next step is to recognize when you are on a path to complacency.

To help put the consequences into perspective, stop and ask yourself, “What is the worst case outcome of my complacency while performing this task?”

And yes, this exercise is to help you realize that many of us are in a very serious business and people can get seriously hurt or worse. Then, find out if any of the tools I have listed above may work for you in the setting you are engaged in. There are many more tools, so find the ones that work and practice them. It’s a great habit to get into – and when that habit feels too routine, avoid complacency once again by finding yet another tool. Keep it new, keep it top-of-mind and keep it safe!

READER QUESTION:
I went through competent person for fall protection several years ago and since that time a lot has changed regarding the types of fall protection equipment and systems that are available. Should I get update training for this role?

ROCO TECH PANEL ANSWER:
Yes, definitely. In fact, ANSI Z359.2 states competent person training update training shall be conducted at least every two years. It is always a great idea for competent persons to stay abreast of not only any legislative changes, but also to stay current on consensus standards such as ANSI, and certainly on emerging equipment technologies. It is amazing how quickly new fall protection equipment is becoming available. It wasn’t long ago that harness mount self-retracting lanyards were just a drawing on an engineer’s desk, and now there are so many different versions it is mind boggling. OSHA’s recognition of suspension trauma as a workplace hazard to fallen suspended authorized persons has created an entire market segment for systems to help deal with this hazard. So receiving update training for this crucial role at least every two years is certainly a great idea.

READER QUESTION:
Can I complete competent person for fall protection training via an on-line course?

ROCO TECH PANEL ANSWER:
We discourage that type of course other than for learning the legislated requirements. There just is no substitute for hands-on training. One of the most important responsibilities of a competent person for fall protection is the performance of periodic equipment inspections. I can’t imagine having any way to show competency of this skill without demonstrating it to a live instructor/evaluator.

This article appeared in OH&S, November 2015

Whatever training you attend and complete should be viewed as the launching point to get you started on learning everything you can about fall protection.

Gravity doesn't need to go to school. She is a master at pulling all objects toward the center of our blue planet and has been doing so since the dawn of time. So, yep, she is the grand master. Whereas we mere mortals are still learning how to counter her effects. Part of our learning is how to protect our workers at height from falling into her grasp. And OSHA recognizes we are still learning and thus requires employers to provide appropriate training to protect their workers at height—as well as from the grand master's constant grip.

The following article was featured in the June 2014 issue of ISHN, and authored by Roco Chief Instructor Pat Furr.

As part of my safety consulting duties, I have seen many fall protection programs for a wide variety of industries. When I ask about an employer’s fall protection plan, it’s pretty scary to be told, “Well, I can show you our program in two minutes”— and then see no more than a locker with a rag-tag assortment of body belts, harnesses and a few six- foot energy-absorbing lanyards of questionable integrity.

Now, it is rare to come across such an inadequate program. But truth be told, the comprehensiveness, diligence and effectiveness of the programs I have assessed run a fairly wide spectrum from so-so to top notch.

Top-notch programs all had several common elements, but the one element that stands out the most as being consistently included in the best programs is the completion of fall hazard surveys.

A Comprehensive Survey

The fall hazard survey, or what I like to call the fall hazard “walk-about,” is a critical early step in the process of assembling a comprehensive managed fall protection program. And a survey should be conducted again when certain changes occur including, but not limited to, changes in the facility configuration, changes to work processes, changes to legislated requirements, and the emergence of modern fall protection equipment solutions.

Outlined in ANSI Z359.2, the fall hazard survey is an effective means to identify areas where work is performed at height, identify ways to eliminate or control fall hazards, and help determine which hazards require the highest priority when it comes to allocating sometimes limited resources. A comprehensive fall hazard survey is the best way to identify and understand the types of fall hazards that need to be addressed to provide the best protection to your workers at height.

This requires that the Qualified or Competent Person do a top to bottom, left to right, tour of the facility to identify known areas where work at height is currently being performed, and any areas where future work at height may take place.

It may be helpful to have an area foreman or even an Authorized Person with thorough knowledge of the specific work areas available to ask questions regarding the work process and their needs and concerns.

The goal of this survey is to not only identify areas of work at height, but to determine the most protective means of abating the fall hazards.

 
The goal of this survey is to not only identify areas of work at height, but to determine the most protective means of abating fall hazards.

The Qualified/Competent Person must have the “Hierarchy of Fall Protection” in mind at all times. By having the goal of eliminating the fall hazard first and foremost, any opportunities to bring the work to the ground or to perform the work from the ground should present themselves during this survey. This may require a change in the configuration of certain structures, or the retrofitting of systems that allow the work to be performed from the ground. This may incur some significant costs, but in the long run the changes will be more than offset by avoiding a fall from height and the direct and indirect costs of such an accident.

Continuing the survey while still adhering to the Hierarchy of Fall Protection, the Qualified/ Competent Person may have to consider the use of fall restraint measures, either passive measures in the form of guardrails or parapets, or active measures in the form of body belts or harnesses with lanyards anchored in a way that the system prevents the Authorized Worker from reaching the leading edge of a fall hazard. Once active measures are employed, it is critically important to work with the Authorized Persons to understand what their work activities entail to come to a solution that provides the needed protection but also considers their need for mobility.

If the lower echelons of the Hierarchy of Fall Protection cannot be employed, a fall arrest system may be the only feasible solution.
 

A Fall Arrest Solution

If the lower echelons of the Hierarchy of Fall Protection cannot be employed, a fall arrest system may be the only feasible solution. This is where the Qualified/Competent Person’s knowledge of current fall arrest systems and components really shows its value. Lightweight, breathable, multi-function fall protection equipment available today protects workers while also providing the ease of use and freedom of movement that has been missing for many years. This is an important tool that the Competent Person can use to their advantage when faced with any resistance from certain Authorized Persons.

During the fall hazard survey, consider the presence of any environmental factors that may affect the performance of the fall protection equipment or systems as well as an alternate solution, specialized materials, or even a reconfiguration of the structure/process. Environmental factors can include hot objects, sharp edges, slowly engulfing materials, chemicals, weather factors, or any other environmental factor that may render the fall protection equipment ineffective.

Document Findings

Once the entire facility has been surveyed, it’s time to document in writing the findings and the means to abate the identified fall hazards. The Fall Hazard Survey Report becomes a part of the written fall protection program. It should be reviewed periodically and whenever there is a change to legislated requirements or a change in the facility or fall protection equipment.

Plan for Rescue

If any identified areas require the use of fall arrest systems, then that triggers the need to complete a written rescue pre-plan. It is my opinion that rescue

If any identified areas require the use of fall arrest systems, then that triggers the need to complete a written rescue pre-plan.

 
pre-plans should also include anywhere workers are performing work at height, such as elevated platforms that have been accessed by means other than elevators or stairs, with the goal that the rescue plan provides a capability to get the injured or suddenly ill worker to the ground promptly.

Time to Train

Once the Fall Hazard Survey is completed and documented, it is time for the Qualified Competent Person to provide training to the Authorized Persons on the types of equipment, systems, selection of anchor points, clearance requirements, swing fall hazards, and pre-use inspections of their equipment. Training may vary depending on the areas that Authorized Persons are assigned duties, but in all cases the type of training, any required re-training, and the criteria that would trigger the need for retraining must be documented.

A Valuable Tool

The fall hazard survey is a valuable tool that provides a thorough assessment of the entire facility to honestly identify fall hazards and determine the most effective means to protect workers from falls. Look at it as an expanded JHA that focuses specifically on areas of work at height.