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#69: Safety from every perspective
79 Plays5 years ago
In this episode of The Accidental Safety Pro Podcast, Series host Jill James interviews Paul Penn. Paul is a Swiss Army Knife of emergency management, environmental management, and health & safety management. His safety and advocacy work has been making waves in the safety world for decades. Listen to all the great stories, advice, and more!
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Transcript
Introduction to Paul Penn
00:00:12
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded December 28th, 2020. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Paul Penn, who I'm going to call the Swiss Army Knife of Emergency Management, Environmental Management, and Health and Safety Management. Paul has a storied career.
00:00:33
Speaker
including leading the Emergency Management and Refinery Safety Program in the Office of the Secretary at the California Environmental Protection Agency, from which he retired in 2018.
Paul's Advocacy and Interests
00:00:45
Speaker
Paul is now president of Global Vision Consortium. Saying Paul is an expert in his field isn't quite adequate.
00:00:52
Speaker
It leaves out his advocacy for labor, the environment, environmental justice, environmental health, first responders, regulatory, and safety communities, which is why I'm so excited to hear your story, Paul. Welcome to the show. Well, hi there, Jill. How are things?
00:01:10
Speaker
Hey, good, but probably not as good as I'm guessing where you are. I'm in Minnesota, it's kind of cold. And before we dive headlong into your journey, where are you today? What's it like where you are right now?
00:01:27
Speaker
Well, I'm here in the Sierra Foothills in California in the Gold Discovery Country near Sutter's Mill, for those of you that know your California history, where gold was discovered in the 1840s.
00:01:43
Speaker
And I live at around 1800 feet and unlike a lot of the rest of the country, our weather is based on not your relationship to the sea and your latitude. Here it's your relationship to the sea and your altitude. So luckily I live just below the snow line and just above the fog line which comes and hits the valley of
00:02:06
Speaker
Central Valley of California in the winter. This narrow band and I live in Rolling Oaks and it's quite beautiful. I spent all day yesterday skiing and I can go play tennis today if I'd like also. So it's pretty much the Great Balance and I've been in the foothills here for 32 years. I guess I'm parking it. My wife and I decided that we're coming out of here feet first.
00:02:38
Speaker
sounds fantastic and much and much better than you know I put my my cleats on my hiking boots this morning to go for a walk so I wouldn't slip in the in the snow and ice that my state got blanketed with yesterday well you don't want to hear that I actually went out to the garden that I have over at my neighbors and there were still some tomatoes and some blossoms surprisingly enough Wow
00:03:03
Speaker
But I called those and picked some persimmons off my neighbor's tree because it is that time of year and made some persimmon bread.
00:03:11
Speaker
Oh my gosh, that sounds fantastic. Well, Paul, before I get more jealous about your surroundings, let's back the Paul train way up and wondering, you know, like, where do you want to start with your story? How far back do we go to find that tipping point where health, safety, and the environment entered your life? Is it in college? Is it on a ski slope? Is it before that? Is it both those places? Where did it all start?
Early Life and Influences
00:03:39
Speaker
Well, you know,
00:03:42
Speaker
I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. As they say, I'm a New York expat out here in California. I lived that suburban life, grew up primarily in a blue collar community. I was involved in a lot of things I've been a do-gooder all my life. I did some first aid in scouts and things like that.
00:04:07
Speaker
Unfortunately, when I was 15, my mom died of Hodgkin's non-Hodgkin's with whom I was very close. And so that was 1968. Understandably, I was angry at the world. I was also very politically active, active in the anti-war movement, civil rights movement, and then I went off to college.
00:04:33
Speaker
I was actually on my way to George Washington University and got into a state school at the University of New York at New Paltz, a beautiful town around 100 miles north of New York City where I had some familiar relations. My grandparents lived on the other side of the mountain.
00:04:51
Speaker
And so I was up there and again politically active and in 1973 I ran into a guy named Ira Fritek on the streets and mentioned that the local town was actually starting a rescue squad.
00:05:06
Speaker
How do you run into, how do you just run into this guy on the streets? This town is so small? The town is pretty small. Okay. Actually, Ira, the last time I saw him, he ended up as the road manager for the Persuasions, the acapella group, and I ran into him outside the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco one night as I was going in to see Dave Bromberg. He was staying in the hotel next to him, but that's another story. But I showed up, I was the only college student
00:05:36
Speaker
I had Shirley Temple Curls to the middle of my back, of which I have very little hair left, unfortunately. It was the late 60s, early 70s, right? That's right. So this makes sense. And I started off washing dishes at a pancake breakfast. But by the next year, I'm on the board. I always end up on the board of something or another.
Education and Career Shift
00:05:56
Speaker
People ask me if I want to do that. So I did that. I got my EMT in 1973. I held that for 26 years.
00:06:04
Speaker
um and after college i came out west and i was um staying in san francisco with a bunch of friends who were um so i knew from back east hold on what was what was college about what did you major in
00:06:19
Speaker
Well, after four years, I looked at my transcript and I said, how do I get out of here? So I have an undergraduate degree in sociology. But I have around 30 biology and science credits. I took microbiology. And I remember one of my first environmental classes was environmental aspects of microbiology.
00:06:44
Speaker
This is in the 70s before it was trendy. And so that kind of opened my eyes to many of these things. And then in 1975, I'm in San Francisco and I decided I want to live out of childhood fantasy.
00:06:59
Speaker
And that was to become a professional ski patroller. I've been skiing all my life. I did some ski patrolling in college. And I got a job and moved up to Donner Summit for a season.
00:07:15
Speaker
I ended up seeing a decade. And because I couldn't find any place better, this is in the high Sierra rather than the foothills. This is the area outside of Lake Tahoe. It's named after the Donner Party who did not do good health and safety management as you can well imagine. As we used to say
00:07:34
Speaker
who's for lunch. But by the time I left, I was the vice president of the public utility district, which was sewer and water and fire and ambulance. I was an engineer on the fire department. I ended up as a county planning commissioner. But mind you, I was waiting tables and tending bar.
00:07:56
Speaker
because I was a ski bum and I didn't pound nails. I wasn't a carpenter, which is one of the other aspects, you know, employment that ski bums have during the off season. But you know, the sewer and water actually helped introduce me to a lot of the environmental management issues.
00:08:15
Speaker
And then I started and I was... So what sort of Paul drew you to, you know, to some of those things, you know, different appointments and different pieces, not the oftentimes ski bum jobs, but, you know, the things that sort of crossed into that environmental and safety piece, is it because of your background in college or what kind of drew you to that? Well, I'd say it had to do with
00:08:45
Speaker
How do you make the world a better place to live? The do-gooder part that you talked about. The do-gooder part. Again, I've been politically active and socially active all my life. I was raised in some respects in the Civil Rights Movement. Of course you were, yeah. In 1968 you were talking about, yeah, that's in the thick of it. OSHA was born a couple years later. Makes sense.
00:09:05
Speaker
Well, my parents took me, I was actually at the I Have a Dream in Washington DC in 1963, I was 11 years old.
00:09:23
Speaker
And during that period, if you remember, there was that whole transition in the early 70s where a lot of people went back to the Earth and were doing a lot of kind of withdrawing. And I decided I'd want to stay active but do something that was meaningful.
00:09:38
Speaker
My Rescue Squad work worked me into this and then the Public Utility District made me more aware of the environmental issues and the health and safety issues. Again, for example, we use chlorine as a disinfectant both in the fresh and wastewater and made me aware of the hazards.
00:10:02
Speaker
I also, because I was on Donner Summit Fire Department, we were in the middle of the most dangerous part of interstate aiding. We were at the top of Donner Summit between Reno and Sacramento. So we used to get some hellacious crashes, including some vehicles, some trucks. We also had what was then Southern Pacific, now Union Pacific Railroad, coming through the area. And as a professional ski patroller, where, to the best of my knowledge, the only
00:10:31
Speaker
civilian occupation that actually holds a live explosive charge in their hand for avalanche control. So anyone in their right mind during a blizzard is snug as a bug in a rug. I'm on the top of the mountain
00:10:51
Speaker
in a blizzard with 40 pounds of high explosives and a pack in my back and a live explosive charge in my hand so I obviously can't be too bright because you use explosives to try and either cause an avalanche before people get out there or also to help settle the snowpack so that it doesn't slide.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah. So hey, Paul, when you but the first time that I mean, this is, this sounds, this sounds like pretty wild. So the first time someone hands you a live explosive in your, you know, in your 20s, or however old you were and said, Hey, this is what you're gonna do, do you just go, okay, cool, I'm gonna do this? Or were you like, hold on a second? What? More the latter than the former.
00:11:39
Speaker
But as a guy in his 20s, I love seeing things go boom. But yes, there is a certain amount of trepidation and understanding the hazards. It's interesting that, for example, where you would arm those
00:11:56
Speaker
It was in an unheated shack. You were not allowed to have any form of ignition with you. You couldn't have matches or lighter or anything and to avoid static. So there are so many things that you learn because the cost of failure can be dire.
00:12:19
Speaker
So again, that increases your knowledge. As a ski patrol, you were involved in health and safety. That was your job. And then, to kind of where did that next step come from?
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah. One day I'm sitting at the local cafe having breakfast and I see a small little ad in the San Francisco Chronicle about a master's degree in environmental management. So at this point that was 1983.
00:13:01
Speaker
I said they listed some of the things that had to do with hydrogeology and you know fresh and wastewater and environmental conservation and that was actually at the University of San Francisco and I live 200 miles away. That's kind of a commute. It was kind of a commute and it was Saturday classes for a year and a thesis. So I commuted 200 miles each way
00:13:29
Speaker
For a year, as I say, I was so poor, I only had AM radio. We're talking poor, right? Yes, okay. And I crashed on the floor of my friend's house in San Francisco until he got a motorcycle accident and was in a hospital bed in his living room, so I got his bedroom.
00:13:49
Speaker
um you know your real friend is when you'll change your friend's urine bottle you know while he's in the hospital bed oh my gosh your poor friend and what a way to gain a bed okay um but then uh afterwards i as i say my mistake wasn't going to graduate school my mistake was graduating from graduate school because then i had to get a
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, the ski bump days were gone. What happened was I actually got a job in San Benito County, California.
Experience in Seismic Zones
00:14:40
Speaker
Most people have never heard it. It's a small county, actually not so small a county, but it's southeast of Gilroy, northeast of Salinas, from around 75, 80 miles south of San Francisco. And it happens to be the most seismically active county in the country.
00:15:02
Speaker
Oh wow. It is where the Calaveras Fault and the San Andreas Fault meet and you have a phenomena called creep which is where instead of having large earthquakes you actually had a series of small ones
00:15:17
Speaker
where the ground would move on a regular basis. And it was well-known. Geologists and seismologists know this place well. It's kind of mecca for those folks, where the sidewalks would be offset. And I was hired
00:15:38
Speaker
Because of some problems and mistakes that the county had made, I was hired to run both emergency management and their hazardous waste programs. Within a couple of months, I'm running both emergency medical services because I come from that background, hazardous materials, hazardous waste, and their emergency management program.
00:15:58
Speaker
And because it was a small county, I got my ability to put my hands in a lot of things. And I did that for several years. It was really wonderful. I still have friends down there. Oh, the county seat for San Benito County, something that is known to most people, as Hollister.
00:16:19
Speaker
um of t-shirt famous yes okay um and uh also for those of you that remember the movie The Wild Ones with Marlon Brando about the motorcycle gang was actually based on a real life incident that happened in the late 40s in Hollister um so so I'm getting I'm getting the impression Paul that you have uh you know your your career is paralleling some sort of
00:16:49
Speaker
infamous things, Hollister, The Donner Party, this movie, okay. Love the color commentary, all right. I mean, what an experience that must have been like for you as a young person, just fresh out of graduate school to have that many responsibilities. You know, when you list it off, the main things you're responsible for, that's a lot to put on to someone who's not, you know, in your first foray, in your first job.
00:17:17
Speaker
Yep. And it also was a lack of resources. So one of the things I would often say is the jobs I've had, you have to use whatever tools you have, especially if you have a few resources and very little delegated power. So as I say, in emergency management, you often use a command and control mode. I was stuck with a coercing cajole mode.
00:17:50
Speaker
And that's one of the things that helped me along the way is because if you want to get something done and you don't have the economic resources, if you don't have the mandate of authority, you have to show the benefits of the health and safety, the environmental management, the emergency management to the end users.
00:18:14
Speaker
because otherwise they're not going to sign on. And if you're not going to get that support, you're not going to be successful. So you have to be able to plan and create and to convey the benefits of these efforts so that they're all actually being real and demonstrable benefits to those end users, either individuals or organizations.
00:18:41
Speaker
I mean, this is something that our listeners to the podcast know all too well. So many of us have never even had a budget, right? And so we're always trying to do that, what did you call it, cajoling? Coercing cajole. That's right. I think if there was a degree in that, safety and health professionals probably would at least have a minor in it in all the ways that we're trying to turn over rocks and create relationships to find funding for the initiatives we need and backing.
00:19:09
Speaker
And this is something that has followed me through my career. How do you affect that meaningful change with the least resources? And as every safety professional out there knows, boy, that can be a tough sell sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happened next? Well, what happened next?
00:19:39
Speaker
My thesis and my focus was on hazardous materials emergency response. In fact, when I was living on Donner's Summit, I started going back to the National Fire Academy back in Emmitsburg, Maryland to take courses in hazardous materials emergency response and management of emergency medical services.
00:20:02
Speaker
Now I did it because I was interested in it, but I also had another ulterior motive. Remember, I was a poor ski bum, and I'm originally from New York. So the feds would actually pay for my hair. Pay you to get home. So somehow or another, I would wrap myself through New York.
00:20:22
Speaker
Same amount of money, so it didn't cost the feds anymore. Then I would pick up the tab and take the train down to DC to pick up the bus to head over there.
00:20:32
Speaker
But I got a really good start and had this materials emergency response, partially because, as I described, living on Donner Summit, Interstate 80, Southern Pacific Union, Pacific Railroad, and high tourist traffic, it gave me that opportunity to really find out what was happening at the cutting edge. But that was 1981, where the cutting edge was a little
00:21:01
Speaker
primitive. And let me just give you an example of primitive. So we were taught in the early days, those of your listeners who go back this far, when responding to a potential alcohol fire or an ether fire,
00:21:19
Speaker
Those flames are not very well visible. They have a blue-white flame. So you were taught to go into a potential alcohol fire and carry a corn silk broom in front of you. Oh, wow. That was your monitoring device. And if the end of the broom caught on fire, you were supposed to back up. Now, in these days of high tech,
00:21:48
Speaker
And in GCMSs, you reflect back on those days and you go, boy, that was both primitive and scary.
00:21:58
Speaker
This is the emergency management version of the canary in the coal mine. That's right. Carried the broom. Oh my gosh. So Paul, how many years is this before the Haswapper Standard is adopted? Well, Haswapper Standard was incorporated, well, was addressed in the, first in Sarah Title I in 1986, as I remember it, I believe.
00:22:24
Speaker
Mike Moore, not the filmmaker Mike Moore, but another Mike Moore that worked at Fedosha, I believe came out with the draft in 1987, I think it was adopted a year or so later. And that was really, when the Haswapper standard came out, it really created the framework, which we're still living with today.
00:22:46
Speaker
They have really, they have not modified that standard since then. And it's a testament to this gentleman, Mike Moore, who put something together. I think he was a volunteer fighter, firefighter in suburban Maryland, who put together this program. And the Haswapper standard was also based partially on the four agency manual on dealing with hazardous waste sites, which
00:23:11
Speaker
created the physical framework, and their direction was to come up with something, as I remember, as protective of workers as the asbestos standards. And, well, you see, it is now since, you know, the late 80s, and now we are crossing to 2021, that that standard still
00:23:35
Speaker
exists, is still relevant, and is still protecting both people, workers, the environment, and the communities all these years later. Let me just say that I'm just finishing up this kind of one of those
00:23:51
Speaker
reflective what goes around comes around is I'm actually rewriting a 40-hour general site worker course for the California Conservation Corps so I had to really go back and look at the standard again with fresh eyes after all these years to make sure I was incorporating everything and it really does hold up over time.
00:24:13
Speaker
Amazing. And so you had gotten your start prior to Haswapper coming into play and then you got to see it's work in real time. And started, I assume then started working with it and in compliance with it and doing training with it after it was adopted with the work that you were doing. Is that how that went?
00:24:37
Speaker
Oh, yes. In fact, one of the big pushes that I was working with OSHA, because at that point, in this kind of segues, after my time in San Benito County, I took a position with the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services in their Hazards Materials Division.
00:25:00
Speaker
And one of the things that we were corresponding during the, just before the adoption of the final rule, was attempting to ensure that the incident command system was incorporated into the standard. It was actually in the final rule and
00:25:28
Speaker
The original wording says, shall use an incident command system.
00:25:35
Speaker
in without capital letters but as time went on now it says the incident command system i believe in capital letters in the standard because the use of a of a common organizational structure and the use of a common nomenclature is so critical to having an effective response and i'm happy to say that
00:26:01
Speaker
Not too soon after joining the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, which I'll call OAS, I was actually on the fire scope group that developed the Hazus materials module for the incident command system, which is still in use today. And I can tell you that was two years of yelling and screaming, saying bad things about each other to come up with that module, working with
00:26:29
Speaker
Fire folks down in Southern California. We spent a lot of time up at Camp 4 for LA County Fire, which is right next to the Jet Propulsion Lab. But it was two years of work, and I'm happy to say that that module is still in use worldwide today.
00:26:47
Speaker
And so people are using this incident command system in in places outside of Outside of has whopper. I'm guessing is it adopted widely in other areas to know that the original incident command system was created following a series of disastrous wildland firefighters in 1970 in Southern California
00:27:14
Speaker
where, in retrospect, they realized that not only did they lose the battle, but they lost the war, and the lack of a common organizational structure, any common nomenclature, and understanding the command and control that we talked about earlier,
00:27:31
Speaker
was so critical to having an effective response. And even though it was touted as an all-hazard system, in reality, it was for wildland fires, and it really had not developed beyond that. And east of the Mississippi, it was really unknown and not really well adopted. In fact, there was a parallel program that came out of Phoenix for the
00:27:58
Speaker
with Chief Bruno Sini, called Fire Ground Command. That was similar, but was more for structural fire, but in the command wars, the incident command system won out, and it became the system, and in fact it was the basis for HSPD 5, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, that led to the adoption of NIMS, the National Incident Management System.
00:28:27
Speaker
And that was really the basis of it that it was pushed up to the next level. Fascinating. Fascinating. I know I've been hearing these last number of months my own governor talking about following the incident command system in response to the pandemic and what my state in particular is doing and how they're following it with regard to people and supplies. And I hear him reference it often.
00:28:57
Speaker
Well, and one of the things I do is we get further on and talk about how I evolved into the work I do in healthcare, but I teach the hospital incident command system both nationally and internationally.
00:29:16
Speaker
And one of the points is that the key concepts are applicable in so many different things, even in non-emergency events. And there's always the, you know, the organization joint, some of your listeners may have seen, you know, there is the planning a wedding using the incident command system.
00:29:41
Speaker
the mother of the bride, unit leader, you know, and all sorts of things to do that. In fact, my company, the one that I started was called N-Magine, think John Lennon for emergency and environmental work, but we would work all of our projects using the incident command system.
00:30:02
Speaker
One of the objectives there is to demystify it. That if you only use your emergency savvy and organizations during an emergency, you're not that well versed in it. So we would highly encourage people to, if they're doing a safe
00:30:19
Speaker
or planning a flu clinic or whatever it might be to use the incident command system on a day-to-day basis so that it's not a foreign concept and that you can incorporate it into your daily work. Again, going back to that course and cajole, how do you make things better on a day-to-day basis? And if you can get people familiar with this. In fact,
00:30:43
Speaker
When I teach my classes, don't tell anyone who's taking my classes. The first exercise we do to do it in a non-intimidating way is we have them play on the company picnic.
00:30:58
Speaker
using the incident command system. I have little party hats with a different color coding, red for operations, blue for planning, and things like that. And we plan the company picnic. One of the things I find amusing is, again, I worked in healthcare,
00:31:16
Speaker
And so I would go to hospitals around the country, and when I'm working with faith-based organizations, I would always ask during the planning period, I'd say, okay, here's a question. Are you going to serve alcohol?
00:31:32
Speaker
The Baptist hospitals would say no. The Catholic hospitals would say yes. Yes, right. Of course. What a fascinating way to make it applicable and understandable to people. That's great. Let me take you to the next step, because I am devious, is because then the company picnic turns into a food poisoning event.
00:31:56
Speaker
And then we turned it into an intentional food poisoning event. So then you go from a low intimidation and everyone's enjoying themselves, kind of sharing the concepts, but then it gets a little more serious and then it gets a little bit more serious. And so we found that it was a really effective way to convey the material in a way that would have an impact and it seems to have worked well with us.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, and picking something that everybody can relate to how what a smart idea. So back to your career, Paul, let's pick up. Where were we? I was at the governor's office of emergency services. Yeah. And while I was there, I had, you know, just a wonderful opportunity. I was assigned the responsibility of rewriting or really writing the California hazardous materials incident contingency plan. It was really the
00:32:56
Speaker
the framework for hazardous materials emergency response now i was berated um vilified for a while because i actually wrote the plan using the incident command system so i had a basic plan i had command operations logistics planning and finance and um
00:33:25
Speaker
And also, you know, it doesn't take much effort to write a thick plan. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of thought to write a thin plan. Amen to that. Editing is something. Right. So I promised my colleagues that this plan would be no more than a half an inch thick.
00:33:47
Speaker
And that is very, very difficult. But it worked. In fact, that plan, which I think went to press in 1990 or 1991, is still the official California Hazards Materials Incident Contingency Plan.
00:34:03
Speaker
Then I made the mistake of getting promoted, and I actually became the CERA Title III Program Manager, which many of you listeners know as the Hazardous Materials Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Program. I ran the largest program in the country. At that point, we had, I think, 100,000
00:34:30
Speaker
businesses and that has grown over the years but it was really implementing this California had an unusual circumstances that we had a parallel program New Jersey and California had a
00:34:45
Speaker
their own hazardous materials emergency planning community right-to-know program known as EFGRA and Senator Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey put in a standalone section of the Superfund amendments Sarah titles one and two that re-up the
00:35:05
Speaker
circular the comprehensive environmental response liability and cleanup act known as super fund um but he threw in this standalone title three unfortunately he was based on the new jersey model because that's where he was from so we had to spend a couple of years
00:35:21
Speaker
trying to integrate it to reduce the burden on business because we want them to be working on substantive issues, not doing the administrative. And that took a while. It worked out well. And that evolved in California into the Cooper program, the certified unified program agency.
00:35:42
Speaker
which is administered primarily at the local level, which is where things should be done. After that, I actually moved on. I was requested to move over to the California Conservation Corps because that was after the Huntington Trader oil spill. What happened was there was an oil tanker, the American Trader,
00:36:11
Speaker
sat on its own anchor down in the Huntington Beach area and spilled a bunch of oil and they had people in sandals and shorts on the beach trying to clean it up and the oil was actually owned by BP
00:36:30
Speaker
And they took an overhead, and they took a flight over, and they had Dirty Beach, Dirty Beach, Clean Beach, Dirty Beach, Dirty Beach, Clean Beach. And they said, why is that beach clean? And they said, well, that's because the California Conservation Corps was out doing that. And you're hearing a lot about the Civilian Conservation Corps from the New Deal during the Depression, and they need to revive it because of the circumstances we're faced with now.
00:36:57
Speaker
Well, the California Conservation Corps has been around for around 40 years, and they got a grant from BP to develop people who are trained to the regular site worker under Haswapper to do oil spill cleanup. So I took over that program and modified that program for the Conservation Corps.
00:37:21
Speaker
The interesting part, or the challenging part, is the Conservation Corps. It's a wonderful organization. Their official motto is, hard work.
00:37:32
Speaker
low pay, miserable conditions, and more. That's the official motto. Really? Bring it again. Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more. But we're talking about a workforce
00:37:52
Speaker
mostly 18 to 23 years old, often who do not learn well in a traditional academic city. People with, you know, varying levels of literacy, people that, you know, young adults who came from low-resource homes and communities. And so how do you take a hazardous waste course and make it effective for
00:38:23
Speaker
These essential workers, yeah. And I remember a lively discussion that I had with an industrial hygienist who had talked about how his responsibility was to convey the information and that was it. And I said, you have the absolute wrong approach.
00:38:47
Speaker
My job is to ensure that the people that leave that class are able to demonstrate competency to work safely and effectively. That's right. That's my only job. And I think that's one of the problems that a lot of people have, and I think we all fall into it, myself including, is you want to give all the information, but it's how you convey the information so it works and
00:39:16
Speaker
And because of the different learning styles and the different approaches of the end user, then you have to ensure that you understand your end user. And that is one of the key challenges that I've found, which kind of transitioned that when I was
00:39:34
Speaker
I also became the safety officer at the Conservation Corps, whose workers' comp rates were astronomical. Often these young adults were not physically fit. You know, they came from sedentary lifestyles. And although their biggest workers' comp claim was jelly poison oak, but there were a lot of serious injuries and we really worked hard.
00:40:00
Speaker
to reduce those injuries because those can be life-changing for those corps members. And that was quite a challenge.
00:40:08
Speaker
So Paul, you were talking about responding to this oil spill in the Huntington Beach area. Was that one of the first disasters that you had a hand in? Because there's been others that you had a hand in in your career, right? Environmental disasters, workplace fatalities, various accidents, right? Well, since 1973, I've been dealing with
00:40:36
Speaker
In some cases, mass casualty incidents. New fault sits on the New York State Thruway. So we had hellacious motor vehicle accidents. On Dona Summit, we would have our annual bus crash.
00:40:51
Speaker
We had a number of hazardous material spills, and avalanches on Donner's Summit, and large motor vehicle accidents. Then, when I had some earthquakes and spills when I was in San Benito County, and then one day, let me see if I remember. Oh, that would be October 17th, 1989, with OAS. But we're going to an off-site over in Monterey.
00:41:21
Speaker
And on my way there, I'm with my wife and four-month-old son. And going over the Pacheco Pass, little did I know that the Loma Pria at the earthquake hits.
00:41:33
Speaker
and so I'm supposed to meet some friends and colleagues down in San Bernardino County because they're driving through there and playing in through town the traffic is backed up and the traffic lights are out and I see a tilt up building that's kind of collapsed and but you know those sometimes in your life where you're just not hitting you like it's like you know the facts are in front of you but they're kind of bouncing off the top of your head
00:41:59
Speaker
Mm-hmm, especially when you're with family you don't you're not always plugged into your profession a hundred percent So I pulled down a side road I knew the town and I pull in I asked my wife to change our form of old sun's diaper and I run down to the most supposed to meet these friends at a bar restaurant and I see plywood on top of these
00:42:23
Speaker
downtown and on the windows and so and it's still not hitting me it wasn't until I someone walking past me on the street I heard the word earthquake and all of a sudden my head exploded so I ran down looking for my friends the bar is completely without power but there's still people drinking I run back to the car I go Adeline there's been a big
00:42:52
Speaker
insert adjective here, earthquake. So I go up to the local emergency operations center. Mind you, this is like 45 minutes an hour after the event. I go up, all my friends and colleagues who are the emergency management folks are up at the emergency operations center. And the first thing the guy that I had hired before turns to me and says, what took you so long? I'm gone.
00:43:12
Speaker
What do you mean? It's less than an hour after the earthquake. You've got a representative from the governor's office here. By happenstance. By happenstance. So I spent the time there. I ended up being sent over to Santa Cruz. And if you remember, the Santa Cruz Mall collapsed. But they actually, my friend who was the head of emergency management for Santa Cruz, Nancy Carr Gordon,
00:43:37
Speaker
It said, you know Paul, I haven't heard much from Watsonville. Why don't you go over and check that out? Well, Watsonville was devastated by this earthquake. A lot of unreinforced masonry buildings. This is a community that was mostly immigrant workers working in the fields.
00:43:58
Speaker
known for strawberries and other things that you find in the greater Salinas Monterey area. And I ended up spending most of a week there sleeping underneath a desk in the city offices, but it was also where the Jolly Green Giant plant had a major ammonia leak and almost all the matters of egress out of town were compromised by the earthquake. Oh, wow.
00:44:25
Speaker
And working with my friend who was at that point, the assistant city manager and the fire chief, a wonderful person named Gary Smith, it was from that event
00:44:36
Speaker
that was formed the Ammonia Safety and Training Institute, people who I've been connected with and friends with since then. And they have the definitive work in terms of emergency planning and response to ammonia, but approaches that are applicable in so many ways, the work they do is really phenomenal.
00:44:58
Speaker
national and international work. And there's still some very close friends. So I've had little and bigs. I've had people die in my arms. I've had major things blow up. I've had cities collapse on me. And then over the course of my career, I had the opportunity to be at down in Northridge for the earthquake. I was at Katrina and quite a number of other events.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah, and they color you, don't they? Yeah, I haven't been a part of history making events like you have, but I've certainly done my fair share of fatality and catastrophe investigations.
Impact of Investigations
00:45:42
Speaker
they never leave your mind the stories never leave your mind and as i know that as i'm driving the landscape of my geographic area you know i'm thinking about them as i pass certain places and think about places i've been and people's stories that i carry and i bet you have that as well as you crisscross across the country
00:46:03
Speaker
It's the curse of the safety professional. It is, isn't it? Yeah. As I say, I am a professional paranoid. Try this at home.
00:46:13
Speaker
And it goes back again to being a New Yorker. They say a certain amount of paranoia is always justified. And so my job is instilling into a certain amount of constructive, appropriate paranoia as part of your life. And one of the things that I've always felt as I evolved
00:46:37
Speaker
is what is emergency management and environmental management, but it's really just health and safety management on a grander scale.
Understanding Emergency Management
00:46:45
Speaker
All the same concepts, they're all applicable, and what are you doing? You're trying to protect life, the environment, and property in that order. And so if you can do those effectively, you will have the opportunity to make effective change.
00:47:04
Speaker
That's right. So Paul, you were talking earlier about the ammonia release and how it led to more legislation. But there's been other things that you've been part of as well, based on your experience, that you've had an opportunity to author some different, well, I don't know, some of it legislative and some of it
00:47:31
Speaker
local plans, how does that work?
00:47:39
Speaker
I've been fortunate to be involved in a number of things that evolved into becoming essentially the standard of care in many respects. And some of those through, as you say, through legislation. For example, I had a hand in, and I will not take full credit, but I definitely had a hand in, the revise.
00:48:05
Speaker
As you indicated in the beginning I retired from Kelly PA in 2018 where I ran the refinery safety program. Yeah the one of the big accomplishments of
00:48:18
Speaker
is you have, again, many of your listeners are familiar with the Process Safety Management Program and the Risk Management Prevention Program. PSM falls under the auspices of OSHA and then the Risk Management Prevention Program falls under EPA. California, we have our own version called the California Accidental Release Prevention Program called CALARP for the RMP.
00:48:46
Speaker
what the Interagency Refinery Task Force did is they took the applicable parts of the PSM and the RMP and married those and expanded those for refineries. And those were adopted and, to my understanding, they are the most extensive and detailed
00:49:15
Speaker
prevention regulations for a high hazard industry probably in the world. And there are different approaches. I had the responsibility of taking the lead on the
00:49:34
Speaker
preparedness and response regulations that apply to the Kellogg side and those are still sitting over in two years later, much to my chagrin, over at OAS, waiting to go through the formal rulemaking process. But I've been involved in standards through different bodies and
00:50:03
Speaker
Some of them I think really made a difference. Some, you know, languish and are forgotten, but I think for the most part they've done well. And, you know, having moved over to healthcare, because after I was with the Conservation Corps, I ended up taking over environmental health and safety at a small healthcare system you've probably never heard of called Kaiser Permanente.
00:50:28
Speaker
Oh no, never heard of it. Never heard of it. You've never heard of Mayo Clinic in my life? Yeah, no, no. Those places. And so, again, here's what I had to do. I had to transpose some of the skill sets that I learned in the Conservation Corps to working in healthcare.
00:50:51
Speaker
Was it hard? It wasn't necessarily hard. It was challenging. And one of the things that came out of that was we had all geared up for Y2K. Remember the disaster that wasn't? Yes. The one we actually prepared for, unlike this one. Right. And it's interesting. The only time that I remember where finance
00:51:17
Speaker
You look at the incident command system, getting people to participate in the finance module and component of the incident command system is almost impossible because they never come to training. They don't really care about it. But with Y2K, you had their attention. Now, I believe that in emergency management, I have two dicta. One, cheating counts.
00:51:47
Speaker
And two, opportunism is not necessarily a bad thing. So we had the attention of people that would normally not be involved in. We really pushed that to bring the parts of the health care system into being effective in an emergency, the ones who normally would not participate. And that was very effective. But as a region, we had an emergency preparedness group as a subunit of the local hospital association.
00:52:16
Speaker
And after Y2K, they said, well, let's take on a project. And that project was Hazmat's materials. So they asked me to co-lead on that. And that's what really became the flagship program that I'm known for, which is Hazmat for Healthcare, which evolved into a first responder awareness and operations class designed for
00:52:43
Speaker
healthcare workers to deal primarily with contaminated victims and small internal spills. And as I said, the core, often we have people who do not learn well in a traditional academic setting. Well, in the healthcare, you had many extremes, and I'll use two of them. One was our housekeepers or environmental service workers.
00:53:12
Speaker
Often English is a second language. Often, you know, do not come in with an academic background. Now, mind you, these are the hardest working, lowest paid and worst treated people in the organization. With high exposures. Right, and high exposures, right? And they work so hard. And I often when people, you know, people go, look at this place, it's a mess. And they blame environmental services. And I go, wait a second.
00:53:42
Speaker
Did they make it a mess? Or did you make it a mess? But then you also have the other end of the spectrum. And that's physicians.
00:53:52
Speaker
who also do not often learn in it while in a traditional academic setting. I've had experience with this. I've worked in healthcare. I understand what you're saying. And so as we evolved the program, we took a lot of the same concepts. And we believe in edutainment, right? That adults often learn well when they're enjoying themselves.
00:54:16
Speaker
Now, it's important to ensure that we do not take the material flippantly. As we say, we take the material very seriously. We just don't take ourselves very seriously. And so, that was one of the challenges, but it's really served us well. And so, that is in many respects that Hazmatra Healthcare Program has evolved into a very
00:54:46
Speaker
In some respects, the defacto standard throughout the country. Yeah. And Paul, do you do you think that pieces and parts of it are being used and applied in health care for the pandemic response? Absolutely. And one of one of my mantras is, let's just go back to the definition of a hazardous substance in the has whopper standard.
00:55:10
Speaker
talks about DOT and other things like that, but there's a section in the definition which talks about biological and infectious agents. Now, when I was in the fire service and times before that, I kind of ignored that section. Well, when I got into healthcare, I said, wait a second, what are blood-borne pathogens? What are infectious diseases? What's biohazardous waste? But,
00:55:37
Speaker
a hazard. And so one of my mantras that I would constantly convey is that if you deal with a blood-borne pathogen, an infectious disease, or a biohazardous waste as if it were a hazardous material, you are much more likely to have a safe and effective response. And we saw this working throughout the system. And the ones who adopted it
00:56:07
Speaker
effectively are the ones who tend to fare better. Yeah, this is a really great point for our listeners, particularly anyone who's maybe starting out in the career. I've heard our mutual friend Chip Hughes, the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, refer to the Haswapper standard as
00:56:29
Speaker
kind of that blueprint or backbone of all that is health and safety response. And if you pull it apart and do exactly what you're describing, Paul, it's so applicable to so many different situations for safety and health professionals as a starting point to try to figure out how to handle something.
00:56:51
Speaker
And again, going back to the Incident Command System, to my knowledge, it is the first place where the words Incident Command System show up in any regulations. And look how it's evolved.
00:57:10
Speaker
throughout the country and throughout the world. I had the opportunity to teach a lot of this material north of our border in Canada, in Mexico, in Israel, in Abu Dhabi, in Dubai, where it actually had a British model, but I think the
00:57:34
Speaker
the incident command system has really become the system throughout the world. Yeah. Paul, I know we're getting close on our time, but there's a few other things I wanted to ask about if you don't mind. Please, I'm here for you. You had mentioned in your do-gooder setup that you've also been part of many
00:58:03
Speaker
boards and committees and commissions and councils. I'd like to hear a little bit about that and in particular for our listeners, you know, when they're building a career or you're at a certain point in your career right now, what that affords you and what doors that has opened for you? What have you learned from those things? Can you talk a little bit about some of those boards and committees?
00:58:30
Speaker
Well, as I indicated, I ended up on the board of the new Pulse Rescue Squad. Again, volunteer, the only college student at that point. Then I moved on, and often, I guess it's
00:58:48
Speaker
a personal testament where people had approached me to say, there's this opening, would you be interested? And it was very, it was wonderful when I was on the board of, again, the Donner Summit Public Utility District. One thing to your listeners, don't be afraid to start small.
00:59:09
Speaker
Often you get a much larger understanding and broader perspective if you start off in small organizations because you're doing everything. If you're working in a large organization and you are compartmentalized in the work you do, it doesn't give you that broader perspective.
00:59:30
Speaker
But currently, for example, I'm the immediate past president of my local hospice. It's a volunteer board, but we are now 41 years old.
00:59:45
Speaker
startup as an all-volunteer organization is now a $20 million a year operation providing hospital services with no charge to families or patients doing incredible work. I am on the National Hospital Incident Command System Advisory Committee where we met
01:00:06
Speaker
through the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Worker Training Program, that I've been on the advisory board on the Western Regional University Consortium, which does HAZWAP training, disaster training, often for minority workers, unionized workers, under-resourced communities, that really helps you to develop that skill set to develop the connections. Again, part of these connections.
01:00:37
Speaker
Now, I often don't get my work out of there, but I know many people who have parlayed that work in the council's commissions. I'm also the vice chair of my local fire safe committee, the council, which is like, you know, 20 square blocks. Well, I live in the country, so I don't have square blocks, but you get the idea.
01:00:59
Speaker
large and small. It allows you to understand how organizations work and how you can fit in and where you can help make decisions and also where you don't stick your nose into. I'm known for sticking my nose in places it doesn't belong and it's got me in trouble all my life. And I've often been an advocate. And again, it's got me in trouble all my life, but I do not regret any of that. Sometimes when you're willing to
01:01:29
Speaker
advocates for people who are not in the decision-making room. That's what it's important. I'll go back and talk about
01:01:39
Speaker
There are two things without which whatever program you're doing is doomed to fail.
Keys to Program Success
01:01:45
Speaker
Because if you do not have a real, demonstrable, substantive, long-term commitment of executive support, your program is going to fail. The other thing that you need is you need champions.
01:01:59
Speaker
You need champions in three places in your organization. You need champions inside that C-suite, that executive suite. You need someone who's going to advocate for you when you're not there. Number one. You need people in the trenches.
01:02:18
Speaker
to support you. That's why when I was a Tizer, one of the first things I did is I worked closely with our unions. I remember when I got there, there was a big talk about labor management partnerships and I said, oh, and where's the labor rep on our safety committee?
01:02:39
Speaker
They looked at me like I had two heads. They said, you can't do that. I said, of course I can do that. They said, if you don't have the people who are doing the actual work, first of all, you consider the enemy in many respects because you're imposing things on them, and they're the ones who really know what's going on.
01:02:56
Speaker
So my alliances with the Nurses Union and SEIU, who are our primary unions at Kaiser, became my biggest allies. And there's the third place where you need champions. And this is in some respects the most daunting. And it's the place where in organizations, things go to die. And that's middle management.
01:03:22
Speaker
because they are caught between that rock and the hard spot. Manager wants them to do more with less and the people down below and the trenches, they are the ones who are getting beat up all the time. And when it comes to training and preparedness and things like that,
01:03:39
Speaker
in healthcare, they're just trying to keep the doors open tomorrow. So, executive support and champions are the things you need. And I think my experience on those councils and committees and commissions and things like that really do help. Yeah, that's fascinating to break it down into those three areas, Paul. As you're saying that, I'm thinking about my career and different jobs that I've had and who those
01:04:05
Speaker
like I can name those individuals in places and I've always been I've always been good at the labor piece and having those advocates and it's taken some time in my career to be able to find those champions in the C-suite and or being part of it and you know particularly for people starting out to be brave enough
01:04:26
Speaker
to know that you need that and to pursue that and to ask for that help and to make yourself known. And middle management, you know what, you just taught me something. I really hadn't thought about that, but I'm thinking about where I made those alliances and I did. And in particular, it was helpful for the middle managers who had budget and access to money that would help me get where I wanted to go with them.
01:04:51
Speaker
Well, let me just give you an example of how to work that. I was also given the responsibility to work on employee injury reduction program at Kaiser. You all know, healthcare workers have some of the highest injury rates of any profession out there, often associated with patient lifting.
01:05:12
Speaker
That's right. And then the other place is the lifting and pulling that environmental service and medical records. Musculoskeletal injuries. But I realized that I had to convince
01:05:31
Speaker
the executives, the chief nursing officer, they had a finance, all the rest of those. So before I went to give a formal presentation, I met with just about everyone on that C-suite to talk to them about the project, to give them ownership, and each of them had different motivations. Our chief nursing officer was really into nurse recruitment and retention.
01:06:00
Speaker
So you say, well, this is one of the things that's going to allow you to be the employer of choice because you're reducing the threat to their backs, right? In terms of lifting. Or that they're able to stay longer in the job because they don't have a bad back. And I remember our chief nursing officer was there.
01:06:23
Speaker
a former ICU nurse. And I said, you know, do you know any ICU nurse 20 years in the job that doesn't have a bad back? And she turns to me and she goes, you're wrong. I said, huh. And she goes, 10 years. And you know, the finance person and the risk management person was worried about workers' comp costs. But what you do is you address each of those
01:06:49
Speaker
you have now gained an ally and they have investment in the success of your program. You meet them where they are. And so when I went to make the formal presentation and get to the approval, I had already worked the background. And that's the hard work that you do. But understanding everyone's got different motivations, both personal and professional. And incorporating that into your approach is very important to success.
Career Reflections
01:07:18
Speaker
So Paul, out of all the things that you've done in your career and lifetime, wondering, is there something that you feel has had a lasting legacy for you, something that you're really proud of?
01:07:34
Speaker
Well, as one reflects back on one's career, there are many things that were exciting and rewarding and frustrating. But the ones that really last and make a difference in people's lives, those are the ones that I think one can be most proud of or get the most satisfaction out of. One that I'd like to bring up is
01:08:01
Speaker
Back in the late 80s, or the 80s, there used to be a hazardous materials emergency response workshop. It was put on by Montgomery County, Maryland Fire and Rescue, and it was these spots that everyone used to go to.
01:08:18
Speaker
And I was there when I first started working at OAS, and I was standing around a table, maybe there was a cocktail or three involved, with people from San Francisco Fire, and San Jose Fire, and Santa Clara Fire, and FEMA, and Sacramento Fire, and we were standing around and said, you know,
01:08:41
Speaker
We could do something like this. And the gentleman from FEMA, Bill Patterson, used to be the chief of Santa Barbara and Long Beach Fire. So I have a little money. So in 1990, we put on a conference. Had around 350 people there. We thought it was a one-off. Well,
01:09:04
Speaker
30 years later, with the exception of the year 2020 for obvious reasons, we put on annually during Labor Day week generally, the nations, and it evolved into the nation's largest
01:09:20
Speaker
hazardous materials emergency response workshop and we would get between six and nine hundred people for ten years I did the fashion show the hazmat fashion show
01:09:36
Speaker
which we used to do some crazy things. We used to blow stuff up and have different themes. You know, when you read a 2001 theme, when you read a television theme, you know, and guess that hazmat, where we take contestants, put them into a hazardous atmosphere, and they have to guess the concentration.
01:09:58
Speaker
Guess that has met. Great talk show voice by the way. Thank you very much. So what we and it really it's amazing and again it's one of those examples of edutainment stuff that we take very seriously. It was very informal. Put on over a hundred sessions each time both classroom, manipulative skills.
01:10:26
Speaker
Again, we would have the FBI take people out to a field and blow stuff up. And we'd have the ammonia safety training institute release ammonia with permission. And that's a legacy. And many years and years have gone by. And for many of the people that has this materials emergency response community,
01:10:49
Speaker
it became the place where they would get together and share new ideas. We really pushed a lot of the innovative stuff. I remember one of the evaluations, I think it was from Dean Deisard, who was a captain of Ventura County Fire, was actually chair of the
01:11:10
Speaker
a fire sculpt hazmat committee said that a well-placed bomb on Wednesday night could send hazmat back 20 years. But it's great. We're still planning on doing it again once we can do it safely. So it's again one of those things that's lasted.
01:11:32
Speaker
Certainly, like with Hazmat for Healthcare, when we designed it, I was moving on from Kaiser, and the group that we helped put it together said, look, this is really great, but so many things we do go and they kind of die or wither.
01:11:49
Speaker
If you're going to go on and start consulting, why don't you take that with you to make it last? It's lasted, again, since Y2K, over 20 years. As you look in retrospect, what are the lasting things you have done?
01:12:11
Speaker
but at least a couple of them might have a legacy. And I really owe that to all the people that we've worked with over the years. And that means that those lasting friendships and lasting professional collaborations and hoping to move the dial forward, that's just mixing metaphors, to make things better, to give people the tools. I think I talked earlier about
01:12:41
Speaker
you know that that broom and the alcohol fire yes well we don't do that anymore and hopefully we've come up with better ways to keep people safe and to do a job that is inherently hazardous yeah and and learning over all these years of getting people together and collaborating on best practices new ideas and and inventing a new path fabulous oh thank you for sharing that Paul my pleasure
01:13:10
Speaker
And thank you all for spending your time listening today, and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you'd like to join the conversation about this episode or any of our previous episodes, follow our page and join the Accidental Safety Pro Community Group on Facebook.
01:13:30
Speaker
If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, subscribe on iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more safety and health professionals like you and I and Paul. Special thanks to Will Moss, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.