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#97: Safety in the Bering Sea
105 Plays2 years ago
Alan Davis, CSP sits down with us to share his story of how he "accidentally wound up in a profession to prevent accidents". His story starts with a farm injury that ruled out a military career before it began, but gave him an opportunity to explore a career in safety. He eventually ended up overseeing safety at sea as the Director of Safety and Compliance at American Seafoods Company. With years of experience in Conducting In-Port and At-Sea Vessel Safety Inspections, including Machine Guarding, Work Practices, OSHA Compliance, Life Safety, and more.
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Transcript
Introduction of Podcast and Guest
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded September 23rd, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. And today my guest is Alan Davis. Alan is a CSP and Director of Safety and Compliance at American Seafoods Company. Welcome to the show, Alan. Thank you for inviting me.
00:00:33
Speaker
Well, I've invited you several times. You just seem to have a very busy life where you somehow mysteriously are always on a ship somewhere where there isn't a good Wi-Fi connection. So thank you for being here today and making the time for us. I'm glad we could find the time that we could put it together.
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, so Alan, you have a long and interesting story, and I cannot wait to get into it with you today for our audience. And when we had our pre-podcast chat, I wrote a note in quotations, because this is from you, how you accidentally wind up in a profession to prevent accidents. And it has something to do with your childhood.
Alan's Path to Safety
00:01:22
Speaker
So do you want to start there?
00:01:25
Speaker
Yeah, sure. It was an interesting question prompt for me because none of us grow up playing in the sandbox as children thinking that we want to be safety professionals when we launch our careers and enter adulthood. I grew up on a farm in rural North Carolina. And thinking back over the accidents that led me to accidentally becoming a safety professional, there's a number of events that occurred on the farm where
00:01:54
Speaker
You know, my grandfather got hurt and pulled a tree over on himself when I was four years old or five years old. You know, my father was injured at one time or another. I have scars and actually sustained an injury myself that prevented me from following the normal career path that farm kids take to get off the farm and get an education.
00:02:26
Speaker
Yeah, so do you want to talk about any of those pieces with your about your family? Well, I think one of the one of the things that changed changed my course along the way is I had a small entrepreneurial venture where I was running a trap line and I had kind of a Jack London experience where
00:02:51
Speaker
I fell into water in winter and in the process of trying to light a fire, I was unable to get the fire lit and decided that my next course of action was to run towards the house and warmth. And we think that somewhere along the way in that process of running through the forest trying to keep from freezing to death, I did some damage to my knees.
00:03:21
Speaker
And it resulted in five knee surgeries between, what, seventh grade and 12th grade. And the normal path that farm kids take to escape the farm and get an education is to join the military, see the world, earn some college scholarship kind of credits, and go from there
00:03:51
Speaker
With my knee injuries, that path was closed to me and it just so happened in 11th grade, already trying to figure out a new path.
Mentorship and Education
00:04:03
Speaker
I was at a career day and Dr. Isaac Barnett spoke about a
00:04:11
Speaker
program at North Carolina A&T State University that had just been started. And you had to be a little bit of a business person, a little bit of a medical person, a little bit of an engineering person, maybe a little bit of a chemical person. And the mission was to keep people from getting killed, maimed, mangled, mutilated, or sick.
00:04:35
Speaker
I had already been a volunteer firefighter and had started the path towards becoming an EMT. So, having an option laid out in front of me that would allow me to try to prevent things from happening looked like a pretty attractive opportunity. And with it being a new program and almost in my backyard, it was a pretty easy path to step onto.
00:05:05
Speaker
And this is in the 11th grade? Yes.
00:05:10
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing. For people listening, and we often talk about mentorship and the pipeline to the EHS profession being so slim right now, these opportunities like Alan's describing about someone going back to a career day at a high school can really have a large influence on a generation, and certainly it did on your life. That's wonderful. Yeah.
00:05:39
Speaker
kind of taken it upon myself to engage in activities like that in a variety of ways to sort of pass it on or pay it back. I've only had one opportunity, I think, to go back to A&T and speak, and it was probably 10 years ago.
00:06:03
Speaker
But when I graduated from my program in 1990, there were four of us graduating. When I went back in 2010, something like that, there were 50 or 60 people in the program. So at least at that time, it had grown pretty considerably.
00:06:27
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing.
Firefighting Experiences
00:06:30
Speaker
Hey, I want to go back for a second to the 11th grade because you have these parallel things happening and I don't want to forget about the one. So you have a mentor come, tells you about this newish occupation, little sciency, little of this, little of that, little of this. But you had mentioned you were a volunteer firefighter. You had to be all of 16 years old.
00:06:50
Speaker
How in the world? And then let's go back to college, but let's talk about how you become a firefighter at age 16. I have a checkered career path. It's kind of interesting. We had had a fire on the farm and the local volunteer fire department had come and helped put out the fire.
00:07:16
Speaker
And growing up going to elementary school in a rural community, I had kids in my class whose parents were on the fire department and kids being kids. They all talked about joining the fire department, being firefighters when they grew up. And I was also working off the farm at a family diner, food truck kind of combination thing.
00:07:44
Speaker
Uh, and had stopped at a car rack, uh, and rendered aid at a car rack. I wound up going by the fire department, uh, thanking the guys for, uh, for helping put out the fire on the farm. And, uh, the next thing I knew, I was a cadet firefighter at the Williamsburg volunteer fire department, uh, near Reedsville, North Carolina.
00:08:08
Speaker
Apparently, they didn't have an age restriction. I mean, I'm thinking about kids who work in the deli right now who can't run the meat slicer, but you're on the fire department. Things were a little bit different then, and I'm a big fan of not age discriminating because we have young people that are mature enough to do a great many things, and we have older people that aren't mature enough to
00:08:39
Speaker
do the same things, it just depends on the individual. But at least at that time and in that place, you could become a cadet firefighter at 16. I started the path towards becoming an EMT not long after that, but due to age restrictions, I had to wait until I was 18 to take the test.
00:09:08
Speaker
and become certified in the state as an EMT. I didn't wait until I was 18 to do CPR for the first time, I'm pretty sure, among all the other things that you respond to in rural America. And I'm not sure if the statistic is still accurate, but at some point I remember seeing something that said
00:09:33
Speaker
75% of the firefighters in the United States are volunteers. So there is a huge, huge cadre of volunteers in rural America that sacrifice an evening every week for training, go and attend additional training to build up their skills and certifications.
00:09:58
Speaker
and then functionally serve on a 24 seven call in their community. So when the, when the alarm rings, you, if you're able to respond, you do.
00:10:12
Speaker
That's certainly true where I live. I live in a smallish city and the fire department is a volunteer fire department and I know the firefighters in my community and I ask the fire chief when I move to the community questions like, so I have this house, it's got all the bedrooms on the second floor and this is the area. How many minutes? Do I need a ladder? And he's like, it's going to take us 11 minutes to get to your house.
00:10:38
Speaker
These are the things that you can ask your local fire department and it's such a rich and wonderful relationship when you can have it. Later, when my career had me moving to Wyoming, I joined the fire department in Lyman, Wyoming, which is an even more remote and rural area. At one point in time, we had a call that it was
00:11:07
Speaker
I think in excess of a 45 minute response time from the fire station to the event and, you know, we were, we were moving rapidly. It was just a long way to get there.
00:11:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, very rural, very rural.
Early Career in Safety
00:11:22
Speaker
All right. Thank you for that. We probably will jump back into the fire service from time to time here. But if you don't mind, can we jump back into that other track? You went to college, you're in a class of four. Is that what you said? Graduating class of four. And shout out your university again, in case people don't know that there's a program there.
00:11:45
Speaker
The university is in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's North Carolina A&T, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, part of the NC State program. Yeah. Wonderful. We've had a guest from NC State on the show a couple of years ago. Fabulous.
00:12:08
Speaker
Okay, so you graduate class of four. What's your, what's your first job in this career with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, which gosh, that's such a good way to describe our profession because it really is, it really is.
00:12:23
Speaker
Um, it was interesting going through the program, 2 of the, the core professors were practicing safety professionals. Charles Crocker was a working for Burlington industries and he taught a number of.
00:12:43
Speaker
courses through my four years there, many of them in the evenings, because that worked with his work schedule. And then Dana Ripley was the certified industrial hygienist, also from Burlington Industries. And they were doing their part to give back to the profession and build new safety and health professionals.
00:13:08
Speaker
Dana Ripley had been working with Sarah Lee on a contract providing some training and development for their in-house safety specialist and safety supervisors. So I did a summer internship with him helping do that. And it turned out I wound up being picked up by Sarah Lee Knit Products, Fleece Ware Division.
00:13:37
Speaker
Oh, I had no idea they had that. I was just thinking of the coffee cake. Uh, it's interesting when you say Sarah Lee, everybody thinks, uh, cakes and pastries, but at that time, I believe Sarah Lee knit products was 50,000 employees. Wow. Sarah Lee knit products fleece wear division was.
00:14:03
Speaker
550 or 5,500 employees. Oh my gosh. So, uh, think Hanes sweatshirts and sweat pants. Yes. My, my first job, I had two facilities. I was responsible for my first professional job in the industry.
00:14:22
Speaker
I had two facilities that I was responsible for in rural areas of Virginia, Rocky Mount and Gretna, Virginia, with a total of about 1,100 employees between the two facilities that they were taking cloth that our company wove and died. The locations I was at laid it out on forms.
00:14:52
Speaker
Marked out the patterns, cut it with these giant electric knives that looking back are kind of terrifying.
00:15:02
Speaker
I would have guessed that would have been a punch press, but okay, big giant knife. Okay. They would lay the fabric back and forth out on these really long tables, mark out the patterns using plastic pattern boards and chalk, essentially. And then they had these vertical electric knives that look like
00:15:25
Speaker
a combination of the electric knife you use for carving up your turkey and a jigsaw and they would cut out the pattern and people would take those those stacks of pants legs or
00:15:42
Speaker
shirt sleeves or whatever uh to the rows and there seemed like an infinite uh number of ladies mostly sitting at sewing machines uh sewing away making sweatshirts and sweatpants welcome to the textile industry wow I have to say that I probably made the ugliest sweatshirt and the ugliest pair of sweatpants ever sewn
00:16:13
Speaker
Because I sat down and tried making some myself. Yeah, you got to do the street cred piece. You got to try. Wow. So that's a lot of employees. It's hazardous work for multiple reasons. Were you the only EHS person?
00:16:36
Speaker
So the division had a director and a couple of other people. There were 13 locations and I had safety specialist, safety supervisor responsibility at two of them. And after I had been there a little while, we were working on, uh,
00:17:01
Speaker
upgrading the programs, policies, procedures within the division or subdivision. Most of the locations had been purchased from a family owned company and had just been added to Sara Lee. So everything was in the process of being transitioned and upgraded. Shortly after I started, I wound up having a
00:17:30
Speaker
third office at the division headquarters where I would be there once or twice a week working on uh you know programs and policies for the entire division. So what are the what do you what do you remember like learning there it's your first job what was your big takeaway before you moved on and how long how long did it take before you moved on?
00:17:54
Speaker
I think one of the interesting things was my first day in the office. I'm 21 years old. I'm at the division headquarters in Martinsville, Virginia.
00:18:06
Speaker
And they bring in this lady that is 16, 17 years, my senior. She is a nurse that is going to be working for me and reporting to me at my two locations.
00:18:26
Speaker
Um, and she, you know, I'm looking at this lady that's older than me thinking, Oh my God, how am I going to tell this lady that's older than me what to do? And later I found out she was looking at me going, Oh my God, the smart ass college kids going to be telling me what to do. That's right. Yeah.
00:18:48
Speaker
And, and we were a fabulous team. She was such a delight to work with. The biggest challenge I had with, uh, you know, shout out to Cheryl Hooker wherever she is now. Um, the biggest challenge I had with her was getting her to take her comp time because she worked so much.
00:19:12
Speaker
And at the time in the niche that she was in, she didn't get overtime, she got comp time. And getting her to take a day off was a death-defying experience.
00:19:27
Speaker
That sounds very familiar. I had a similar, a similar colleague in my first job at OSHA as well. And yes, oh my gosh, she worked and worked and worked and then, you know, would like randomly teach me things because I was a punk and she wasn't. So she'd, so she'd mail me through the mail, like instructions written in longhand on how to make a Thanksgiving turkey.
00:19:55
Speaker
And then included the special bag you baked the turkey in so it would never fail on you. I still have her handwritten directions to this day. Cheryl was a fantastic person to work with. And it reminds me that I need to track her down. She also volunteered in a rural hospital.
00:20:21
Speaker
Uh, on the weekends, it was more a thing that she was doing. She was working, I said, volunteered. She was working, but it was really more of a volunteer thing where she was helping her community and, and helping staff, the small hospital. Um, and, uh, eventually, uh, Sarah Lee net products went through a downsizing, at least in the fleece where division where, uh,
00:20:49
Speaker
you know, evaluating the different locations and stuff. They shrank things down. And officially I got caught in that layoff or downsizing process. And that happened, I'd only been there nine months or a year or something like that. So I'm just out of college. It's the early 90s recession.
00:21:20
Speaker
And I'm scrambling around desperately trying to find work because not working is a strange thing for me. Yeah, not working isn't really an option. And we've already established you can't go back to the farm. And the military's off. Yeah. So where did you go? I wound up getting an opportunity to interview with Church and Dwight, which is
00:21:49
Speaker
not a name that people recognize, but their brand name, Arm and Hammer is recognized pretty broadly. Randomly saw a newspaper ad and accidentally found this advertisement while my family was on vacation, submitted a resume to the recruiter that had posted it and
00:22:16
Speaker
They were wanting somebody that had 2 years of experience as an ocean specter.
Innovations at Church and Dwight
00:22:24
Speaker
I, I talked to them and proposed that my really weird rare degree in occupational safety and health.
00:22:34
Speaker
might be kind of equivalent to two years of experience as an OSHA inspector. And the folks in Green River Warming took the chance to fly me out to interview. This is a big deal. And I don't know what your experience with interviews and occupational safety and health have been, but mine have been that they're marathons. And this one was
00:23:04
Speaker
A prime example, the human resources manager, Tony Cortese, flew me out. So it was all day to get there. The interview began with an early morning breakfast, then a drive 40 miles out into the desert because it is a very remote location.
00:23:29
Speaker
an all-day tour of the facility, which included meeting with the plant manager, the engineering team. They made baking soda, laundry detergent, and carpet freshener at this location. And it's like an all-day interview plus a consulting session.
00:23:57
Speaker
And then it went into dinner. So it was basically a seven o'clock in the morning to nine o'clock at night interview. And Cheryl Hooker, the nurse that I worked with at Hanes, Sarah Lee, actually played a role in me getting the job. Tony Cortese told me at the time that they had
00:24:23
Speaker
other candidates that they wanted to talk to and they would be checking my professional references and I had just gotten back to North Carolina the next day and got the call with the job offer.
00:24:40
Speaker
He later told me that they made the decision quickly because he called and was checking my references. And when he spoke to the nurse, she told him that the best thing that she could say is that if we were ever going to hire a nurse in Wyoming and the nurse was going to work with or for me, she wanted the job. Oh, my gosh. That's fantastic.
00:25:09
Speaker
It was such a huge compliment, such a nice thing to say, and got me a job at a really high quality organization that really promoted my professional growth.
00:25:23
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, that's so awesome. And yes, I've been part of Marathon Interviews before, and it's, yes, all day affairs, and if we had more time, I'd share how I got my job at HSI, which was the most interesting interview I've ever had in my life, but we'll have to just put a pin in that and save that for another episode.
00:25:42
Speaker
But, you know, kind of amazing, right? So, like, everyone's worried about this EHS professional. Like, are they gonna be the safety cop? Are they gonna be this? Are they gonna be that? So, yeah, you have to meet everybody because they're nervous about, like, what is this? What is this gonna be? So, you land this job. You're still very young in your career. How do things go there?
00:26:05
Speaker
It was interesting. Like I have experienced in several locations, they had never had a safety professional on staff. The entire corporation did not have a safety professional on staff at any of its locations.
00:26:25
Speaker
I got to be Tony Cortese's guinea pig as he was getting his master's degree in organizational development. So a chunk of what he was doing was trying to knock some of the farm boy off of me and turn me into a more well-rounded professional.
00:26:48
Speaker
He encouraged me to go to things like the American Society of Safety Professional Development Conference, which actually became a gathering for church and Dwight people who had collateral assignments of safety. We went to one in Texas way back when.
00:27:16
Speaker
And it was a great way to meet and interface with other safety professionals. We all had divergent interests from our different locations and our different backgrounds. We would divide up, go out to different seminar sessions and then meet for dinner at the end of the day and talk about the different things that we'd seen and things that we might want to try to implement.
00:27:42
Speaker
And we got to cross-pollinate with other people from other places. It's actually how I accidentally met Scott Geller. Dr. Geller, who's been a guest on the show at least, I think, three times. Yes, he's a fantastic person that I have thoroughly enjoyed knowing for 27, 30 years or something.
00:28:11
Speaker
And it's interesting how those random occurrences provide you opportunities of growth. That's right. Tony also sent me to things that most safety professionals might not be able to go to or want to. I got sent to a week of employee relations law. Oh, yeah, super important.
00:28:38
Speaker
Yes, but perhaps one of the most painful weeks of my life. Well, yeah. You know, I say super important, and I do have a background working for OSHA and the government. And so yeah, it's all with a grain of salt, right? What's baked into the cake.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, half half the attendees were human resources professionals. It seemed about half the attendees were were attorneys that were beginning practice or in practice and employee relations law. And then there's this 1 young. Safety guy.
00:29:14
Speaker
You learned a lot. You learned a lot. Adding to what is the nerd-dom of our profession. I think one of my most favorite conferences ever was a workers' compensation conference, which, yeah, same thing. Attorneys, HR professionals. But man, I found it all so fascinating. Loved it.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah, big nerd. All right, so yeah, organizational development as a mentor, that's fantastic early on. Yeah, so tell me more about that job. Well, Arm and Hammer, Church and Dwight was a great place to work. Green River, Wyoming and that community was a great place to live. A lot of really, really good people there.
00:30:00
Speaker
And one of the things that the organization wanted to do was build up their safety training. And they had a pretty aggressive timeline like I started in February and we were doing safety training in March.
00:30:16
Speaker
Uh, and it was, uh, I would call it death by PowerPoint, but PowerPoint hadn't been invented yet. It was, uh, it was death by, uh, transparencies. And being from the South, I have a tendency to, uh, to speak slowly and I am blessed with the voice of a hypnotist.
00:30:44
Speaker
So here I am 22, 23 years old in front of these people that are two or three times my age trying to explain to them eye protection and confined space entry safety. And it's trying to get everything that hadn't been done and get everything up to speed. It's an eight hour day.
00:31:10
Speaker
And this plant operated with 12 hour shifts. So what they did was with their shift rotation, you would wind up with a seven day block out of every month where you, you know, the shift workers were off. Well, we, we took that month and on the seventh day,
00:31:32
Speaker
you came in to train instead of having that seventh day off and uh... well they were uh... they were getting compensated for their time but yes you know it's uh... it's never fun to to sit in a classroom for eight hours and listen to some young wet behind the ears kid tell you how not to uh... to get hurt
00:32:01
Speaker
And at the end of the cycle where we had trained all four shifts with the death by overhead transparencies, we got together. We did solicit feedback from the crew. Feedback was that they would really like to do more peer-to-peer training.
00:32:25
Speaker
Uh, and what we launched for the next year's training cycle and building towards it was a peer to peer team training, uh, train the trainer kind of thing. Um, Tony Cortese brought in a gentleman named Robert maker, who was the guy that had written the books on train the trainer. Uh, we.
00:32:51
Speaker
Solicited volunteers, there's air quotes around the volunteers. Some of the volunteers were the hecklers. Tearing.
00:33:04
Speaker
the safety training that I had just done, some of the volunteers were people that said that looks like fun and step forward. Important to have both, actually. Yeah. So out of 220 some employees at that facility, we had 12 that stepped forward one way or another to become trainers the next year. And we engaged in a process where
00:33:34
Speaker
I kind of scripted out training. We looked at the desired outcomes for each safety category, developed three or four desired outcomes that we needed to hit on, make sure everybody leaves with that foundational knowledge after the session.
00:33:57
Speaker
Then what we did is over a period of months, we would bring in a fall protection specialist from a fall protection manufacturer. We would bring in a respiratory protection specialist from a respiratory protection manufacturer. And each of our hourly crew that were being trained to become trainers wound up becoming 3M certified
00:34:25
Speaker
respirator protection or respiratory protection instructors or DBI-SALA, fall protection. Shout out to DBI-SALA, a Minnesota based company. I love them. Yeah, I didn't think about the fact that I'm advertising for folks. You said that company name and I think they do a great job with education. I think they're known by another name right now. But yes, that was a fantastic way to do training.
00:34:54
Speaker
Well, what we did is we did those foundational building blocks first. Yeah. And then we brought in Robert Mager and his team, took these guys out of the plant setting, went to a nearby community college setting. And so we're totally removed from the work environment and spent
00:35:22
Speaker
three days, I believe, maybe a little bit more on how to conduct training.
00:35:29
Speaker
How do you deliver it? How do you not have the voice of a hypnotist and learn to modulate your voice? how to mix up the Training delivery so that you you hit the visual learners you hit the audible learners and You you hit those tactile learners the people that need to get their hands into it or be engaged in it we also learned things like
00:35:57
Speaker
You're not supposed to embarrass the person that falls asleep during your training session. You're supposed to find a way to not draw attention to them while simultaneously waking them up.
00:36:12
Speaker
how to deal with that person that keeps talking to his neighbor during your training session while you're trying to conduct training. These are wonderful gifts for a 20-some-year-old kid to figure out early on. Wow. That's fantastic. They were great tips. And I think one of the hallmarks of my career, at least my early career, was
00:36:41
Speaker
That next February rolled around. It was our training month. I think February had been chosen as our training month because in the winter in February, the only thing that you can do in Wyoming is go snowmobiling or skiing, and most of our folks were not skiers. And we lived in the middle of the desert, so snowmobiling wasn't that big an option. Yeah, because it's called white out.
00:37:09
Speaker
It's kind of a downtime and, uh, in outdoor experiences in Wyoming, but our team, uh, we spread the trainers that, uh, that we had built up out, um, based on what portion of the operation that they were from. So our operators that were the ones that manufactured the baking soda or the laundry detergent or the carpet freshener.
00:37:35
Speaker
were in one group, our maintenance team was in another group, and our warehouse shipping receiving team was in another group. And they were now learning from their peers. So basically we had a three-ring circus of training going on simultaneously at the facility, and I was running from circus ring to circus ring to circus ring trying to
00:38:05
Speaker
facilitate, do quality control, assist where needed. And it worked really, really well. But like I think several famous generals have said through the span of history, no good plan survives first contact with the enemy. We had some people who were fantastic raconteurs, storytellers,
00:38:32
Speaker
But when they started trying to do training, they were reading word from word from the script, turning the pages slowly and basically stuck. They had stage fright. The voice of the hypnotist. OK. OK. Yes. I tried not to take great delight in the fact that one of them had been one of my hecklers when I was doing it.
00:39:01
Speaker
I was gracious of you. I said tried. But out of that group was born sort of an extended idea in that we now had this cadre of operators and maintenance people who had each kind of become subject matter experts
00:39:29
Speaker
in different aspects of safety as they went through these training programs and kind of gravitated towards things that they had personal experience with. So we were invited to take our show on the road and go to some of the other locations that Armand Hammer had. So I had the opportunity to take some of these, you know, hourly workers
00:39:59
Speaker
and fly from Green River, Rock Springs, Wyoming, to Syracuse, New York, and Greenville, South Carolina, so that our guys could deliver safety training at these other locations. Gosh, they must have thought that was the coolest thing. It was a lot of fun. And they had each come up with things that resonated
00:40:29
Speaker
with them as ways of delivering the understanding of why carbon monoxide is bad for you or the importance of wearing safety glasses. And, you know, we again did the feedback loop with our own employees at the Green River plant, got the feedback that they
00:40:56
Speaker
They would like to see the instructors throughout their day kind of mixed up so that it wasn't the same person delivering all of their safety training throughout the day.
00:41:09
Speaker
And, you know, we had some of our volunteer, quote, unquote, instructors that decided it was not the thing that they wanted to be volunteering to do. We had some other people that stepped up and said that they would like to do it. So we established kind of a peer-to-peer mentorship program with the training.
00:41:35
Speaker
I'm very proud to say that we won Arm and Hammer's Quality Award that year because of our training program. And the next year, what we did is we established the idea that regardless of which group you're teaching and what specialty or what module you're teaching, you have to be prepared to teach it all.
00:42:02
Speaker
Okay, so you needed a Swiss Army knife for each. So everybody had to be prepared to be the sole presenter for their group in case there was something that went wrong. But we also allowed them, regardless of which shift group they were in, or regardless of what operational specialty they were in, they could trade.
00:42:32
Speaker
So the trainers would, uh, would kind of deal with another trainer that that person would come and do their confined space, uh, safety. And the other person would come in and do their respiratory protection. So we basically let them work it out among themselves. And we also partnered up the experienced trainers that had done it the year before.
00:43:01
Speaker
with the new folks that had stepped up. And like all good plans, nothing survives first contact with the enemy. The first day that we're doing our, what would be my third training cycle at Arm and Hammer, we have an emergency.
00:43:21
Speaker
There is a construction project going on. A construction worker had gone back to his vehicle because he wasn't feeling well. Somebody had gone to check on him, and unfortunately, he had no pulse and no respiration. Now, our location was so remote that we had our own ambulance.
00:43:50
Speaker
So, you know, building on that experience as a firefighter, EMT, I'm essentially the fire chief for our emergency response program, including the emergency medicine part of it. And one of my key trainers for the day partnered up with a newbie was my paramedic that was on shift. So.
00:44:16
Speaker
One of the key trainers and myself that was bouncing around doing quality control are in the back of an ambulance going 60 miles an hour down the road headed towards the hospital 45, 50 miles away. And as the ambulance doors were closed, the HR manager is yelling at me, what do I need to do? And I told him he needed to go check on this new trainer because he had just been abandoned.
00:44:47
Speaker
In the face of a tragedy, yes. Yes. And I found out later that what had happened is when the code announcement, the emergency announcement had gone out over the PA system at the facility, one of the trainers that did not have any training responsibility that day, and he was a key person in the maintenance department, had realized
00:45:13
Speaker
that this player had been moved off the table and this player was by themselves. He went to his supervisor said, hey, I need to go help this guy and had already backfilled. It was already taken care of probably before the ambulance even got to the highway. So it was a great system. Yeah. Yeah. Out of out of what was a really, really tragic day with a lot of stress.
00:45:42
Speaker
There was this component where the people at this facility recognized what needed to be done, stepped up and did it without any micromanagement. It was a really cool place to work.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's a one way to define safety culture operating optimally for sure. So Alan, I mean, what an interesting way to start your career and that's fantastic. What a bar to set an expectation around. You're working in
00:46:21
Speaker
You know abort with the commercial fishing industry. How did that come to be part of your life? You know, you're in the middle of Wyoming in the middle of a desert arm and hammer and now all of a sudden Yeah, how did how did this leap happen? Yeah, that was that was another one of those accidental
Transition to Commercial Fishing
00:46:39
Speaker
leaps. It was not something that I had planned and
00:46:43
Speaker
Uh, the facility that I was at, uh, with arm and hammer, uh, in, in the metrics of the time they went, uh, three years without a lost time accident legitimately, uh, a million and a half man hours with no lost time legitimately. It was not prevarication smoker mirrors. Uh, there was no pencil whipping involved.
00:47:08
Speaker
We did have a major accident and it shook the organization or that location to its core, but it also reinvigorated their commitment to safety, you know, everybody there.
00:47:28
Speaker
And it wasn't because of that accident, but around the same period of time shortly after it, the company as a whole was going through some changes. And I don't understand the high finance decisions involved behind it. But the company decided that the way to deal with their issues was to lay some people off. And I wound up getting put on the chopping block. Again. Again.
00:47:57
Speaker
Oh, I, you know, some, someone at corporate headquarters was, uh, was going down the list and saw that this location had a safety person, but none of the other locations did. So obviously the green river facility did not need a safety person. And I got, I got to walk the plank right onto a ship instead of off the ship. Quite literally. Yeah. Um.
00:48:25
Speaker
At the time, Google didn't exist. And there was a clipping service that was available. What they would do is you would tell them what you were interested in looking for as a job. They would come through newspapers in the areas that you were interested in. And on Tuesday morning of every week, you would receive a FedEx package with job announcements.
00:48:55
Speaker
My, uh, my partner at the time needed to go to a place with a larger university for, uh, for her advancement. And I was looking in communities like, uh, Seattle, Portland, Reno, uh, salt Lake and a company called Tyson seafoods had a posting for a shoreside emphasis, shoreside safety guy.
00:49:24
Speaker
They wanted to bring in an OSHA-type safety specialist to help them enhance their safety policies, procedures, and practices onboard the ships and in their shipyard.
00:49:40
Speaker
So I flew from Wyoming to Seattle. I interviewed with Tyson Seafoods and met some great people. Steve Kennebec was their director of risk or vice president of risk. I'm not sure what his title was. Tony Ford was their safety director. He was a retired US Coast Guard captain. And these crazy people hired me.
00:50:12
Speaker
And, and suddenly I found myself in the, what was at the time, the largest commercial fishing company in United States. It had just been purchased by Tyson foods from a company called Arctic Alaska.
00:50:33
Speaker
And Arctic Alaska was an incredibly diverse organization that had built itself up from, you know, one boat to two boats to four boats to 34 ships of various sizes and sector categories. And.
00:50:54
Speaker
I knew that the pointy end was the bow. I knew the square end was the stern. I knew fishing was dangerous and that Alaska was cold. And that was about it. And what I learned when I came in was that there were new regulations by the Coast Guard for fishing vessel safety.
00:51:17
Speaker
Uh, those regulations had been written because of a number of tragedies. Some of those tragedies had befall in Arctic Alaska. Uh, in their operations.
00:51:31
Speaker
So going through OSHA 300 logs or what was probably OSHA 100 logs at that time. The 200 log? Yes, I remember the day it switched from the 200 log to the 300 log. We waited 10 years for that to happen. Yeah, okay. Going through those logs and seeing fatalities that occurred and major injuries that occurred and recognizing that the
00:51:58
Speaker
The logs may not have been complete because there's a little doo-wah in the regulations that
00:52:06
Speaker
Technically, if it occurs outside of three miles, it's not under OSHA's jurisdiction. Therefore, you're not required to record it. That's not my practice, not how I do things, but that's a little quirk and a law. Tyson Seafoods kind of promptly, I came in the first of November.
00:52:32
Speaker
In 1995 and January of 96, I was in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, staying at kind of an austere camp sort of setting, you know, construction trailers, somebody once called it a man camp kind of thing, and visitating my benevolent presence upon the ships as they came in and went back out.
00:53:00
Speaker
Uh, and it was, it was decided that, uh, you know, for me to really learn the business, I needed to go get fishies. So I wound up going out on a ship that was at that time called the Pacific Enterprise with Captain Ray Haddon.
00:53:19
Speaker
I wound up discovering that my highly tuned sense of equilibrium is not very happy with the motion of the ocean. The ship had been in for a brief repair and it was what's called a catcher boat. Its mission is to go out with five crew members and one observer
00:53:48
Speaker
catch Bering Sea Pollock and bring it to a processing ship that's anchored up in a bay on Alaska Island. And we left at midnight and I discovered approximately 6 a.m. that the motion of the ocean did not agree with the retention of my stomach contents, so that was fun.
00:54:15
Speaker
It took about six hours for me to get to where I could stand upright and move in a forward direction, which coincided perfectly with them hauling back their first toe.
00:54:32
Speaker
So I got to learn about sorting fish and sorting by size and sorting by species. And as the day progressed and I got my hands into things and I'm doing things, my seasickness abated. So I spent three or four days on that ship with that crew learning a little bit about that sector and it was a great introduction.
00:55:01
Speaker
catching a seaplane from Beaver Inlet to Dutch Harbor, which sounds like a lot of fun, and in a way it was. It sounds like another way to lose the contents of your stomach is what it sounds like to me. Yeah, maybe the stomach.
00:55:20
Speaker
The weather had gotten a little rough, so taking off in the bay in this plane that's called a goose, it's basically a boat with wings and two engines. Taking off, the pilot was in a hurry. The takeoff was rough. He climbed up over the mountains to the north of us.
00:55:44
Speaker
And as I had gotten in the plane, I looked down and there's this big steel ring between my knees. And I didn't really understand what it was for, but then as we started bucking through the waves, the cowboy background kind of kicked back in and I realized that was to hang on to.
00:56:02
Speaker
And we came over a mountain ridge so low that I reflexively lifted my feet as if my feet were going to be what was going to drag on top of the mountain. Very brief plane ride, but it's an experience I vividly remember. Oh my gosh.
00:56:25
Speaker
Funny not funny thing is three months later that pilot and that plane tragically disappeared in that region without a trace. One of the highest occupational fatality rates in the United States is actually Alaska bush pilots. Bush pilots are the lifeblood
00:56:50
Speaker
rural Alaska in getting goods and people where they need to be, whether it's delivering pizzas, funny, out in rural areas or medications or getting people to where they need to be. The Alaska Bush pilot is a career all in and of itself.
00:57:17
Speaker
I got the opportunity to go out on the boat that was at that time called the Bristol Enterprise, a 180, 185 foot boat with Captain Lauren Perry, participated in a different fishery. So, similar but different gear type, fishing for different species, fishing in a different area.
00:57:46
Speaker
Um, we went out to sea and, uh, one of the things that's interesting is, is in Alaska, we get these, uh, these storms that, you know, if they were off the coast of Florida would be called hurricanes. Um, and the Bering sea, it may be called Tuesday.
00:58:10
Speaker
This ship was 185 feet, had a crew of about 45. We were fishing for a species of fish called Roxole. It looks like a flounder for your listeners from the southern states. It's a flat fish.
00:58:32
Speaker
you process it once it's caught and sorted and in the factory, you process it by grabbing it by its nose and cutting the head off and sort of a V cut.
00:58:49
Speaker
And I had been thinking about this ergonomically and looked at the knife and was scratching my head thinking this is a weird knife and thinking that the knife interface was going to be the thing. And I had actually picked up a couple of ergonomic knives to try before I went out trying to think ahead a little bit. And then I found out that the real ergonomic issue was holding those guys by the nose while you
00:59:18
Speaker
made the cuts to cut the head on. My left hand cramped up way before my right hand. We went out engaged in that fishery and wound up having a three day storm that was a glory to behold. We had 30 to 35 foot seas
00:59:45
Speaker
for three days constantly. And one of the fun things about fishing in the Bering Sea is that sea spray will freeze. Sea spray will freeze on your ship and as the ice gets thicker, the top of your ship gets heavier.
01:00:05
Speaker
As the top of your ship gets heavier, it may eventually get heavier than the bottom of the ship. So there's all kinds of rhymes and jokes about it, but I guess the cleanest one is breaking ice isn't nice.
01:00:24
Speaker
Oh my gosh, these are hazards that nobody knows about unless you are in the commercial fishing industry. Yeah, there are times that they basically blow the whistle and everybody goes out with
01:00:38
Speaker
baseball bats or now we have these things that look like oversized sledgehammers that are made out of a high impact, high impact plastic. Um, and you are busting nice off of the railings and the bulkheads and throwing it overboard to take weight off. Yeah.
01:01:03
Speaker
But I got to spend two weeks on that vessel out at sea, had some scary moments that still give me some reverberations. But it was a fantastic learning experience. I got to work with the engineers on fixing broken stuff. I got to spend a little bit of time on deck, spend time in the factory, spend time in the galley.
01:01:33
Speaker
probably a little bit of a hands-on learner myself. I like to get into things, get dirty, build some camaraderie that way as well, feel what the job feels like to the person doing it. Yeah, absolutely. Alan, how many years have you been doing this work in the commercial fishing industry now? I have now been doing it about 24 years. I think I was
01:02:03
Speaker
I was with Tyson Seafoods for three years, three and a half years, something like that. I got caught in another layoff. Tyson Foods decided that
01:02:20
Speaker
The seafood sector was not a sector that they wanted to continue to be in and sold the company in pieces. Each ship is basically an LLC or each ship is its own entity and operation in a way. So some of the ships went to one company, some of the ships went to another company, and in that process I was laid off.
01:02:48
Speaker
I was hired by the University of Washington's Office of Risk Management to do loss control intervention. So it was transitioning to the University of Washington was different. It was my first time working in academia and out of industry and things are done a little differently in academia.
01:03:16
Speaker
And the University of Washington has a large and fabulous safety department. But my job was in the Office of Risk Management. And my mission was to analyze claims and trends, identify areas that trends were occurring, go to those different departments or different organizations, and try to lead them to the path of righteousness.
01:03:47
Speaker
The Gospel according to Alan. You know, so some of those organizations, you know, I'd go knock on the door and and either literally or metaphorically and say, we've noticed that you have injuries occurring in this kind of category. I'm here to help facilitate interventions in
01:04:14
Speaker
how these injuries are occurring and why, and work with you and the safety department to try to find a better path. And some organizations would open up the door and say, come right on in. And some organizations or some groups were perhaps a little less open to outsider interference.
01:04:40
Speaker
There was a lot of good work done improving safety and health for different aspects of the university. I have to say one of the career achievements for me was I got involved in the prevention of nurse back injuries. University has two major hospitals that
01:05:03
Speaker
that it manages and nurse back injuries, uh, back 20 some years ago were one of the things that caught our attention. Uh, I wound up working with, uh, a safety professional from, uh, San Francisco named William Charney, uh, who literally has written volumes on healthcare safety, um, just
01:05:31
Speaker
by happenstance was invited to an event where he was speaking. He became my mentor and guide through healthcare safety and nurse back injury prevention. We conspired in numerous ways to try to make the world a better and safer place for healthcare workers. I was able to work with the two hospitals and implement something called a lift team.
01:06:01
Speaker
where nurses would be able to page to people who were specifically and specially trained in body dynamics and patient movement and had equipment stationed on various floors. So they would come help move patients and take literally the weight off of the nursing staff.
01:06:27
Speaker
A number that pops into my head was in the first six months of the intervention at one of the hospitals, only on the one shift that the intervention was being experimented with that reduced nurse back injuries 87%. And the ones that had gotten hurt had not called for the lift team to come help them.
01:06:57
Speaker
And I don't want that to sound critical of those nurses and those workers. One of the big challenges in healthcare is whether you're an EMT, a firefighter, a nurse,
01:07:15
Speaker
throughout that whole healthcare chain, we have a lot of people who are self-sacrificing to benefit others.
University of Washington Tenure
01:07:26
Speaker
That's right. Within my own family, my brother was a paramedic for over 20 years and that's exactly what happened to him and experienced a career ending injury for the sacrifice of other people.
01:07:39
Speaker
from lifting and carrying human beings for over 20 years. Yeah, I get that. I get that. I feel that. Thank you for that important work. Gosh, it just, we need more and more people working on those initiatives for those really high hazard, what you don't necessarily always think about as high hazard industries, but those repetitive stresses are certainly, certainly there.
01:08:04
Speaker
Um, Alan, I know we, we are, we are having so much fun. I'm having a lot of fun. I hope you're having a lot of fun. Uh, we haven't even gotten to present present work day. We may have to, we may have to, uh, you know, like
01:08:20
Speaker
ship ourselves forward in time, because I know there's some things I want to ask you about, especially initiatives that you that you're working on today. And American seafoods. So healthcare wise University of Washington, if you find do you find yourself next back on ship? Yes, I had had been working at the University of Washington and
01:08:45
Speaker
Through my work at the local chapter of the American Society of Safety Engineers, I had different recruiters that would call me and tell me about positions that they had open. I would tell them two or three people that would fit the opening that they had and sort of facilitate the process.
01:09:13
Speaker
I got a call from a recruiter that I knew, a headhunter, if you will, who had worked in the commercial fishing industry and knew that I had worked in the commercial fishing industry. And he, he said that he didn't want to talk to me about anybody else. He wanted to talk to me about me, that there was an opening at a local fishing company that I would be ideally suited for.
01:09:40
Speaker
And I promptly told him to go away in no uncertain terms. But at the end of the conversation, I agreed that I would call one person and ask them a question and sort of vet the company that I was being referred to. And I don't know what I was thinking. I called the same guy that originally recruited me to the commercial fishing industry.
Return to Commercial Fishing Industry
01:10:13
Speaker
I called Steve Kennebec and he heard my voice, became very excited and it turned out that he had done some consulting work for American Seafoods and one of the things that he had recommended to them that the company had grown to the point that it needed a full-time safety professional to facilitate their
01:10:36
Speaker
prevention work. They were using outside consultants. They were using outside consultants like Tony Ford that I had worked with when I was at Tyson Seafood. But having a full-time dedicated safety professional would be a good idea. So my one reach out to try to find out whether I should pursue the job at American Seafoods or entertain the job at American Seafoods
01:11:06
Speaker
had actually just written a big report for them, suggesting that they create a safety department. And two job interviews later, I wound up being offered the opportunity to leave the University of Washington and come back to working in commercial fishing. And I guess I didn't say it earlier, but one of the things
01:11:35
Speaker
Working in commercial fishing, it is a hardworking group of people. I can't imagine. Literally from all over the world. And they so much remind me of the agriculture farmer rancher ethos that I grew up with, where you're getting things done. You're feeding the world.
01:12:04
Speaker
uh you're feeding your your your own family and and in a lot of ways many of our employees may be supporting an entire micro economy back home where they they originally hail from and you know working with commercial fishermen has been you know an honor and a privilege and I know it sounds trite that they're
01:12:31
Speaker
It doesn't. So many heart rending, heartwarming, life altering stories that I have have heard sitting at the table in the galley on a commercial fishing boat and asking a question similar to what we started today with. How the heck did you get here? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And everyone's. Yeah, go ahead.
01:13:01
Speaker
I've now been with American Seafoods for 20 years. I am super privileged and happy to work for American Seafoods. And one of the things that I really like about our organization is that leadership here supports not just what I'm trying to do to make our operations safer, but they support me spending
01:13:31
Speaker
Company time and my working with efforts locally with Seattle fishermen's memorial. And with other organizations in our, our area and gear type, but they, they've also supported me.
01:13:53
Speaker
traveling and going and participating in things like the US Coast Guard's Fishing Vessel Safety Advisory Committee. I served on that board for, or that committee for 12 years, I think. They've supported me participating in fishing vessel safety forums with the National Transportation Safety Board.
01:14:20
Speaker
I have had the opportunity with American seafood support to attend 3 international fishing industry safety and health conferences. It's it's really great to work for a company that realizes that.
01:14:41
Speaker
a rising tide floats all boats or raises all boats, that by making the industry as a whole safer, we make all of us safer.
01:14:54
Speaker
And you've also been working with your organization on sustainability things as well. I know you had a recent opportunity to do something pretty cool with fishing nets. Do you want to talk about that as we're wrapping up our time today?
01:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, it was a little scary from a safety professional standpoint in some ways, but it all came out well. One of the things that the fishing industry worldwide uses is nets. Most of the nets worldwide now are made out of synthetic materials, and many of those nets are made out of multiple different kinds of
01:15:41
Speaker
synthetic materials. Now, over time, a net wears out. It gets stretched on one side, gets torn on another side, and you can do so many repairs in so many ways, but eventually it just isn't flying through the water the way it needs to be efficient. And classically, those nets would wind up going into a landfill, or at least you'd hope they'd wind up going into a landfill.
01:16:11
Speaker
And not to the bottom of the sea. Yes, so they're entering into a waste stream. A young lady who had worked as a national marine fisheries observer in the commercial fishing industry in Alaska saw these large amounts of recyclable material
01:16:36
Speaker
that did not have an outlet or a stream or a process within which it could be recycled um and and thought that it was a waste and that there was a better way to do things so she has started an organization called nets your problem uh that what they do is facilitate uh nets and other commercial fishing gear going from
01:17:06
Speaker
various communities in commercial fishing into different processes by which they can be recycled. One of the challenges to that is in separating those materials. You can't just take a 25,000 pound net and dump it into a blender and out comes a material that you can use to create other products.
01:17:36
Speaker
So those materials need to be separated out and there's no mechanical way to do that. So some of the folks at Nature Problem and some of the folks at American Seafoods got the kind of crazy idea that instead of paying a third party to disassemble these things,
01:18:00
Speaker
that we would try taking one apart ourselves. So, the Tuesday after Labor Day, 2022, we had approximately 2,000 meters of net stretched out. And we had people from netsher problems, from American Seafood's office staff.
01:18:26
Speaker
from the genuine Alaska Pollock Producers Association and from our insurance company all gathered together on Tuesday morning. I provided some knife 101 instruction, which was kind of interesting because I had never thought about
01:18:49
Speaker
how to train somebody not to poke themselves or cut themselves. But we had supplies and materials and a little circus tent and tables and chairs, but it was six hours of manual labor with knives cutting apart this net and batching it up into different material types.
01:19:18
Speaker
And at the end of the day, we had over 19,000 pounds of material sorted out into different bales or bundles ready to go into different recycle streams or waste streams. Actually not waste streams. All of the material I believe is destined to be recycled one way or another.
01:19:46
Speaker
And that number does not include the chain that we work to separate away from the net. At one point, I had, I don't know, over 1,000 feet of chain that was still in one continuous run that we had
01:20:11
Speaker
Swirled around into a giant pile, but we didn't have the ability to weigh it because it was too much. Um, but it was, it was really great being able to take this. Uh, this material that 10 years ago would have gone into a landfill.
01:20:31
Speaker
and instead break it down into its component pieces and be able to put it into various recycled streams so that it can get used. It can have an additional life and not be wasted. Oh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. And I'm really happy to say that with all those office people running around with all those knives,
01:21:01
Speaker
Nobody got hurt. Yay! You're a good trainer, Alan. You're a good trainer. No doubt about it. You've sent me the pictures of this particular day, and it's just phenomenal to see it. I don't know if those are personal pictures of they ended up in a press release, but they were pretty fun to look at. I think that they were part of the press packet or whatever that went out.
01:21:30
Speaker
It was a good event. For those of us that are used to driving a chair in an office, it was an event that might have left some of us sore for a week or so.
01:21:45
Speaker
Yeah. If that was an official press release, then maybe we'll have to include that in our show notes so people can see this because it's a great, you've told a great story around it and it's really wonderful to see with the pictures. Alan, I know that our time is coming to an end and I didn't even get to some of the things I wanted to ask you, so I think I might put you in the hot seat now and say, will you come back?
01:22:10
Speaker
Because one of the things that I'd love to talk with you about and I bet our audience would love to hear about is how you've bridged over all these 20 plus years in the commercial fishing industry compliance with the general industry construction and commercial fishing, you know, like all of the regulatory bodies and kind of how you how you wade your way through that to use water analogy, I guess. I would I would love to have that conversation with you at another time.
01:22:39
Speaker
I, I think I would be open to, uh, to doing that. And it is interesting. The, the number of regulatory bodies that commercial fishing has to interface with, I think would be the.
01:22:55
Speaker
the polite term to use because we have national marine fisheries regulations. National marine fisheries is under the agency of NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. We interface with the Coast Guard. We interface with OSHA, sort of rarely but occasionally with state program OSHA kind of agencies.
01:23:23
Speaker
But we also are making food products. So we have state and federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the FDA that we interface with.
01:23:36
Speaker
At one point in time on one of our smaller vessels that we used to manage, I had five different government agencies and the wheelhouse and the wheelhouse on this particular ship was smaller than my office.
01:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little different. I'm thinking of the meat packing industry and how they have one set of inspectors in a plant on the shore, on the ground, in a factory. Alan, yes, please, if you will, come back for that. I just want to say thank you so much for your investment with us today, but also your investment
01:24:21
Speaker
in our industry, for our profession, and the ways that you move things forward and the passion that you bring to the work is really admirable. Thank you so much. Thank you.
01:24:34
Speaker
And thank you 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 aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can 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 health and safety professionals like Alan and I.
01:25:01
Speaker
Special thanks to Naim Geraisi, our podcast producer, and until next time, thanks for listening.