HSE in Seismic
Once again I am back to the subject of HSE and its insidious effects on the industry. This episode is brought about by a HSE representative who massages the books by saying that people visiting the doctor on the crew and receiving medical treatment do not constitute medical treatment cases.
How on earth does this get to qualify as HSE policy? If receiving medical treatment from the crew doctor does not constitute a medical treatment case then what does? The answer is that medical treatment cases can only arise due to an incident.
When I argued that this was wrong the HSE representative told me that as a technical person I was not qualified to comment.
This is the sort of HSE-think that I have been fighting against for a long time. It simply stands to reason that anybody getting medical treatment must be listed if we need to get a true picture of how the HSE regimen is working. Why? The answer is that we have the following HSE instigated procedures in place.
- Medical checkups for all new hires.
- Food preparers medical to ensure no transmission of infectious diseases.
- Checks of freezers for suitable temperatures for food storage.
- Checks of environmental hazards.
- HSE audits on any and everything that could cause illness or injury on the site.
Thus any sort of treatment which arises on the work site is the result of either the environment (the “E” in HSE, often forgotten in the rush to get perfect HSE scores) or a failure in one of the other items in the list. If somebody gets malaria on a crew it is a failure of prophylactic treatment or a failure of HSE assessment of the area if no prophylactic treatments are provided.
A simple case of diahrea has a cause based on either food or water quality, storage or handling. This happens on the crew but is omitted from the HSE records with this doctored books approach.
This type of doctoring of HSE statistics was also evident when I worked on a refinery construction project which was being built for a company well known in HSE circles. I saw a man die as the result of an incident when a substandard lifting sling was used on a piece of heavy equipment and failed.
The man was wearing all of his PPE such as hard hat, safety boots and safety glasses which were mandated by the HSE supervisor anywhere in the site. None of these helped when the sixty ton tower fell on him.
The next day as I entered the work site I noticed that the HSE sign still proudly proclaimed over two million man hours without an LTI. This prompted a trip to the HSE office where I asked how this could be. The answer was that the man had died instantly and thus the incident had not caused any loss of time.
I then asked about another man who, several days before, I had seen with a large gash in his leg caused by using a grinder badly. This man had gone to the local hospital and had seventeen stitches in his leg. A photo of the resulting wound was displayed in the HSE office to horrify anybody seeing it and thus ensure that they used grinders correctly. This was explained to me as well. The man had been replaced immediately by the contractor and this also did not qualify as an LTI.
The big problem is that HSE departments are allowed to justify this type of reporting with such specious arguments. This makes people like me look askance at any sort of HSE statistics. How can we believe that HSE is helping us if these sorts of things can be swept under the rug?
Anybody who thinks that HSE is about keeping them safe needs to think again. HSE is about insurance costs and the US led legal liability laws which make companies responsible for any sort of stupid act their employees or their clients can come up with.
HSE people seem to have the idea that with enough rules and enough PPE you can make stupid people safe. The problem is that stupid people are incredibly ingenious at finding new ways to hurt themselves.
HSE is about lawyers making money through people who commit the stupidest acts and then can be convinced to sue the company. Nothing more and nothing less. If you think differently you should look at the picture below to check for any resemblance.
That is the first time I have seen anyone (apart from myself) stand up and be honest about Seismic HSE. Interestingly I was recently on a job in the dark continent. One day the HSE man explained to me how wonderful and necessary he was and how one of the concepts of modern HSE was to report everything that happens so it can be analysed by someone with a better overview of the ‘Big’ Picture. I then asked why the crew doctor had so few daily cases (zero actually and this was a crew with around 300 local labour). He then proceeded to explain that only cases that fall into the category of ‘Work Related’ could be included as MTC or LTI or whatever. Apparently Diarrhea due to dirty water, cuts and scratches, twisted ankles, insect bites were not work related.
So on the one hand it is report everything, on the other it is don’t report things that might make the HSE man look good.
Modern HSE is a sham.
Everyone seems to focus on the S of HSE, and only the cosmetic side of it too. It is about time The H and the E were looked at. And for me the E is working environment, not kissing trees. Get the guys decent living conditions and a decent break schedule instead of focusing on coloured flags and pretty signs around camp.
Anyone that needs that crap should not be on the crew in the first place!. And that is something else that needs to be addressed. Why are we (they, not me) intent on making seismic ‘safe’ for idiots and penalising the normal men for it. Get rid of the ones that shouldn’t be there and seismic would be safe. All without an HSE man too.
And don’t get me started on hard hats. The most useless cosmetic adornment ever seen on a seismic crew!.