Thursday, August 18, 2022

The Blessing of a Close Call

If you ignore close calls and think that you’ll always avoid tragedy, you’re heading for disaster

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

When I hear someone telling me about a close call that they experienced, I always remember a day when I was working as a student for the town of Dundas, Ontario, in the parks department.

It was Canada Day and we were preparing our large park for a fireworks display. We needed to erect a temporary fence to create a perimeter where spectators couldn’t enter.

My job was to be one of two students who would stand on the back of a pickup truck and use a metal pounder (a heavy metal tube with a thick metal cap with two handles on it) to hammer metal stakes into the ground.

One full-time parks employee would drive the truck, while the other, a long-time staffer with white hair nicknamed Old Bean, would place and hold the stake while it was pounded into place. It was a huge perimeter and so a lot of stakes had to be driven into the ground. When either of the students got tired, the other would take over.

We were nearing the end of the job, and my arms were feeling like heavy rubber. As a new stake was placed, I wanted to get a good first strike.

I placed the metal tube over the stake, heaved upward to get enough space to slam it back down, and launched it downward. But in my eagerness to get power, I didn’t realize that the top of the stake had slipped out of the metal sleeve!

Instead of the pounder striking the top of the stake, it continued down and was wrenched out of my hands by the weight and momentum. It drove itself into the ground right between Old Bean’s feet.

He jumped back and yelled, “What’re you doing? Are you trying to kill Old Bean?!”

I felt horrible and a little sick. If the pounder had come off and gone the other way, it could’ve caught him in the head and might have killed him.

To this day I can’t help think of that and remember how lucky I felt and how it made me do everything safer, and slower, for the rest of the summer. It was a close call that drastically changed how I approached all the work I was doing.

A paper about improving railroad safety through using reports of close calls notes that “a close call is ‘an opportunity to improve safety practices in a situation or incident that has a potential for more serious consequences.’

“When individual events are analyzed collectively, railroads can identify safety hazards and develop solutions to these threats. . . . The aviation industry uses close calls as part of its safety management process.

“In the United States, the aviation industry created the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) and the Global Aviation Information Network (GAIN). The success of these industry-wide systems led to the Improving Safety through Understanding Close Call Events creation of company-specific systems for evaluating close calls.”

In the workplace, it’s important to report close calls to your employer so that others can learn from your experience too. It just might prevent a tragedy.

According to the Infrastructure Health & Safety Association, “the information gathered through near-miss reporting is valuable for finding the root causes of dangerous incidents, proactively taking steps to reduce the danger, and improving the company’s health and safety performance metrics.

“By reporting near misses, employers and workers can significantly improve worker health and safety, enhance the health and safety prevention culture of the company, and ensure that the day-to-day operations meet the health and safety standards required by law.”

But close calls shouldn’t just change our behaviour with safety issues at work. Any behaviour that just narrowly avoids a catastrophe should change that behaviour.

Whether it’s narrowly avoiding a car accident, an overdose, losing a lot of money, hurting a relationship, breaking someone’s trust, or getting in trouble with authorities, a close call for any of these should be seen as an urgent warning message to change what you’re doing.

If you ignore close calls and think that you’ll always avoid tragedy, you’re heading for disaster.

While I still shudder at the memory of nearly severely hurting Old Bean, I’m thankful that this close call likely saved me from making future mistakes.

The Blessing of a Close Call

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