Proactive VS Reactive: Reassess Your Safety Program Regularly (Safety Tales Podcast S3 Episode 6)

Intro Speaker:

Dave and Bacon Safety Tales, the only industrial safety podcast that brings you commonsense advice on job site safety, standards, regulations, and industry best practices without putting you to sleep.

Fred Radunzel:

All right, welcome to another episode of Dave & Bacon Safety Tales, it's a rainy day, at least it was raining when I was driving up here.

Dave White:

Yeah, I got the electric bill the other day and it you get all these statistics that you usually never had yeah and the funny thing is usually the average temperature is a degree or two over/under. And I guess it would have been May was like 12 degrees hotter on average per day in the same period 2017. So either it was really, really cold or it has been as hot as we think it has been because God knows that I think it was last week was the in "summer solstice" so basically the summer solstice is you have equinoxes and solstices and that's where your period of daylight is equal, so you'll have like what is a firmly vernal equinox and autumnal equinox and then it's spring and summer solstice I believe. But anyway, I stumbled upon that one just because everybody ... what's that big ol thing over in England?

Fred Radunzel:

Big Ben.

Dave White:

No, no, no, all the rocks that are separate, the Druids set up the big rock thing that-

Fred Radunzel:

Oh, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Dave White:

Stonehenge. Okay, so yeah so all of a sudden I'm looking down there and they have this big old group of people that have a mask dressed like they got like sheep horns on their heads and they're into the whole pagan thing and they're celebrating that because Stonehenge would measure one of the things that the druids set that up to measure. So, I don't know where I'm going with that other than the fact that before the summer solstice or whatever is, it's been hotter than hell.

Fred Radunzel:

We had the coldest April it seemed like in the [inaudible 00:02:40] years and now we have the hottest May.

Dave White:

We didn't get a spring because it went from I think it snowed and then I believe three weeks later we had the hottest day ever recorded in this ... and we're in Iowa, but I think everybody's got a little taste of it.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, well that gets us off what we're gonna talk to a little bit about today but we have a retail store that we have. And I know that we still had our bomber jackets, all our winter clothing, and our ice plates, and stuff like that in the front window and we were going to get rain in the next three or four days.

Dave White:

[crosstalk 00:03:14] sweating, looking at it like what in the hell.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, we hadn't had a chance to swap that stuff out yet, but it's all taken care of now so we're ready if it rains on you. So once again Dave and Bacon Safety Tales, let's start a summer episode we're gonna do here today. We're not going to talk about any summer stuff but we're getting it going. So once again I'd say this every episode but please reach out to us if you guys have any questions, or comments, or concerns, or you wants to take an episode in a different direction. We're always looking for topics so we'd love to hear from you whether it's on any of our social media platforms or even direct email, Fred@QuadCitySafety.com and Dave@QuadCitySafety.com, hit us up and we'd love to talk to you. So today it got me thinking about the people that sell home security systems.

Dave White:

Ring.

Fred Radunzel:

Ring, that's like door to door-

Dave White:

Simply Safe.

Fred Radunzel:

Simply Safe.

Dave White:

ADT.

Fred Radunzel:

ADT, that's that's a good one that's more of like someone that's gonna knock on your door. But they always say that nobody is gonna purchase anything like a home security system until shit happens, it's one of those product groups that it's I got broke into now I'm interested in doing it.

Dave White:

Yeah, well I mean there's a society we're reactive to everything. We don't have a lot of or we don't predict where things are gonna go or try to predict where things are go, we're horrible planners. We're literally like ... and how to say every now and then I forget to do it before I travel somewhere. So I'll be traveling from Iowa in the winter maybe to conference in Florida, well in my mind it's Iowa winter so I'm packing and then I get there and it's like, why do I only have long-sleeve shirts? I am such a dumb ass.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, so thinking about that as part of your safety program. Another example, that I brought up was a sports scouting that you're planning for a game, the coaches are planning for the game, they have you watch game film so you have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen when you see that team on the field. So if you've got a lefty on the mound today and he throws a lot of curve balls and you got a big slugger that doesn't hit a curve ball and can only hit a fastball, you might want to sit that guy down for the day. And in your safety program there's game film that's out there like you can look at other companies that do the same thing that you're doing. You can look at your history the last time that you have faced this pitcher and see what happened when you did it.

Dave White:

And I know that you can call just about anybody and ask them a question. A lot of times if I don't know the answer to a question I think I know somebody that knows or has been in a situation, where, hey man we're getting ready to do this tomorrow, got any experience with that? And while it's tribal knowledge I mean yeah I guess you can get out there and google and spend 20,000 years researching every page that's out there but sometimes going to the gift horse mouth and just saying, hey have you done this before? And they're like, yeah, do this, do this, and do this, that five-minute conversation is worth ... I mean worth a lot.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, and we've talked about this I think in one of the past episodes here but talking to your guys that are actually doing the work too and asking them what do you need, or what are the hazards that you're facing here.

Dave White:

And sometimes though it's that disconnect that sits there because as it becomes instead of ... we talked about marketing aspects and looking all the way down to selling the whole safety package which requires like a restaurant, they're gonna come up and go, how was this? And if you say, "Hey man it's too spicy." Well they're gonna go back to the chef and go, hey man, take it easy because everybody's out here sweating and not finishing their food. So getting an open environment where people can have a conversation and not feel like it's us versus them or it's we don't want to tell anything even though these gloves suck. We're just gonna sit here and bitch about them and not wear them because if we would just have a glove that would do this, we would solve those problems and we just don't do that.

Fred Radunzel:

But I guess how many times have we seen it where you get a call, a guy on the phone says, hey we're looking at cut resistant gloves we had six injuries in the last three months, before that we weren't having any injuries, but in the last three months we've had six injuries, six hand injuries. It's like, dude, what happened? On number four wasn't that an alarm, or was it number three, or glass is another one that ... hey, we really got a look at what we're wearing for eyewear. We had two emergency room visits where someone had to go in for their eye, or bump caps, that seems like to be another one that's starting to pop up more and more. It's like we figured out we need to start wearing some sort of head protection and it's not because we have falling objects in there it's because guys keep cracking their head on working in their confined space or whatever. Or it's OSHA came through, they came through and they popped us, we have five violations here, or it's stuff that anyone that asked for help ahead of time you just take a little walk around your facility and you can see a lot of these hazards that are jumping out at you and like you don't have to-

Dave White:

Yeah, you can't manage safety in a spreadsheet. I believe I've heard it called management by walking around and that's literally what it takes is if you're not out in the field, and you're not talking to people, and you're not looking at situations you're not gonna identify what potential hazards are out there.

Fred Radunzel:

And in doing that regularly too because things are changing especially on the construction site or even in a facility it's like, man I hired-

Dave White:

Well to your point is the guy that has those six hand injuries and they've never had them before there's probably something that changed, has to be something that changed either that or it's just a statistical anomaly. But most of the time it's something that's changed and when that changed there was no change in the requirement or the required PPE.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, it could be, there's a new piece of equipment, there's a new process that happened, we're now working with a different material like you were manufacturing these widgets and now you're manufacturing these widgets that are a little bit sharper, or you hired somebody different. This guy was right-handed now this new guy that you hired is left-handed and so his arm is more exposed to a machine than the right-handed guy was, so there's a million things that can happen. But leads me into something that we're excited about here at Quad City Safety, we're a couple months into it but we haven't done the greatest job of promoting it. It's a working title, but right now it's our buyers journey or our customer journey that we're trying to take our customers on like, I don't know, a yearly PPE journey or what were your phrases? A reassessment.

Dave White:

Reassessment, well we've identified that most everybody's set out there and said, well here's here's what we think that we need and you've geared up and everybody's wearing stuff. But again we don't go in there and reassess, we don't take a second look at it, and we don't identify those things by just taking a second to look at it. Another thing to keep in mind is that when we look at personal protective equipment the markets upside down meaning back in the 90s safety glasses from like 1992 to 1998 changed very little. And so there was no change, everything was static. Well now it seems like every day it's like, hey here's a new anti-fog coating for glasses, traditional anti-fog coatings were crap because of just historically they would spray them on in China and by the time you put them on a boat and then you moved them to a warehouse in the United States, and then they sold it to the distributor, and then we sold it to the end-user they no longer had any anti fog coating on them because that stuff dissipates over time.

Where now I mean there's there's three coatings out there that have been Ergodyne has a proprietary, 3M has a proprietary, [Radians 00:12:22] has a proprietary. And when I've tested them myself because you have different ways that they work, they're working a lot better than the traditional ones that came over work. And so again when we're doing that reassessment is we probably know what the shortcomings of what we're using now, maybe it's the clothing is too hot like I've got some samples that I'm ready to field test out there on some new weld jackets that they've redesigned the back into a thinner more breathable material because most people have been wearing that eight ounce green FR cotton sateen jacket that you go out there to the field and they've just sweated through the thing, it's just sopping wet. So yeah, we've done what we're supposed to do to give them some type of PPE, but if we would reassess that and look at it and go, well realistically when you look at incidents or injury curves there's a couple defining factors that cause people to get injured.

And one of them can be I've done this job for a long time so I am very complacent, so I'm going blank on where I was going with that, but when you go through and you reassess the situation and what those shortcomings of the PPE or who was working in a job you can do a better job of freshening up what you're using. Maybe it's there wasn't let's go cut resistant, gloves cut resistant gloves used to be one through five now there one through nine, so there's different levels so used to be there was like an ANSI2 and then you had like a four which would now be like a seven or eight and there was really nothing in the middle.

Fred Radunzel:

It could be a four still, could be a four through a seven.

Dave White:

But what I'm saying is you can get more options that might better fit where before you went from slightly cut resistant to really cut resistant and usually when you move through that you're going from a lot of dexterity to not much dexterity but maybe you can get some more dexterity there in the middle, but it didn't exist six months ago. It didn't exist a year ago, maybe it is a respirator that works a little bit better like clean space has a respirator now that it has a motor on the back of it. So, it's not a true personal air purifying respirator, PAPR, but it does make it easier to breathe because it's got a fan that's pushing air to you. So when you sit there and you talk about fatigue and that's where I was gonna go is a lot of the things that are comfort features or things like that, that would be considered comfort features will obviously reduce fatigue and fatigue is probably the number one thing that causes people to get hurt. If you're up with a baby rolling around the floor from 1:00 till 4:00 in the middle of the night you're gonna be a little tired.

You're probably not gonna be as awake, aware, and ready is the person who has no children, and just [crosstalk 00:16:00] up and slept 11 hours.

Fred Radunzel:

Fell asleep with the pizza on his belly. I had a buddy that when we were about college age, it would happen a kid once a month, it'd be like where is ... I hope he doesn't listen to it, Shipley, where's Shipley? You'd call him and all of a sudden you get a hold of his girlfriend or something like that, fell asleep in the couch, pizza on his stomach, plate of pizza on his big belly.

Dave White:

There you go, but I mean he's gonna be more less apt theoretically to get hurt than the person that's had no sleep I mean-

Fred Radunzel:

It's not just the physical fatigue it's mental fatigue.

Dave White:

That's why truck drivers are only supposed to drive so long, you can't sit there and drive for 20 hours straight because the Highway Safety Administration has gone in there and said, we noticed that when we let y'all do this you do it and then all of a sudden, an 18-wheeler runs over a [inaudible 00:17:04] and kills of a family of four.

Fred Radunzel:

Have you ever been driving like when you shouldn't be driving ... where you've been driving too long? I drove-

Dave White:

Absolutely.

Fred Radunzel:

... I drove to Savannah Georgia from Iowa City, Iowa.

Dave White:

That's a long drive.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, and I got stuck in traffic in Atlanta for about three hours where I was barely moving, but it started get to the point where it's like 3:00 in the morning yeah and I left at 6:00 in the morning. And so it's about three o'clock in the morning and I'm driving somewhere unfamiliar on a highway but it's like now I'm like an hour away so you've got to get there. I swear like the trees start like creeping in on you like as your driving [inaudible 00:17:43] they're gonna fall on you.

Dave White:

I always say that I start seeing animals [crosstalk 00:17:46] you get jarred awake or how many times ... I mean I'm not proud to say this, but man I know I've been driving before and all of a sudden you nod off and then you come to and you're like, I don't think I remember the last five minutes now that I'm thinking about it. I have no recollection, all of a sudden you nod off and there's a song that's on the radio, it's free bird and it's almost over and [crosstalk 00:18:14] and you're like when did that come on.

Fred Radunzel:

Or yeah, you missed your exit, you're like when did I drive by that exit like you see the exit and where it's at you're like how did I end up here 20 minutes past? Your brain just turns off and you cruising.

Dave White:

But that's usually mental physical fatigue right and doesn't yield well.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, so we got a little bit off track there but our purpose of this whole thing and people can do it just themselves, but we're a supplier so we like to talk about products so products are a big aspect of what we're doing. But where it's just sitting down and being like I'm gonna look at my glove program this month, and we have a chemical hazard, and we have a cut hazard, and we have a leather glove that we use. And you know what that leather glove we've been using the same leather glove and the price keeps going up and up and up. I'm using the same glove since 2004, maybe it's time to take a look at what you're doing with that piece of equipment.

Dave White:

And if we're doing our job then we have that conversation and we go, here's some samples that may be better than what you're using. And you can get it out to people to try and obviously it's trial before you buy we don't want to just load everybody up with everything new. I mean we want you to experience it, but I mean that also drafts that whole marketing aspect that we talked a couple episodes [crosstalk 00:19:50] say going, hey guys look at this new stuff, people do ... traditionally there's always been a resistance to change. I don't think we have the resistance to change that we've had historically where people see new stuff and they're like, that would be great to change, that would be great to try.

Fred Radunzel:

Sometimes it's like that gray one oh man that's so much better than the blue one that we had before and then you're all of a sudden you get that mindset the marketing of the whole program is, man my company really cares about me look at the changes that they're making my job easier and more comfortable.

Dave White:

Yeah, one example this morning we had a gentleman in the store, he's a forklift driver and he goes from indoors to outdoors and he's got clear safety glasses. Well we have transition safety glasses which will tint when they see sunlight and all of a sudden, you're not the guy that has-

Fred Radunzel:

Shades inside in a dark warehouse.

Dave White:

Yeah, so that it matches the environment that they're in automatically without them having to go, okay now I'm in the yard where there's the shaded safety glasses or they just drive in the clear one and they're there squinting and then they put the forklift forks through a 55-gallon drum of some chemical and then they got to get the spill booms out and trying to contain something that's like, man if we had just had some transitional safety glasses that might not have happened.

Fred Radunzel:

For sure but some of it so get to our earlier example about the guy that would call in and say, man I've had six hand injuries maybe ahead of time it's hand protection month and he went through that program and was looking and all sudden here's some information about cut resistant gloves. Well you know what we had two cut incidents maybe we should take a look at something like that ahead of time. And so maybe you don't get to that or maybe it's now we're not in cut protection month we're in arc-flash month and that's something we hadn't thought about, or we get to signage and we don't even have signs, we probably should have signs, but I even think about signs. So it's just really trying to go through month by month look at all the different for us its categories that we sell, for y'all it's probably categories that you purchase, or maybe you should purchase, or maybe it's even just getting the blog posts, or the articles, or the videos, or the samples, or the new product ideas. It might be a podcast that we did that that relates to a certain topic that we can use because we'd always love to have you go check back in on a podcast that we did two months ago so it doesn't just die out there in the on the inter web.

Dave White:

Or it might be something that you just didn't think about or know.

Fred Radunzel:

They we're trying to do an assessment at the end of each month where-

Dave White:

But it's not uncommon for all of a sudden you walk into somebody's shop and it's like, okay what's all that on the bench? And it's all, it can be starting fluids or stuff that's highly flammable and it's like that really should be stored in a flammable cabinet. And so it's just ignorance and ignorance is not bad I mean that's one thing that we keep promoting here is it's okay that if you're ignorant and that's what the buyers journey is also meant to do is have a topic where you get real with yourself. I mean everybody's that goes on the journey has to really sit there and take a couple minutes as you're scrolling through because there's a lot of content and videos on them that may explain or give some training or tidbits to look at and look for to where you can make some decisions that help you along the process that train you up. Maybe you never have an explosion but wouldn't it be great that you had all that stuff there and all of a sudden you had a building fire and you didn't have little torpedo rockets going shooting in all the fire guys because you said we should put that stuff in a flammable cabinet.

And again, I think another thing to reiterate is safety equipment, i.e. personal protective equipment, PPE, are little mini insurance policies, and it's but I have life insurance. I really hope that I don't die, but if I do I would like to have an insurance policy that takes care of things and that's what a cut-resistant glove is maybe you're not going to cut your hand every single day but have paying a little bit to have insurance that you're not going to have that outcome is how you have to look at it.

Fred Radunzel:

Cool, well if you guys want any more information please feel free to reach out to Dave or I, Dave@QuadCitySafety.com, Fred@QuadCitysafety.com and we'll try and get you more information. If you wanna be part of our program otherwise just take a look at it in your own programs and develop something. We're just starting to review the products that you're using on a yearly basis, I mean some of them it would be great if you did it every couple years.

Dave White:

And what better when the OSHA guy comes in and he's doing is interview and he does his walk there and goes, how do you manage your safety program? And they say on an annual basis we try to look back at what we're using, why we're using, how we're using it, and reevaluate. You're going to get his little ears perked up and maybe instead of writing some level of violation he'll go, "Hey between me, you, and a fence post why you get that fixed I'm gonna check back with you. It sounds like you're you're trying," and that's that's realistically what we need to try to do. And the people that are just asses and don't care that's who OSHA is looking for, they're not necessarily looking for people that caring or trying to make something better.

Fred Radunzel:

Okay, cool well let's put a bow on that one let's move on to the Dumb ass of the Week this week and I'm going to call this guy Carl. Carl likes to throw in his ear buds when he's working in an area where they should be wearing earplugs. he likes the substitute in his ear buds, he says it's like the same guy that does I wear glasses so I don't have to wear safety glasses type. But this guy blares music directly into his ears where instead of blocking out noise all he's doing is putting more noise into his ear which is actually making it more dangerous, so we see that one pretty often. That's one that I know even especially like five years ago I think people are getting smarter as we get a little bit older and maybe the technologies are changing, but it was really a, my guys like to listen to music while they're doing whatever widget that they're doing and they have to wear ear plugs, so is there anything that accomplishes both? Which there is.

Dave White:

Yeah, but to your point when you look at noise people traditionally haven't looked at it till how we're going to look to it in the future is people are getting baseline tests. And then if you have a decline in your hearing and you can have recordable an OSHA recordable which is going to affect your workman's compensation, it's gonna affect a lot of things. I think there's even cases, you're starting to see people that are suing companies because their hearings been hurt in the facility and maybe it's that whole case where, well it was the guy that was wearing the earbuds that was already getting a 95% dose and then he's listening to Led Zeppelin blaring all day that maybe gets as those to 100 or something and it's just destroying him.

Fred Radunzel:

All your examples music examples, it's always like 40 years ago. Can you throw a current one in there, who you got? Current, anyone current?

Dave White:

Current what?

Fred Radunzel:

Musician, that's what I thought.

Dave White:

Toby Keith.

Fred Radunzel:

So, all right well you moved up three decades, but I guess Toby Keith's probably still-

Dave White:

Yeah, I guess I'm-

Fred Radunzel:

Kendrick Lamar, how about you throw Kendrick Lamar-

Dave White:

I don't even know who that is.

Fred Radunzel:

Well ask your kids they probably know.

Dave White:

I'm not interested, I'm old enough that I don't care.

Fred Radunzel:

All right, so don't be that dumb ass if you need to be wearing hearing protection your Apple earbuds aren't gonna get it done just because you plug something in your ear doesn't mean that it's protecting you.

Dave White:

And we also wanted to talk about products that are predictive so that hearing protection example, Accuform just got a sample of it's a sign that basically has a sound level meter on it that publishes right in front of you that there's an issue thorium makes a wearable that blinked green when you're okay if you get above the threshold all the sudden it goes red so that you have something that goes even though you may not be aware, you're in harm's way. You need to pay attention right now.

Fred Radunzel:

Yep, we're gonna talk about some of those other tips here in a minute. We're gonna get after getting more on that hearing one. I realized our script here so I move that to the end because I didn't have anything else to talk about, mostly is the reason so Q&A, moving on to that, question number one, can you talk about the advantages of different outsoles on a work boot?

Dave White:

Yeah, I can, what would you like to know?

Fred Radunzel:

I don't know enough about work boots-

Dave White:

So, when we have people come in there's different compounds that soles are made out of and they respond to environments differently. So let's say I'm the guy that's working in a foundry or steel mill where I may be in a lot of heat. Well obviously, if you were like your regular old Nikes the outsoles are real squishy and that's an EVA material and you wear that into heat and it's just going to melt.

Fred Radunzel:

So, you're talking out so long to assume that the rubbery part on the outside of the shoe that you're feeling’s gonna be your outsole.

Dave White:

Correct, so if you met with like a Vibram which is like a rubber polymer it's gonna respond to heat really, really well. Maybe you're in some chemicals so the fact that you're in chemicals is going to break down plastic whether it's rubber, or it's a PVC, or an EVA, or whatever it's gonna break those down faster than it may you're a thin outsole. So understanding what you're in and around can control what outsole is going to perform the longest or the best for you. Maybe in that it's the construction of outsole so let's say that the outsole you're in an area where it's really slick you're around oils, maybe food oils, maybe there's just water on the ground and you want something that has a higher coefficient of friction so basically the sandpaper concept and what's going to give me grip is it could be a combination of, well I need slip resistance but I need heat resistance so that's going to be different than maybe just a regular heat resistance.

Maybe you're a guy that needs to climb ladders so you need to define the heel on the shoe so that's going to change the construction of the outsole. So construction of the outsole and then what the outsole is subjective maybe it's metal chips, maybe it's chemicals, maybe it's heat. Every shoe is going to operate a little differently based on the outsole.

Fred Radunzel:

So, the outsole is gonna basically be protecting you from the environment or it's gonna have something to do more it's a durability of the shoe?

Dave White:

It's going to be durability, longevity of the asset. I mean theoretically yeah it could be a safety factor if you walk out on a furnace, on a shoe that's just gonna melt or obviously-

Fred Radunzel:

You could slip, somewhere you could slip or whatever, so okay, cool. The other question that I had down was how our eye wash bottle is acceptable if OSHA recommends 15 minutes of flushing?

Dave White:

They're really more of a first aid thing because the standard reads is if you've identified that you can get whether it's chemicals or particulate matter in your eyes then you need to be ... they say like a 5-second or 50 foot walk from an eyewash and an eye wash is defined as something that dispenses tepid water right and tepid is a loose definition, but it's basically not too cold not too hot so it's one of those [crosstalk 00:33:46] well how's the person going to respond to it. So if the water is 110 degrees Fahrenheit because you're in a hot area or maybe you're in a construction thing with this thing sitting out in the work area with the sun beating down on it, warming that water up. You get something in your eye and you need to flush your eye but the water is too hot for you to be in and sometimes it showers.

So, let's say that you're around chemicals and you get the chemicals all over you and you need to you need to wash off and you pull the that shower and the water's like 50 degrees Fahrenheit, you're not going to stay under there and you get the incident, you've got the potential of people freak out and trip and fall because they ... I'm not scared to say this is, I've gotten in the showers that I thought were warm yeah and it wasn't and then trying to get out of it the next thing I know I've ripped the [crosstalk 00:34:51] there's a fat guy rolling around in the floor wrapped up, got the curtain rod hit me in the head and everything.

Fred Radunzel:

Plus, you got that shrinkage happening.

Dave White:

Yeah, right, so I mean it's just a bad situation all together.

Fred Radunzel:

It's bad all around. Okay, all right cool, what else you got, sorry, you're about to say something else.

Dave White:

But going into when we're looking at eyewash the question goes back to the dump bottles is if you really have a hazard, the bottle is not really meant to be an eyewash even though they're eye wash bottles under the standard. And I think people think, oh I need an eyewash so I'll just put 2 32-ounce bottles in this set and then I should be good, not really the case.

Fred Radunzel:

Okay, or even the little one ouncers that are like in your little first-aid kit that you have.

Dave White:

But again, those are meant to be like a first-aid flush or whatever, a true eye wash so that's I mean [crosstalk 00:35:58]-

Fred Radunzel:

[crosstalk 00:35:56] area where eye wash is required that can be confusing that it's like, well I have eye wash.

Dave White:

Historically the problem was always that eye washes going way back had to be plumbed, you had to have a water source and they're like, well what I do here, I don't have a water pipe, I don't have a drain so how do I deal with this? Well now they've come up with a lot of the portable little plastic guys that you fill up with water, you put an additive in, or they have cartridges to go into them so whether it's Fendall or there's there's a lot of manufacturers out there that have those systems ready to go.

Fred Radunzel:

Okay, cool, cool, all right well now we're gonna move on. You brought up the Accuform product that would turn red if you were in certain environments if it got loud enough to go from green to yellow to red so I was thinking about

Dave White:

It's just using as we talked about the newer products that are out there. One that's out there now is we were just got done talking about eye wash, so Fendall makes a little gadget that you put on the eye wash that says hey time to change the additive because they're not meant to be there forever. You have to dump them out and they do take a little bit of maintaining to keep right because nobody wants to also can go use an eyewash and the waters clabbered and has been in there for 15 minutes and smells like you're taking a bath with a bluegill water or whatever, stinky, nasty water. So they make a little guy that can go off. They make ones that you can integrate in there that when somebody deploys the eye wash it has an alarm so an alarm sounds so instead of the guy that got battery acid. He's messing around with the forklift, the battery exploded all over, hit him in the face, and he goes over the eyewash and he's like a lone worker guy doesn't have a lot of people around him.

And he's just he's sitting there, he's blind and he can't see, and nobody knows that Bill just got his face burnt off by battery acid.

Fred Radunzel:

Right, it's like Jim Carey in the mask.

Dave White:

Yeah, so just those are little things that you can add that are not always predictive but help you manage the situation make you aware of it. It can be software, there's software out there that helps you maintain inspections or whatever that you can get apps for your phone. 3M has a product called connected safety where you can manage anything from harnesses inspections to respiratory fit testing to make sure that your hitting all the qualifications [crosstalk 00:39:05] as dummy proof as you can. It still takes somebody-

Fred Radunzel:

There's some effort.

Dave White:

Yeah, somebody has to go out there and do it, but it takes some of those guessing factors out of it. Like hard hats, hard hats as they relate to UV so you take a hard hat and you put it out in the sun, you take any piece of plastic and it's gonna degrade right. So, 3M makes a UV indicator that's right on the back of the cap, it's like a little red dot back there and when it gets orange it's been degraded, it needs to be taken out of service and replaced so it takes some of that guessing, it's a visual inspection-

Fred Radunzel:

Like a razor with the little orange piece on your razor and as the razor starts wearing out it turns white.

Dave White:

They make signage now that when it gets to a certain degree, things appear or change colors so that you can go it's cold enough that ice is being made right now, I should pay more attention than ... when I left work last night it was 38 degrees but now it's 29 and that water is probably frozen and slick, I can make people aware of it or give them some prediction of how things have changed.

Fred Radunzel:

Or the other end when it's so hot out we maybe need to start paying attention to dehydration.

Dave White:

Yeah, well you have heat stress monitors and stuff that you can put out there that can measure that stuff also.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, so I had down ... this is a more of a simple thing but a lot of times with like electrical gloves, they're supposed to be sent in for inspection what every six months, technically?

Dave White:

It's technically from the date they're put in service. They can stay in a bag up to 12 months and then put in service, but the date they're put in service, six months from there you need to send them back to an [inaudible 00:41:11] certified lab to where they shock them and look for defects and do their inspections.

Fred Radunzel:

So, a lot of companies will have we're wearing red for the six-month period and then that six-month period ends and we switch to yellow. And so, you can see that well Dave's wearing red and we're in a yellow six-month period so-

Dave White:

Why is he wearing those.

Fred Radunzel:

So, we got to get him in the new updated one so we can send his in for inspection.

Dave White:

And you can use some of that color coding even I've seen a lot of contractor customers use electrical tape and so they'll have inspection policy that says that if something's been given the once-over and okay to use they'll put blue tape for the first quarter maybe the second quarter is red so all of a sudden to the point is if they're going to pick up a tool and use it that hasn't been inspected to obviously their company's requirement they can know, oh wait a second, the tapes not right so somebody has it ... maybe I shouldn't be using this>

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, or I know in one of the past episodes we talked to lockout tagout it's like maybe the red lock signifies this, and the blue lock signifies this, and the green lock is this. It's like oh that's got a green lock on and I got to do that, all the different kinds of things you can do like that but it's just getting back into this reviewing your safety program, it's monthly and weekly reviews so maybe you set it up to where every single month I go and I check all the AEDs in my facility and AEDs that's another one that usually they'll have a light on them that'll flash red if this thing needs new batteries.

Dave White:

Passing batteries, and they even have software that will say, hey you need to go look and make sure you see the green dot. And then when you see the green dot you come back and you check off, I saw the green saw the green dot.

Fred Radunzel:

I saw the green dot it's like bathrooms getting cleaned at a Target or something like that it's like don't [crosstalk 00:43:08]-

Dave White:

You walk in there and it's been signed off like three minutes before you were there but it's completely destroyed.

Fred Radunzel:

Yeah, and that toilet seats ice cold so you're like nobody just cleaned this thing I can tell. We'll end it on this, it's a good story. I worked at a Lowe's and the cashiers at the end of the day would have to go in and clean up the bathrooms and one of my managers is in there and he had just been called in because the cashier couldn't figure out what to do because the log was a bridge, it was stretched out from one in the toilet seat to the other end and all the water we just flushed under it. And somebody had to go in there with a paint stick she was breaking this up with a paint stick so that you could get it all to flush down, so it's gonna tid bit we love to give you here on Dave and Bacon Safety Tales. So that's it for another episode, if you like what you heard share it with your other team members, we'd love to grow the audience, please reach out to us with any questions or comments, really appreciate everyone who's listening.

We'll be back again next week with another episode so it's again safety's got no quitting time, we'll see you next time thanks.

Intro Speaker:

Thanks for listening in to Dave and Bacon Safety Tales brought to you by Quad City Safety. Send us your questions on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, at Quad City's Safety, #safetytales, or email them to fred@quadcitysafety.com, he's the guy keeping this mess of a show in line. And if you like the show please rate and review us on iTunes, it's a kick-ass way to show that you care about safety.