"I chose to look the other way..."

February 8^th, 2011: Two construction workers died Tuesday after falling 65 feet down an elevator shaft at a building on the Upper West Side, police said. Emergency responders were called to 150 W. 83rd Street on Tuesday morning after two men who had been welding steel beams inside the shaft fell from the fifth floor. The identities of the men, ages 51 and 49, were not immediately released pending family notification. The commissioner of the city’s Department of Buildings, said it appears the men were not wearing harnesses or using other safety measures, such as netting. “This accident serves as a reminder to everyone who goes on the construction site every day that experience alone is not enough and they must take precautions and they must be safe,” he said.

Every day people get hurt at their workplace or on construction job sites. Every day I get “Construction Accident Reports” through Google.  And this is a prime example of accidents that don’t need to happen. I have tried to use these accident reports in training – also the NIOSH FACE reports – but it seems to me that if an accident does not take place in the home town, it will always be “the other guy” that it happens to. Folks, it is NOT always the other guy somewhere in New York State or Indiana or California. And in this tragic example, safety regulations and precautions were bypassed like in so many other occasions. When will we ever learn? And these guys, 49 and 51 years old, were certainly workers with a lot of experience – like so many others. It is not always the young workers that have accidents. Without knowing the background of this accident it is difficult to speculate why the two workers were not protected. Was it because they have done this work unprotected many times before and did not believe an accident could happen to them? Didn’t they have the proper fall protection equipment? Were they told to “just” do the job?

Two men are dead. They are now part of a cold, faceless statistic. And it should not have happened. The road to hell is not only paved with good intentions but also with the “should have’s”. Also the “should have’s” of management ---- “I should have said something when I saw that the workers were not wearing heard hats, but I had more important things to do”.

Here’s a poem (part of it) from Don Merrell that I found a while ago.

I could have saved a life that day, but I chose to look the other way.

It wasn't that I didn't care, I had the time, and I was there.

But I didn't want to seem a fool or argue over a safety rule.

I knew he'd done the job before, if I spoke up, he might get sore.

The chances didn't seem that bad, I’d done the same, he knew I had.

So I shook my head and walked on by, he knew the risks as well as I.

He took the chance, I closed an eye, and with that act, I let him die.

I could have saved a life that day, but I chose to look the other way.

Meike Patten, MPSafetyTraining