Industry Pauses for Safety Stand-Down Day

September/October 2015

Second annual event focuses on the people behind the tragedies.

By Megan Quinn

The theme for ISRI’s second annual Safety Stand-Down Day, held June 24, was “Be Safe to Be There,” which emphasizes that employees who are safe at work can come home safely to their loved ones and be around to enjoy what’s important to them, be it attending a birthday party, a wedding, a bowling league, or just a quiet meal at home. To mark the day, ReMA asked member companies to pause or shut down operations for at least one hour per shift to focus on safety awareness or provide safety training.

ISRI started Safety Stand-Down Day in 2014 as a response to the high numbers of injuries and deaths in the industry. For this year’s event, the association sent out information about nine recent scrap-industry fatalities. It also provided information about some of the leading causes of those fatalities: mobile equipment accidents, failure to follow lock-out/tag-out procedures, fall hazards, and accidents involving machine guarding or confined spaces.

Here is what some member companies did to mark Safety Stand-Down Day this year:

--The David J. Joseph Co. (Cincinnati) participated by asking all 79 of its recycling facilities to have field-based safety awareness meetings, where they emphasized topics such as mobile equipment safety, lock-out/tag-out, confined spaces, machine guarding, and fall prevention.

Corporate Safety Director Terry McWhorter says another important piece of the event was to ask all employees for ideas on how to improve safety in their work area or in a specific task they perform. DJJ gave employees several weeks to submit ideas before the event. “We received hundreds of ideas to improve our safety program,” he says.

“Improvement ideas related to topics such as traffic and customer safety, ergonomics, communication, equipment arrangement, and more effective tools to perform a job, among others.”

The ideas won’t just benefit the employees at one facility. DJJ has shared the entire list of ideas with all of its recycling yards, and the company hopes to keep the input coming. “We’ve learned over the years that the most effective way to improve the safety process is by regularly engaging every teammate to actively contribute to maintaining a safe and healthy workplace,” McWhorter says. “Our takeaway from this year’s safety stand-down is to build even more momentum by asking for teammates’ suggestions on a daily basis.”

--David Medeiros, environmental, health, and safety manager for Mid-City Scrap Iron & Salvage (Westport, Mass.), says it was important to make its stand-down personal. The 50 workers from the yard, plus two members of the office staff, listened to a presentation that focused not just on safety, but on those who have died because of safety-related accidents on the job. “We gave everyone’s name who died, [and mentioned] if they were married,” he says. “All these people had families, and [the event] was right after Father’s Day. … [Those families] did not have a very good Father’s Day,” he says.

Focusing on the people behind the tragedies was motivating for employees, he says, and shutting down for one hour also drove that point home. Safety Stand-Down Day “was very well taken. We could see on employees’ faces that they actually wanted to make this a priority.”

--Rick Hare, director of safety for Consolidated Scrap Resources (York, Pa.), says he visited all six of the company’s locations for separate meetings on Safety Stand-Down Day. Yet the unifying moment was when about 125 employees from across the company shared a moment of silence at 8 a.m. to remember those who lost their lives to accidents. “We virtually stopped all operations. … We were a company in unison in all those locations,” he says.

Hare says he did not lead specific training, but he invited employees to have an open conversation about how safety affects everyone around them: not just their fellow workers, but those workers’ families and friends. “We didn’t say, ‘Here is what [safety training] protects you from.’ [We said] it’s what it protects you for. Someone may want to go home to their kids, their wife, their family, or maybe go bowling or meet some buddies.”

Hare says Consolidated Scrap Resources dealt with both a fatality and an amputation about 10 years ago, so Safety Stand-Down Day really hit home for employees who were there at the time and still work with the company today. “For some of us who have been around for a while, we remember, but turnover is frequent, and some people weren’t here,” he says. “They don’t know what it’s like to have a catastrophic event like that, so you have to make them aware, especially young people.”

--Jason Brenner, general manager at Brenner Recycling (Hazleton, Pa.), says the company has regular 20- to 30-minute safety discussions twice a month, which are focused on a particular safety topic and also give time for employees to discuss safety concerns or ideas for improvement. He asked all employees to come into work early on Safety Stand-Down Day for an hour of specialized training and discussion on topics such as confined spaces, mobile equipment safety, and lock-out/tag-out. “We did all that and then talked about fatalities that ReMA has reported. … That started a discussion about what are some more things we can do” to prevent injuries and deaths, he says.

Brenner says he is pleased that his employees already have good safety practices, but it’s important to make the time to reinforce the message as a team. “We had everyone there, including office staff. Our drivers got off the road, [and] all of our machine operators, general laborers, and management were there.”

--After the company’s first Safety Stand-Down Day meeting at Pacific Iron & Metal Co. (Seattle), some employees have taken the initiative to ask for more safety training, and they are even more watchful for situations that could be dangerous, says General Manager Ryan Glant. The event “has empowered our employees to speak up when they see an issue,” he says.

For example, the Seattle area experienced record high temperatures this summer, and some employees were worried the weather could create unsafe working conditions. The company’s safety team got together to schedule extra breaks, supply more water, and help ensure workers were not working in hot containers for too long, he says.

--Employees at Sadoff Iron & Metal Co. (Fond du Lac, Wis.) recognized the event in several different ways. Some facilities enjoyed a safety cookout, where they highlighted the ReMA safety tagline, “Safely or not at all.”

At other facilities, Safety and Environmental Health Manager Jerry Heitman says employees had a meeting to discuss injuries and deaths in the industry. They also highlighted the importance of reporting “near-miss” incidents where an injury could have taken place.

After a brief presentation, the company “then opened it up to our employees to discuss things they’ve witnessed that affected them in regards to safety in the workplace.

Surprisingly, many employees opened up to tell stories of past experiences and lessons learned,” he says. As more employees began to share stories of how an injury at work could affect a friend or a family member, “we assured our employees that everyone is empowered to stop any unsafe behavior, process, or piece of equipment.”

Heitman says his goal is to create a “What Safety Means to Me” display board at all facilities as a visual reminder of why it is so important to work safely. Employees will be able to bring in pictures, drawings, or other items to post on the board. “We cannot forget that others are depending on us,” he says.

Megan Quinn is reporter/writer for Scrap.