I was literally (ok, not really, but almost) about to have a cow at what I was witnessing right in front of me on the way to our office.
Picture this:
....a construction worker, wearing a safety vest, hard hat, proper work clothes (everything great so far) and
....they're holding a traffic flag in one hand and a slow/stop paddle in the other hand (pet peeve - flags are for emergency and slow/stop for normal flagger operations, if you didn't already know that) and
...they are standing in the middle of the road where there is traffic headed right at them, with no safety cones, or anything, (this is bad, but it gets worse) and
...they have their back turned to the on-coming traffic!
(This is when you say OMG!)
There were so many things wrong with this picture.
No, I couldn't take the picture because I was driving and well, I'm supposed to be the safety person so, yeah...
Anyway. What worries me is I would almost guarantee that this worker really thought they were doing things right.
They probably thought that they had the right gear and that people could see them.
That worker and their supervisor would probably think: "What?"
And chances are, this worker was a day laborer or a temp worker sent out there that day to help keep traffic away from a forklift delivering material to the site.
Here's the thing...
I had to drive away.
I couldn't stop run out there and flag down the flagger to give them a quick 10 or 15 minute crash (pun intended) course on emergency flagging operations.
I wanted to, trust me. I wish I could have.
What I can do is tell you.
I can tell you about this near miss incident. I can tell you that these real life experiences are what drive me and the team here at Weeklysafety.com to create the best safety topics we can.
I can tell you that I promise to turn this experience and so many others that I have had into relevant, accurate, and useful safety training material.
And I can tell you that you can do your part starting today.
You can say to yourself: "I'm gonna make sure that my job, my company, and my team is safe TODAY. And I'm gonna do my job to train them on good safety practices, even if it is just for 10 minutes, today."
I'll do my part. I really hope you'll do yours.
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