Drilling advances

	Vol. 230 No. 7
LES SKINNER, PE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR lskinner@sbcglobal.net

Lightning Rods

This month I’m returning to one of my favorite topics, safety. However, this isn’t just about safety practices, procedures and personal protection equipment; it’s about people, especially those who just seem to have more accidents than others. If you’ve worked in the field very long, you’ve seen them—folks that seem to attract accidents like rig lights attract rattlesnakes when drilling at night. When I worked in the field, we called these guys lightning rods.

What causes these people to be so accident-prone? There are several reasons:

1. Age and inexperience—Statistics show that younger people, usually males, with little or no rig experience get hurt more often than others. Many don’t know enough about the operation to understand when and where to be cautious. Coupled with that is the young workers’ bulletproof attitude. This combination means that they place themselves at risk without knowing or caring, since they have not yet experienced an accident. Sometimes, sadly, they only have one accident—the one that kills them.

2. Block logic—Similar to inexperience, many people on a rig can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Their thought process is limited to largely unconnected chunks of thought. They can’t look at the entire system and logically grasp all aspects of the project in a stepwise process. Their world is confined, and they don’t like to get outside their little box. So when something happens elsewhere on the site, they can’t grasp how it impacts them. This is one of the key elements of poor situation awareness.

3. Living on the edge—This one involves a willingness to push boundaries of safety and accepted procedure. This leads to climbing the derrick without fall protection, not wearing eye or head protection, ignoring the job safety plan and, in the words of an old song, “picking fights with thunderstorms and charging into trees.” Even if they are fully aware of safety procedures and equipment, they still ignore them, something risk consultant Dr. Peter Sandman refers to as “willed inattention.” This group is the source of the last seven words of a Texas roughneck: “Here, hold my beer. Y’all watch this!”

Work on accident-proneness began in 1919 in a British munitions factory. A study by two psychologists, Major Greenwood and Hilda M. Woods, found that accidents were unevenly distributed among workers even though all of them had the same safety training, the same precautionary advice and the same safety equipment. A similar study in the 1920s by Karl Marbe indicated that people who have one accident are more likely to have another one than people who never had one before.

Further work in the 1930s and 1940s confirmed these early studies. In a 1945 analysis of accident-prone people, they were described as impulsive, drawn to adventure and excitement, always in search of immediate pleasures with an inability to plan ahead and a general resentment toward authority. In several instances, everyone at the facility was provided with supplemental safety training. There was still a small group that accounted for most of the accidents. Not surprisingly, it was the same group as before the training.

In much of this early work, it was assumed that the accident-prone workers were either hardheaded, self-destructive or not very intelligent. The solution to the problem back then was simply to fire the offending worker and rid the facility of the accident source. Of course, that worker then went to another facility carrying his accident-proneness with him.

Several psychoanalysts joined the fray in the late 20th century and early 2000s. They found that accident-prone workers were subconsciously motivated by guilt and a self-punitive urge. The physical pain, psychic suffering and inconvenience of an accident are viewed as punishment that relieves guilt. Alternatively, the accident-prone person may be attempting to avoid responsibility or get “sympathy mileage” from an injury.

F. David Pierce, a well known safety professional, studied 10,500 accidents for 25 employers between 1999 and 2003. Employees involved were interviewed and tested. Pierce found that the there were four definable social styles present in most workers: 1) Driver (risk-takers and deep-thinkers), 2) Analytical (risk-avoiders and deep-thinkers), 3) Amiable (risk-avoiders and feeling-reactors), and 4) Expressive (risk-takers and feeling-reactors). The members of this last group were more than twice as likely to be involved in an accident as others.

Pierce and psychologist E. Scott Geller studied the safety programs of employers with a significant number of accidents. They found that many safety programs had incentives for staying injury-free. These programs focused on outcomes rather than the safety process.

Clearly, the statistics show that personality plays a very big role in accident-proneness. To paraphrase Dr. Geller, incentives will be trumped by personality every time.
So how do we overcome the basic personality trait of risk-taking coupled with feelings instead of deep-thought? Pierce and Geller both believe in the idea of employee participation in the safety process with a focus on process activities (safety-related behaviors). As Pierce says, “Most times these [conventional safety programs] focus on workers staying injury-free, not on worker safety participation.” Given that many workers don’t believe they will ever be hurt (i.e., they’re bulletproof), conventional safety programs simply don’t work well on drilling rigs.

Geller’s approach is to have all workers involved in planning safety programs and procedures for any job. This bottom-up approach puts the accident-prone individual on a team with his co-workers, all of them equally responsible for accident avoidance. Another suggestion has been to more closely supervise crews until safe work procedures and processes become second nature to all. “Boots on the floor” supervision means that someone else will have to answer the phone, send out emails and fill out  forms in the company man’s office (we used to have clerks to do that work). Eventually, the accident-prone worker will figure out that all of this is for his/her benefit.

Nobody deserves to be hurt on the job, not even the accident-prone..               

Les Skinner, a Houston-based consultant and a chemical engineering graduate from Texas Tech University, has 35 years of experience in drilling and well control with major and independent operators.