| June 1999 |
Natural Fit
ISMS functions, especially planning, match the P&E mission
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“When the minor injuries go up, there’s a good probability that the more serious ones are going to go up too,” says Jim Nook. “Spotting these trends is an important tool for safe operation. We put a lot of emphasis on the incidence of all injuries coming down.”
Nook, who leads the Plant and Equipment Division’s business management group, is also bearing the division’s standard for the Integrated Safety Management System. ISMS is a DOE program designed to instill safety awareness and accountability throughout all levels of the work force. Nook believes that a grassroots approach is most effective, especially in the P&E Division’s maintenance and repair operations.
“P&E employees have a higher potential for exposure to injury simply because of the nature of the work they do, especially in maintenance and repair work. Each job you encounter has different conditions. Unlike a production setting where you can install guard devices and set procedures, in the maintenance world you have to rely on knowing what the hazards are.”
That’s the first core function of ISMS: Know the job, also described as “define the work” (see the flow diagram). “ISMS’s five core functions apply very well to P&E; they fit the normal way we work,” Nook says. “Feedback—talking about what we’ve encountered on the job—particularly. It’s traditional for a worker to informally discuss with the supervisor and other workers any unusual conditions on a job. We encourage that. For bigger jobs we have formal pre- and post-job briefings, and we also rely on work crews’ weekly safety “tailgate” meetings to pass on information and learn about situations in the field.
“Tapping into the workers’ knowledge of safety-related situations is the key because that’s where the hazards have been encountered and that’s where the experience lies in doing the job safely.”
Although informal discussions among workers will continue to be a very important part of working safely, the division is looking at additional ways to incorporate lessons learned into job planning.
“We’re beefing up our formal lessons-learned program; we want to communicate what we learn to everyone, at a worker level,” Nook says. “Sometimes the real message gets lost, and as a good business practice we have to make sure the message reaches the worker so he or she can work safely, which often also means work more effectively.
“Sometimes you take other things from lessons learned. For instance, when the malfunction of a fire-suppression system caused fatalities at another lab, we noted that, although we didn’t have that type of system at ORNL, the workers’ evacuation from the accident area was hindered by toolboxes and temporary lighting, which could occur anywhere. That lesson can be applied when planning many of our jobs.”
April’s verification review of the Lab’s ISMS program was very favorable, says Dennie Parzyck, ORNL’s ISMS implementation coordinator. “The review highlighted the P&E Division’s Time Out for Safety program and the partnership between P&E and the Atomic Trades and Labor Council,” he says.
P&E Division Director Jerry Hammontree can see the value in the latter. “If we’re working safely, we’re working more efficiently,” he observes. “An injured worker isn’t just a bump on a graph. It’s someone who can’t perform their job as well as they could otherwise. More importantly, it’s someone who is in pain that would likely have been avoided with proper job planning.”—B.C.
