William Keith Stormant and Eric McClellan are among the 4,836 U.S. workers who were killed on the job in 2015. Both were experienced at their work and, by all accounts, highly respected.
Each was in his 50s and had been married for more than 25 years. Between them, they had four sons.
Their deaths still affect safety professionals and their employers, PotashCorp. (now known as Nutrien) and Reynolds Consumer Products. And each spurred changes to the organizations’ respective safety programs.
“The incident was extremely difficult for the entire company,” said Chad Clark, senior operations manager at Reynolds Consumer Products. “We had to do everything possible to mitigate the risk of future injury or death. We took a hard look at our EHS management system and what gaps existed and closed them immediately.”
The safety pros and others in those organizations also had to contend with grief – both internal and external – along with the questions of what they could have done differently.
“I think when something like this happens, you’re personally invested and you feel a huge responsibility for it,” said John Horne, vice president of safety, health and environment at Nutrien and the former director of safety and health at PotashCorp. “I think the hardest part is when you start to think that lives are never going to be the same. The impact of a fatality, it never goes away.”
Emotional support
The emotional aspects of a tragic incident can remain years afterward not only within the workplace and the worker’s household but in the surrounding community. Taylor Abel, lead for the Campbell Institute’s Serious Injury and Fatality Prevention Workgroup at the National Safety Council, said he found that out when he worked in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, known as the “Potash Capital of the World.”
“There weren’t any fatalities while I was there, but there had been years earlier,” he said. “In a small town, you still felt the impact of the loss all those years later.”
To provide emotional support for workers after an incident, many organizations look to employee assistance programs. Richard Ottenstein, CEO of The Workplace Trauma Center in Maryland, recommends looking into whether your EAP has a critical incident response program.
“It’s important to utilize providers that are trained in providing onsite crisis support for corporations,” Ottenstein said. “Corporate crisis response is different (than crisis interventions from licensed mental health pros). It’s working with systems that are in place.”
Anyone affected by a tragedy should be encouraged, but not required, to attend counseling sessions, he added.
Although a unifying response such as a memorial may be helpful, it also could cause stress or retrigger difficult emotional responses.
The Colorado State Employee Assistance Program advises employers to not require workers to participate in remembrances or other post-incident events. Similarly, don’t pressure employees to share stories or participate in debriefing activities.
Instead, employers should continuously remind workers, even weeks or months after an incident, that help is available. C-SEAP emphasizes that people process grief in different ways and time lines.
“Be patient with yourself and others as you all cope in the aftermath of the event or situation,” C-SEAP says.
Signs of trauma
Employers, supervisors and co-workers need to be aware of the signs of trauma and stress in themselves and others. Acute stress symptoms include chest pain, difficulty breathing, dizziness or shock. Other signs are inability to concentrate, memory problems, difficulties with problem-solving, irritability, anger, fear and distraction.
John Horne
Nutrien (formerly Potash Corp.)
Photo: fantom_rd/iStockphoto
Ottenstein said signs of trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder also include nightmares, flashbacks and frequent thoughts about the incident.
Although most leaders want their workers taken care of first, Ottenstein said his organization circles back to those leaders to make sure they’re OK as well.
“Afterward, we offer to meet with them to provide support because they take these things pretty hard in most companies,” he said. “And I think it’s really important to offer support to them, including the safety and health professionals.
“What I recommend to the safety professional is to really take advantage of the support that’s available.”
That support can include talking to friends or colleagues. “It’s about not suppressing trauma, not holding it in,” Ottenstein said.
Additionally, remain aware of cumulative stress, which can build from past incidents. “With cumulative stress, we’re fine for maybe a long period of time dealing with traumatic events, but then we reach a point where we’ve had our fill,” Otterstein said. “We don’t always know when that’s going to be.”
‘We’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again’
A positive response to a tragic incident includes organizational introspection on safety and a desire to make it better.
McClellan’s death involved a metal lathe, so Reynolds Consumer Products commissioned an in-depth review of every machine guard.
“We were not looking merely to meet OSHA minimum standards, but rather to pursue best-in-class solutions,” Clark said. “We found better guards and/or solutions had become available to protect rotating equipment. This has been addressed accordingly at all facilities.”
Among the other changes were the implementation of a risk reduction program that uses the Hierarchy of Controls and the introduction of REAs (roles, expectations and accountabilities) for everyone from the CEO to factory floor workers.
The results, Clark said, are better engagement, a more standardized approach to safety across the organization, lower injury rates and a better understanding of the role each employee plays in safety for the entire company.
“The loss of a team member is immeasurably tragic,” Reynolds Consumer Products CEO Lance Mitchell said. “I took Eric’s death personally, and know it had a major impact on the company as a whole. The experience reshaped our standards for safety and effected change, setting us on our journey for safety excellence. Team member safety is the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing I think of when I go to sleep.”
In examining what happened after Stormant’s death, Horne said Potash’s safety team found that problems typically occurred not during dangerous work, but rather during more routine tasks. “We had to have a process where we can look at our routine work differently,” he said.
The company added two pieces to what’s now a three-part SIF prevention program, mainly focused on being more proactive. The organization looked at tasks from start to finish to examine SIF potential and “integrated SIF into every discussion.” For its efforts, Potash won the NSC Green Cross for Safety Excellence Award in 2017.
“When something like this happens, it’s important that there’s some good that comes of this, that we use this as energy to make sure that it never happens again,” Horne said. “We don’t forget, and it is that catalyst that says we’re going to make some good out of this. As bad as the situation is, we’re going to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
