By Jim Nortz
BridgeTower Media Newswires
My heart was beating out of my chest. My palms were sweaty. My mouth was dry. And, for the first time in my life, I was literally paralyzed by fear and unable to move. Dressed in Nomex coveralls and clad in oily work-boots, I was standing on the edge of a pipe rack at a Mobil Oil refinery in South Buffalo 35 feet above the ground contemplating a six-foot leap to a nearby scaffolding - with no net or safety harness.
Just one month before this harrowing experience, I had finished my second year at RIT as a mechanical engineering student. My employment with Mobil Oil was the first of five cooperative opportunity (co-op) internships that were required for graduation.
I'll never forget my first day on the job. After filling out the required employment paperwork with HR, two other engineering undergrads and I were told that we were assigned to work for a man named "Bill" - the refinery's chief inspector. As chief inspector, Bill was responsible for evaluating the refinery's critical infrastructure to ensure it was being maintained in accordance with company standards. We were to be extra arms and legs for him during the summer to help him get this work done.
After introducing himself, Bill handed us coveralls that we donned over our three-piece suits. He then led us to the "crude unit" to give us a short tour of a key part of the refinery and show us some of the work we'd be called upon to perform.
The crude unit was a gigantic structure made of concrete and steel towering 70 feet in the air. We ascended to the fourth level on yellow-painted industrial stairs that shook with the deafening pulse of thousands of gallons of boiling-hot crude oil coursing through pumps, pipelines and distillation towers. Shouting over the din, Bill pointed out various crude unit components and explained their function.
Bill eventually led us to a railing at the edge of the concrete platform we were on to show us one of our job responsibilities. To our surprise, he leapt on top of a railing with no fall protection to prevent him from plummeting to the floor 40 feet below. While cradling an I-beam in his left arm for balance, he reached with his right to pull a rod from a pipeline nonchalantly explaining how "this one sticks sometimes."
I recall thinking at the time that there was no way I was going to do that kind of work for co-op credit and a $14 per hour pay check. I was wrong. Over time, we were all conditioned to perform one hair-raising job after another to carry out our duties. These included tightrope walking I-beams and pipelines dozens of feet in the air, handling thousand-degree metal rods by grabbing the red-hot end with a pair of cheap plyers and climbing 100-foot high ladders on the sides of distillation columns with no fall protection. As it turned out, the job Bill showed us on our first day was one of the safer ones because we could at least hold onto the nearby I-beam to keep our balance while standing on top of the railing.
The day I found myself frozen 35 feet in the air, I was working with a colleague to take pipeline thickness measurements with an ultrasonic instrument called a sonoray. As with most jobs we were assigned, the refinery never provided us the proper equipment to perform this work safely. That day, we determined that the best way to access a particular test point was to ascend a scaffolding surrounding a nearby nitrogen tank and make a six-foot jump to a pipe rack. We climbed the scaffolding together and, after looking down from that dizzying height, we debated who should jump first. After some discussion, it was agreed that my partner would go first to the pipe rack provided I went first on the return trip. When my turn came, I froze.
I look back on this experience with horror and as an unforgettable example of the power of social dynamics to drive behavior and how vulnerable I am to them. That summer, my colleagues and I had succumbed to a culture that induced us to frequently risk serious injury or death. Had we demanded the proper equipment and fall protection to do the job safely, it likely would have been denied and possibly resulted in our dismissal. So, we didn't ask. Instead, we gritted our teeth and did our jobs in accordance with well-established custom.
It is no surprise to me that thousands of Wells Fargo employees could be induced to defraud customers or that Volkswagen engineers could be induced to design devices to cheat diesel car emission tests even if they had strong objections to doing so. We are social creatures. We follow the leader and we conform our behavior to align with social norms for good or ill. If you think you are immune from these forces, not only are you mistaken, your overconfidence places you at greater risk of falling prey to them.
Ultimately, I kept my end of the bargain and mustered the courage to make the jump. My buddy followed and we returned safely to the ground. But, it would have been much better if we worked in a safety culture in which we were never expected to risk our lives on the job.
If you're a leader, you must take deliberate steps to exploit your position of authority to create and sustain a safe and ethical culture. If you're not in a leadership position, you can do your part too. The next time you are asked to do something you think is unsafe or unethical, instead of making that "leap," as I so foolishly did, find the courage to tell your leaders that you insist that the job be done safely and ethically.
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Jim Nortz is founder & president of Axiom Compliance & Ethics Solutions. Nortz can be reached at jimnortz@AxiomCES.com.
Published: Tue, Sep 01, 2020
