Last fall, I volunteered at a summer camp renovation project in southern Missouri. While painting a long steel footbridge to be placed later, I started keeping an eye on a long-time volunteer named Joe as he prepared a big chainsaw.
His objective was clear enough. Two tall, dead sycamore trees were leaning distinctly toward the bridge and within destructive range. This job would require some care, as ignoring gravity would cause them to drop onto the bridge.
Lacking a man-lift, Joe didn't have the option of working high, snipping branches and trunks into harmless lengths. The two would have to come down at full length. What impressed me was how much time Joe took to circle the trees, studying them from every angle. After hours of rumination, he climbed to attach a guide rope to each and then whittled away the base to help steer the tree away from the bridge.
Joe, having recognized the risk, took his own sweet time. Reading up on tree-felling, I learned that beavers also take time as a part of their own safety culture. Trail cameras routinely catch beavers pausing intermittently in their work to place one paw on the trunk above the fresh notch. They're stopping to check for popping sounds, which indicate the tree is close to falling. While beavers usually weaken a tree trunk just enough to let wind complete the job, they must understand that a tree might come down early and crush them.
I use the term “safety pause” for halting in the name of caution. In some settings, the phrase can mean taking an occasional hour out of the work week for a themed talk about a recent mishap.
Still, when I say safety pause, I mean a meeting of minds among a team headed by someone with authority over the upcoming work. A safety pause might happen before the workday begins, or it might occur halfway through when someone sees a problem. I was at a blacksmithing course when one of my fellow students informed our instructor that the belt sander was making a funny noise. He came over immediately, shut it down, and trimmed some loose adhesive, explaining to us that a broken high-speed belt can act like an abrasive bullwhip that attacks the user in a split second.
Pilots may know the safety pause by the label “pause and reflect,” offshore workers by “last-minute risk assessment,” and surgeons and dentists by “time out.”
“In hospital settings, the pause is used daily in surgical areas and is known as the universal protocol or 'time out,’” said Dan Scungio, a laboratory safety consultant. “This process prevents wrong-site or wrong-patient surgeries every day across the country. Pausing for safety in the workplace can be a powerful tool, even during the busiest moments. In fact, that’s when it works best.”
Dr. Steve Jacobsen, Minnesota orthopedic surgeon, said a time out in his operating room works this way: After the team has double-checked the patient's identity, the exact location and nature of the work, and called out relevant allergies or medications, he said he always finishes with, "If anyone has any concerns about safety during the case, please speak up!”
Consider the importance of a thorough time out before major dental work. It corrects for problems like the fact that X-rays may be reversed, the number of teeth in any given mouth can vary from the norm, and it's harder to mark a tooth than an arm for surgery.
Whatever the label, the core idea of a safety pause is the same. Everyone knows exactly what the job requires, plus – and this is crucial – anyone can state a concern to a leader who has the willingness and authority to act, even to scrub the plan. Call it a delay, but that extra time could be a lifesaver.
Here's what can happen when a job begins without workers being alert and empowered to speak up. On the afternoon of January 4, 1987, a Conrail crew at a Baltimore yard was supposed to prepare three freight locomotives coded ENS-121 for transfer north. On the way, the crew missed an automatic caution signal at a switch, allowing an Amtrak passenger train to come from behind and smash into the trailing Conrail units at more than 120 mph. Sixteen people died, and 174 were injured.
The National Transportation Safety Board called out multiple errors by the Conrail crew, and one was a sloppy predeparture test.
“It is clear that the crew of train ENS-121 left Bay View Yard without having performed a complete and proper test of the ACS (automatic control system), without the required working console radio, without having performed the required brake test, with the alerter whistle muted, with the deadman pedal inoperative, and possibly a bulb missing from the ACS system.”
Any member of the ENS-121 crew could have, and should have, raised an objection before leaving the yard.
Standing at the extreme end of safety-pause defiance is the case of OceanGate Inc., where any dissension before, during, or after a Titan submersible dive was squelched by the chief executive, Stockton Rush. TV personality Josh Gates became so alarmed by what he saw during a preliminary dive, and what he learned later from Rush's indifference to hull problems, that he canceled plans to air an “Expedition Unknown” episode on the deep-diving craft.
“We all rely on that spidey sense,” Gates said in an interview. “We all have that little voice that whispers to us. In my job, I’ve learned I have to really listen to that voice.”
A safety pause “is very much the case in underwater work,” said James Delgado, senior vice president of the deep-sea archaeology company SEARCH, “whether diving, or using submersibles, or deploying a very expensive ROV.”
John Osteraas recalled lessons from his service as a collapse-response engineer for Urban Search and Rescue California Task Force 3, saying a safety pause can be appropriate any time during a response, not just before a crew starts a shift.
“The engineer has to be continuously reevaluating the risk/reward balance in light of changing circumstances,” he said, “The viability of victims (rescue vs. body recovery), the changing stability of the structure as debris that might be stabilizing the structure or other debris is removed, and increasing understanding of the behavior of the structure and debris based on monitoring of its behavior over time. While other members of the team are focused on debris removal and rescuing victims, the engineer needs to be the one who 'pauses' to remain focused on the possible hazards.”
National Geographic documentary director Savas Georgalis said threats are often reviewed before a scene is shot.
“For example, if we're wanting to film someone talking while driving in a car, before we start moving, we'll discuss where the camera will be, where the director will be sitting, what route and speed to take, and also that the driver's priority should be on the road and not thinking so much about the answer that they make an unsafe decision.”
Marc Henegar, a former air-traffic controller and now an airline pilot, described a close call at Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport in Providence, in which a timely pause likely prevented a major catastrophe.
That day, the airport was shrouded in fog so dense and disorienting that it left an arriving United airliner stranded on a runway. That crew asked the controller for help. The controller radioed that United's location was Runway 5L, then cleared a US Airways jet to take off from Runway 5R. However, the United jet was sitting on 5R. Fortunately, the crew of US Airways had been monitoring ground and tower frequencies. Although instructed twice to take off from 5R, the US Airways crew radioed controllers that they would remain safely on the taxiway until the situation cleared.
Henegar also identifies a broader and important concept in safety: the “owner” of a site. Ground controllers are said to own the runways they direct.
The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) cited a similar term when analyzing an explosion that killed a contract worker at a DuPont chemical plant on November 9, 2010, in Buffalo, New York.
In that case, the worker was using an arc welder on a support for an agitator assembly. DuPont rules for hot work required that such jobs be under the direct observation of an “area proprietor,” an employee with sound knowledge of the unit's process and risks, and who carried the authority to stop work.
“On the day of the incident, however,” the CSB report said, “neither the construction field engineer nor the employee signing off as the area proprietor had understanding of the area, the process, or potential hazardous conditions.”
The arc's heat ignited vinyl fluoride in an adjacent tank, blowing open the assembly and killing the welder with blunt force trauma. A company foreman suffered first-degree burns.
Story Musgrave, a NASA veteran of six Space Shuttle flights, has taken the safety pause concept into retirement and into all his car trips.
“I say it this way: 'We are all driving in this car; we are all on the same mission. If anyone of us is uneasy, tell me.' I want it that way – that's how I get better. I'll listen to anyone who speaks up, and then I'll make a decision. I want to be absolutely the best driver I can be, and to do that, I engage with everyone in that vehicle. And if they see anything there that makes them uneasy, anything that's awkward to them, anything they think is not right and could be done better, I want them to speak up. And I am never embarrassed about that.”
In Musgrave's view, a driver is the site owner of the vehicle and ultimately responsible.
What sites do you own?