Pyramid

I have to apologize for my lack of contributions lately; I was pretty busy with college and preparing for the promotional process.

Recently, a good friend and I were talking about worker safety. He attended a seminar in which the presentation included a section that discussed a “Risk Triangle” shown below. If you start at the bottom of the triangle it lists unsafe practices and associates a number of those unsafe practices. The next step up the triangle shows us near misses. Up one more is minor injuries. Then it shows life threatening injuries and finally a single fatality. You may be asking what this has to do with the fire service. What the triangle shows is the progression and escalation of dangerous actions.

Look we’ve all done things on the fireground that are unsafe practices, more than a few of us have had near misses; a few have received minor injuries. Thankfully life threatening injuries are few and in the modern era, our department has never had a on the job death. I pray it stays this way.

What is often forgotten is the other basic building block listed unsafe conditions. These can be operational based unsafe conditions, but it can also be unsafe conditions in the stations, during training, or just driving to and from miscellaneous details. This could provide a significant number of “events” that contribute to our overall exposure to injury liability.

So what do you do? The pyramid is built on a wide base and each of the other levels is derived from the corresponding number below (e.g. 5,000-10,000 near misses are 10% of the 50,000-100,000 unsafe conditions/practices). What you can do is reduce the number at the base, and thereby reduce the probability of the climbing to the next level. If it takes a single employee 50 years to accumulate 50,000 unsafe practices/conditions, the employee will most likely retire before he encounters a fatal event. A different employee may reach the 50,000 unsafe practices/conditions in 5 years. If so, the second employee will most likely enjoy any retirement. The way to reduce your pyramid is to whittle away at the base. As you decrease your number of unsafe practices/conditions, your career survivability skyrockets.

Each year hundreds of thousands of tourists visit Egypt and Latin America to climb to the top of the pyramids. Let’s hope that we never see the top of ours.

Authors Note #1: The graphic represents a different industry. I believe the fire service numbers to be much lower

Authors Note #2: This logic is not an exact science, as employees could have fatal accidents long before accumulating 50,000 unsafe practices. The numeric representation is a representation meant for job/industry wide occurrence..