Sometimes Safety is Best Achieved by Somebody’s Daughter
By Debbie Dickinson
Between Thanksgiving and the New Year, there are opportunities to stop and reflect on what is important to us an individuals, as project and team leaders, and as companies. Crane Industry Services is thankful for the people we’ve worked with this past year, who share the common goal of keeping America’s workforce safe.
While we hope we are an integral part of your training and inspection plans, the hard work of implementing safety and health programs inside your organizations falls on your shoulders. To inspire you in 2017, we’d like to share a few stories and resources.
Handy Dan by Angela. Credit: Safety + Health magazine.
The Campbell Institute of the National Safety Council honors organizations that sustain excellence in health and safety activities. Richard Cerenzio is Corporate HSE director at ISN, a member of the Campbell Institute. He recently posted a story about how a poster contest open to worker’s families was successful at engaging workers to reduce injuries. Thanks to some creative thinking and a 14-year-old girl’s poster of Handy Dan the purple octopus, hand-related recordable injuries dropped by more than half.
During your downtime this holiday season you might want to read OSHA’s new Recommended Practices for Safety and Health Programs in Construction. Perhaps not as engaging as the story about Handy Dan, but equally worthwhile. This new document is a complement to recommended practices for employers in general industry.
The recommendations may be particularly helpful to small- and medium-sized contractors who lack safety and health specialists on staff. Contractors can create a safety and health program using a number of simple steps that include: training workers on how to identify and control hazards; inspecting the jobsite with workers to identify problems with equipment and materials; 
and developing responses to possible emergency scenarios in advance.
As we look to the future, our promise to you is that crane and rigging training programs provided by CIS will never be one size fits all. We seek to partner with you to provide hands-on, job relevant instruction with the priority on doing jobs right, without exception. Thank you for blessing us in 2016. We look forward to supporting your safety and health goals.
