Where’s the safety guy?
Posted on Tue, Aug 25, 2009 @ 08:46 AM
By Mike Farrell, Disposal Coordinator, Triumvirate Environmental Somerville
A thought occurred to me last night and has in the past when I was watching one of my favorite shows, Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. Where is the safety guy? It’s almost become a game to count how many OSHA violations per episode. Don’t get me wrong I think the show is great but I think at the same time Mike Rowe is single handedly lowering the expectations of how a job should be done safely.
Here’s some examples:
Cleaning an underground oil tank and I don’t recall seeing a harness or a tripod set up for rescue equipment and the excavator is scraping the side of the tank while at least two people are in there. How is that safe?
Vacuuming out catch basins in of all the trash with no real concerns other than rats. My first thought was wow that has to stink. Of course it does because those basins are rotting garbage bins generating hydrogen sulfide gas. Hydrogen sulfide is an immediate danger to your life at only 100 ppm in air.
What about the camera guy? They get some awesome shots but it’s amazing no one has been killed yet. I guess we’ll know when the camera suddenly pans to the sky and stops moving. I bet that won’t make it past editing.
Maybe there should be another show produced by Triumvirate Environmental, Dirty Jobs Done Right. Give Triumvirate a call if you’ve seen this first hand and don’t want to see it again.