Safety Wars
Safety Wars Live 8-5-2024 Olympics Learnings, Internet blackout
Hi, this is Jim from Safety Wars. Before we start the program, I want to make sure everyone understands that we often talk about OSHA and EPA citations, along with some other regulatory actions from other agencies, legal cases and criminal activity. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Proposed fines are exactly that, and they are often litigated, reduced or vacant. We use available public records and news accounts and press releases. We cannot warranty or guarantee the details of any of the stories we share, since we are not directly involved with these stories, at least not most of the time. Enjoy the show. And from the border. On the border of Liberty Prosperion, Iowa's north is Safety Wars 4. Monday, August 5, 2004. Sorry, we got out a little bit later. So, some programming announcements here. We have this week, I'm going to be working remotely. I have no clue how my internet connection is going to be or anything else. So, if I can get in here live, I will be here live. If not, we'll be doing podcasts. We'll just review the audio portion, releasing it on the podcast. How's everybody doing tonight? We're going to have, no, I can't. I could not wait to get in here on the program tonight. Yeah, believe it, even though I'm late, I could not wait to be here with folks, because I tell you what was a very exciting weekend. We had some things happen. We'll go into here in the second half of the show, Safety Wise and some disaster, but I wanted to talk about the Olympics. I'm sorry and how it works in the same way. You can say, "Well, Jimmy, what do you mean?" I know you, blah, blah, blah. Okay, I have to relive some of my glory and I'm going to ask everybody for some leeway here and everything. And I have to do a little bit of research on this stuff. The internet is great when it comes to a lot of stuff, because everything is there. And I got some of the old team results from 1988 when I competed in high school in the shot field. We're going to be talking about the U.S. Olympic shot field results and the shot field results for the Olympics here, because they're actually a lot to learn about what safety here. Let's say, "Well, Jimmy, you got it. I think you're making a stretch here." Maybe, maybe not, but follow me here with everything. So, I'm kind of over. It's over the years when appropriate and everything, you know, people say, "Jimmy, too much, too much." Really, right, the glory days is what they reminded them, the Bruce Springsteen song. Okay, well, fair enough. Maybe that's a fair criticism. Maybe it's not. But here, now, this past weekend, I mean, this was, and there was two Olympic cycling events and competition. No, we're doing pretty well as a country. Other countries are doing well. Remember, these are the best and the best for every country. And if they didn't belong there, if you could say that they don't belong here, that's not true. I mean, people are there. That's a great thing there. Now, we had a lot of other really good performances here. There are two performances here that are exceptional. As far as I'm concerned, I mean, it's just from my point of view, and, you know, other people have their own points of view. Now, Sunday, oh, let me put this. We had a power outage and an Internet outage here in this weekend in town. So it was, you know, it was not nice here. And we'll talk about that because that's safety related also. Now, Joe Kovacs, all right, and came in second, and this is the third time he's came in second in the Olympics in shot foot. And the other person, the big one, is Ryan Krauser, world record holder in the shot foot, right, for the third time. And he's also the world record holder. So both gentlemen, you know, congratulations on your gold and your silver. But there is something important here. I'm watching this live on TV. And it's a downpour. And I'm going to assume that it is, quote, unquote, a fast circle here in the shot foot. Meaning it's a brand new circle, probably hasn't gotten a lot of use, not broken in. And it's a downpour. And if you're familiar, I forget the regulation depth. The regulation depth is like that, right, about, oh, we'll get up my Bob Villa autographed thing. And we're going to go about an inch and a half, an inch. So about an inch, that deep, right, on it. And it filled up with water. I mean, they were out there. We go out there, they're out there. And I was working in the front yard and everything. My wife says, you get your butt in here. You're one. You've been talking about this all week and you're going to miss it. So we're there. And I'm watching. And it's that we're there. And they're nice. It's son of a gun. This is exactly the field conditions from 1988. Greater Middlesex County Championship. Now, this is what it was. And you can have people sliding and sliding and all over the place, throwing this thing. And, you know, it's a great match. If you could, a great meat, you could watch it to see for yourself. And I said, there's something to be learned here. Safety-wise. So, 1988, we had the Greater Middlesex County Meat. And for the previous two weeks of the meat, it rained. And I mean it rained every day. And our coach, Allen, St. Jimmy, you know, it's raining. You don't really have to practice. Look, I'm going to be practicing out there. I went out there as well as the rest of the track team. We were out there almost every day in the rain. Why? And we were under the leadership Gary Trojanowski, and I mean it was groovna weather. And it rained. And we were out there. And what ended up happening was meat day came. A lot of the other teams did not practice. They were not, again, track and field. They're running and it's throwing and it's jumping. Right? And everything else. I had not done very well all season. It was my senior year. And I hadn't thrown more than I believe it was 127 feet. I would have to do some really deep dives to figure out how deep. And the meat day comes. All right. And these were the results. It was Tom Vandermark and the shot put by one, again, one of our supporters, one of our listeners here. One can't deny that right from him. And then in discus, what do you think I threw? I had an almost 20% 20 foot increase in that two weeks. I came in second. I only lost by one foot two inches, which is not a lot in the discus. But what's, and then Tom Vandermark came in fourth. And then I can't, no, my other thrower is here. I can't, I'd be remiss. John Zollinger, who's now a colonel in the U.S. Army last I checked. He came in second in the javelin. Chris Wickman, who is a listener here. I don't know if John Zollinger is a little less, but Chris Wickman, who's also a occasional listener. He came in fourth, 172.5. And, I mean, in the javelin. Now, the team scores, I want the St. Joseph and Dutchman, and we, well, accumulated 37 and one third, meaning that there was a tie somewhere in here for that. Now, what's the moral of the story? If we didn't, as the throwers, did not practice in the move no weather here, we would not, and if, right, and we would have placed an everything, but we would not have had that big of a margin over the other teams. But we were out there practicing all the time. I imagine the same thing happened with, well, these are very experienced people in this event, in the Shoplet event. So what's, how does this relate to safety? I'm going to have to say, how does Jimmy, what's the point? You want to consider the worst-case scenario in your organization could face and plan for it and practice for it. That way, when you have good conditions and good things, all of a quote, and you're prepared for it, and when you have bad things happen, you're prepared for it, and that's what I learned here. And, by the way, a lot of those folks in the Olympics here, they were slipping and sliding all over, and they were able to have capacity and everything else and practice, and I imagine they did it in the rain, too, practicing. That's what I learned here from this event, and it was, I'm very proud of what, no, my eight-year track career here, and everyone's, but I'm very proud of the United States one here, but this is what this reminded me of. Always be prepared for the worst possible thing, because, you know, it's in there. Because you'll be prepared when it happens in real life here. Now, this, we've had a heat wave this past week over here. Actually, what is it called? Heat Dome, right, over the last couple of weeks. And, no, this was my message to my son and some of the other members of his baseball team. We're going to be involved in a very large tournament starting tomorrow. And, this was it. They were over practicing that it was freaking hot on Saturday. Why are they making us frat? And on Sunday and all this other stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on the front, I said, just think, this weekend, you're going to be prepared. And he said, "Oh, you're full of it." And guess what? We watched this, and he goes, "Look, reminded me of this story." All right, so be prepared for the worst. Lesson number one. All right, and now lesson number two is this, what we learned. And I just found out about this this afternoon because I said, we did not have internet access all weekend here. We had storms coming through starting about one o'clock on Saturday, maybe two. Yeah, something like that. Massive storm came through, we had no internet access. So, all the stuff I was supposed to do this weekend didn't happen. Couldn't do anything. That means I'm the area where I live. No internet access means no phones and cell phone coverage is, again, not nice. I didn't talk to anybody until this morning. And on a certain level, it was pretty nice. Now, I found out about this. This came across my Facebook feed here. This is from August 4th yesterday. And again, another stellar performance by American cyclist, Kristen Faulkner. Now, I did a little bit of homework, and that's why I have a little bit of a delay in here. In our discussion here, another great example that relates to safety here with this. And what can we learn from this and how can we apply it? Real simple with her. She was here. She was on the Olympic team. And I'll just read it here. Kristen Faulkner timed her attack to perfection. And I'm reading off ESPN.com from the Associated Press. Kristen Faulkner timed her attack to perfection to win the women's road race at the Paris, Olympics on Sunday, becoming the first American rider in 40 years to win a medal in the event. I remember this, 1984, right? And let's remember, 1984, not to undermine anybody. 1984, you didn't have the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc competing. And, right, so this is like, no, so that was LA Olympics. Again, she got in here right there, 150, so it was actually longer, so it's a really more significant thing. I don't think the Russians competed this year either, but anyway. Rather than finish it in Paris, Faulkner crossing the line in a fraction under four hours. Faulkner finished 58 seconds, clear Dutch rider, Marianne Voss, Lantkopekki, Belgium, and Lantka Vass Henry. I've been following these people all, all season year. Now, this is what happened. Let me go down here. She was in another sport, she competed in college, as she picked this up. All right, and what happened was, she was a track cyclist, she is a track cyclist. Right, so she's the velodrome, right? So another athlete dropped out of the race for whatever reason, about a month ago. And she, this view is like, look, this is not my event. Not my race, blah, blah, blah. She, as much as they said, you know what? I imagine, and I'm reading this in, I'm being a little bit, I'm drawing a slight inference here. She went in, and she did the event that she's not used to doing. She obviously practiced over the last month. She obviously learned about the Peloton, what if she didn't know how to handle that, and managed it, she ended up getting that, getting and winning the event. Now, my, what do we learn from this? When opportunity mucks, you got to take it. What opportunities do you have in your work? Here, what opportunities do you have in your workplace, dealing with safety, that when opportunity comes, you're going to seize it and you're prepared and you seize that. Right? That's what we learn from here, seizing that opportunity and making it work. So that's what I'm talking about here with the Olympics. I'm probably going to have other commentary on this, but I find it very inspiring with all of these folks out there. There's a lot to be learned from this, it's for leadership and separation. I'm going to encourage, and again, we're only what, a week, more of this roughly, until Sunday, the 11th, right? I would encourage you folks, going and watching this. Get some inspiration from this, to your people on. Regardless of what country you're from. Regardless, you know, we reach roughly about 27 countries last I checked with this program. Go and share your country on. Now, have some fun with it. Have a watch party, if you can, with certain events. No, share it on social media. Be positive and mental. It's a very positive experience here. Always has been. A little bittersweet for me this time because it's the first time my father and mother, especially my father, big Olympic, big Olympic hassle. We shared, we watched these. We even got the Olympic flag hanging out in front of the house. It was my father's Olympic flag. Not that he was an athlete, but he was a swirder of the Olympics and flew there, flew the team USA flag every year. That there was an Olympics, winter or summer. First one without watching this, without him. I feel that I'm hearing people about the Super Bowl. They're watching the Super Bowl this year. With my parents, my father, my brother, what have you. And they're upset at World Series. Maybe a team that they've been watching for years with their family members or friends. And then their friends aren't there and you get a little upset. I had a little bit of that opening ceremonies. Again, this is the first time I'm not watching this with my dad. First Olympic track and field events. I'm not watching with dad. It's not easy. You know, if you're feeling overwhelmed by grief, I mean, please. You know, there's a lot of resources out there you can get help with and everything else. And that's what it is. And I'm going to say leave you with this Go Team USA. And we're going to cut to commercial break. Hey there, safety professionals. Welcome to another episode of Safety Wars on Safety FM. Hosted by Jim Postel, and today we're diving into what it really means to be on the front lines of the Safety War. So, let's start with the basics. Safety is not just a set of rules or regulations. It's a culture, a mindset, a way of life. When we talk about safety, we're not just protecting workers from harm. We're building an environment where everyone can thrive. It's about going home safe and sound to our families every single day. Now I know it sounds like a heavy responsibility, but that's why we're here. To make sure everyone understands the importance of safety and knows how to implement it effectively. Whether you're a seasoned safety professional or just starting out, there's always something new to learn. Let's talk about some key strategies. First up, communication. It's critical to ensure that everyone on the team is on the same page. Regular safety meetings, clear signage, and open dialogue can prevent a lot of accidents before they even happen. Next, let's focus on training. Proper training equips your team with the knowledge and skills they need to stay safe. Remember, it's not just about ticking a box. It's about making sure every worker understands the why behind each safety protocol. This understanding fosters a culture of safety where everyone looks out for one another. Of course, we can't forget about technology. From wearable safety devices to advanced monitoring systems, technology is revolutionizing how we approach safety. Embrace it. Use these tools to enhance your safety programs and keep your team protected. But let's not get too comfortable. Safety is an ongoing battle. New risks and challenges emerge all the time. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and never stop striving for a safer workplace. So, what's the takeaway? Safety is everyone's responsibility. It's about creating a culture where safety is ingrained in everything we do. As safety professionals, it's our job to lead by example and inspire our teams to commit to a safer future. Thanks for tuning into Safety Wars on Safety FM. Stay safe out there and remember, every day is a new opportunity to make a difference. Catch you on the next episode. This is Safety Wars broadcasting to our brothers and sisters in the occupied territory of behavior-based safety. Get out your secret decoder ring. Here is your nightly message. Human error is normal. Human error is normal. Safety Wars is screening now. Safety FM.com In the professional safety community, communication and planning are just a few keys to your program's success. The question many practitioners have is where do I start? Dr. J. Allen, the creator of the Safety FM platform and host of the Rated R Safety Show, has built a global foundation to help you along the way. Visit safetyFM.com and listen to some of the industry's best and most involved professionals, including Blaine Hoffman with the Safety Pro, Sam Goodman with the Hopner, Sheldon Primus with the Safety Consultant, Jim Pozel with Safety Wars, Emily Elrod with unapologetically bold, and many others. As individuals, we can do great things, but as a team, we become amazing. Dial in to safetyFM.com today and surround yourself with a powerful force of knowledge and support. Ocean recordables, catastrophic losses, environmental disasters, you want answers, so do I. This is Jim Pozel with Safety Wars. That's my daddy. So, yes, I am your father. So, here we are, all right, this weekend, we had, I picked up my son from baseball practice, all right, honored and held, and we had an issue here with our swimming pool. So, I go in, I'm going to say, well, where are you going? Well, I'll tell you the whole story. So, I make a run down to the pool supply store, and I had to get some replacement parts from my pump and things of that. Not a big deal, right? Now, like my brother says, you know, every time he, you know, he's very handy. Believe me, he's much more mechanically inclined than I am. Figure things out like you wouldn't believe. He says, and he went, you know, every time he tries something new, and to fix, he says, you know, he's like, don't tell anybody. I was like, well, what was it, because all of a sudden, he gets all these phone calls for people to fix whatever the new skill that he learned, right? And, you know, you can't blame him, you know, with that. So, all of a sudden, he fixed a vehicle that had a problem, then all of a sudden, everyone's calling him up. He's an auto mechanic, and he's like, you know, sort of thing. Anyway, here we have, so, yes, I worked on a pool. Yes, I know, don't call me up about, hey, Jim, you know, fix the pool. Can he fix my pool? No, no, no, no, no, that's not what I am. All right. So, here we have George Holman. This is a hyper-local issue that we have here. George Holman is what we call a town supervisor. We do not have a mayor in town. We have a town supervisor. That's what Clark's town has. And I'm going to do a shout-out to George, because he handled something, or Mr. Holman, right, supervisor Holman. He handled something really great, and we're going to talk about this, because, you know, again, we've been talking about the, you know, communication, everything with Jodie Fisher since about April 1st, here of this year, when I was on his show. So, this is, right, this will serve, this is from 23 hours ago. This will serve as an update. So, anyway, I'm at the pool store. There is a big lightning strike, and everything leaves, no, power is out for about five seconds. Internet's gone, nothing, right? So, that's the context here. Right, and I am, this is his theme, and this will serve as an update. This came up at approximately 7 p.m. last night. So, this, the incident happened on Saturday. People had no idea what was going on. All that we know is that the Internet is out. All that we know is that, you know, the people like us have voice over Internet provided for the phone. So, we had no phone, we had no Internet. We're going to talk about that in a minute, all right? We have no, you know, everything else. So, my wife is calling up. Hey, no, we're reporting an outage, we're looking for this, as we're able to, we're working off of phones, and I live in a craft area with reception as it begins with, and we can't get that. Oh, nobody owes, we're in the dark. We're totally 100% in the dark, what's going on? Now, this happened on Saturday. We heard nothing much online, other than, hey, people say we were taught to so-and-so at the optimum, and optimum told the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, here we go. This will serve as an update on the Internet outage in the new city area. According to optimum, Orange County Utilities Incorporated completed the poll replacement and turned the site over to optimum just after 7 p.m. Currently, optimum has extra splicers on site and are rebuilding over 400 feet of a major trunk line. I have been in contact with optimum government affairs executives who are offering that they will work straight through to get services restored. While they are not offering a specific restoration time, they have indicated that they have extra staff working to fix the problem. Importantly, we have spoken directly with the repair crews on site who are suggesting it will still be several hours to rebuild the lines, clearly progress is being made, and we will update folks as we receive more information. Now, Supervisor Horman, Horman, Supervisor Horman, I have to applaud you. That's the safety wars applaud. Do we have an applaud thing here? [applause] There you go, all right? We're clapping, right? Now, when there's a disaster that happens, when there's an emergency that happens, what are our rules here? This is who I am. This is what we know. This is what we don't know. This is what we're doing to resolve this issue and to find out more information for you. Three things. Four things. This statement, very short, I think it's about 200 words. Beats all of that. Well, everyone knows who George Horman is around here. We know who he is. Very nice. This is who I am, right? This is what we know. This is what we don't know. This is what we're doing to find out and resolve this situation. Fantastic job. Optimum, it would have been great. Had you done that. Had you, right? Because even if they said, well, we're putting it up on our website. I don't know if they did or not. I'm just saying nobody has internet access. You had to go five miles down the road to get internet access. Either direction here. Nobody has this stuff. I can't get anybody by phone. Not good. Would have been nice. No, this came out a lot earlier. Now, that's with them, right? Again, good company optimum. They do good work, but okay, they could have done this better. Guess what? We're going to have to go and learn and improve from this. This is what I'm going to suggest from learning and improve. Handle it a little bit better next time with this. Now, reading off some of these Facebook comments here and other social media of this, right? There was a lot of stuff, right? This is from -- I'm not going to get out of his name, but he is a local radio talk show. I don't have permission to use his name, so I'm not going to use it. He was saying, no, people were given -- no, people were pissed. We'll just leave without that. Those tossing around snite observations about privilege instead of addressing, well, life happens. Of course, accidents happen, but this isn't about privilege at all. First responders, doctors, nurses, home care, health, home care aides, and the elderly, really all of us now rely on Internet services for almost anything. And it goes on and on and on, on all this other stuff with this. Now, my question is this. What kind of capacity do you have in your system to address something like this, Internet average, because now this is a real thing, right? So we worry about food, we worry about power, we worry about water, we worry about all this other stuff with disasters. Now we have something else to worry about, Internet average. And I know some of the older people here are going to be, ah, we were doing without Internet for all these years, blah, blah, blah. I tell you what, a lot of businesses, including this one, safety wars and JCP technical behind me, we all rely on the Internet, if it's from broadcasting, to email, to web services, to paying our bills, everything, as they wrapped up in here. So my question is this, and you should go, again, we're coming up less than a month away to disaster response month, disaster preparation month, sorry. I'm here in the United States, what exactly are you doing to improve your capacity here? Communications, we use some things called walkie talkies, or a short wave, right? One of my things is I'm getting, I'm studying now from what I can, right? For my short wave license. So that's going to be part of how we resolve this. Radios, walkie talkies, CVs. That's another way that we can resolve this. There's still in use, and there's still out there, and there's still available not only for truckers. CV is citizens' band, right? With us, in there. Again, this is an opportunity, just like we talked about, opportunity with the Olympic athletes here. This is another opportunity if you want to be a leader in your community, on your block, right? So you have a little neighborhood, you're able to get information in and out. Maybe this will be a good time and you have an internet outage to go around to all your neighbors, say, "Hey, just to let you know." You know, if you have optimum, we don't have internet, but we have Fios. We have one of the other great companies, we got this. With that, are you okay, checking in on the neighbors? With that, especially if you know that they're elderly or with young children and everything, this is what's important about community, building community. If you're in an HOA home, you know, what do they call that? I know you show a homeowner's association. Again, this is something that the homeowners association could do. They could go out, communicate, get things. "Well, how are we going to do this? How are we going to do?" Well, with this, check on things, I tell you what, there's a lot of medical devices out there that have cellular, their own cellular connections and everything, and security devices that have their own security, their own cell phone systems that you could have. So now you're taking that out with capacity where, okay, you don't have phones, you have cell phone coverage or a satellite. Maybe, I mean, if you're affluent enough, you can get a satellite phone. That would be a great thing. I've got to get a different share here. But any other stuff, building capacity, coming up with plans on how to deal with Internet outages and the communication and everything else. Now, the last thing I would talk about, and we were getting text messages and everything from a lot of different people, Jim, I'm just sitting around with my wife and two kids in the living room looking at each other. We don't know what to do, there's no Internet, there's no TV, there's no computer. Again, the first 20 minutes of this, I'm, even I was a little bit apprehensive, oh shit, I got to do this, I got to do that, I can't do that, I'm a little bit apprehensive. Okay, that's fine, that's dandy, then we get over it. Okay, well, now, I don't have any distractions. What can I do now to make this work, to my advantage? That was my next question, what can I do to make this work, to my advantage? What do I need to get done? You got a lot of housework done, got a lot of little projects done, right, to death by a thousand cut projects done this weekend. Well, your children, well, okay, well, guess what, now you can clean your room, right? Let's say that you're perfect, then your house is clean, you don't have any projects going on, how that we do something called go outside. Oh, we can't go outside, can we? Enjoy the day, and this was what my message was to my family, go out and enjoy the day, go out, and now that daddy got the pool fixed, now we can go in the pool, and we can go and hang out, have fun, no, maybe have a little barbecue, and, you know, enjoy the time together. Now, it may sound hokey, it may sound horny, it may sound anything, but anything you want to description on it, but these are the kinds of things that you have to plan for. If you have a long-term internet outage, what are you going to do? Nobody's on their smartphones, hey, we can talk to each other, it's a good thing, right? Maybe go to your house of worship, right, not eat a good thing, right? Also, or do whatever it is that floats your boat, and that's what my message is for everybody out there, is go out there and do your thing out there, and, you know, you know, what I'm saying, or am I rambling on and on and on a little bit, maybe rambling, okay, great. And how much time we have here? Okay, so we're going to go and do our outro, and let's see if I can get that on there, and that will just play into music, like we would normally do. No, and... All right. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guest, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] [silence] The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the host and its guest, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the company. Examples of analysis discussed within this podcast are only examples. They should not be utilized in the real world as the only solution available, as they are based only on very limited and dated open source information. Assumptions made within this analysis are not reflective of the position of the company. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, mechanical, electronic, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the creator of the podcast, J. Allen. [music] [music] [music] [music]