LIFE EXPECTANCY

Industry rewards those
who protect themselves

By Jeremy Harrell

Rob Starkey remembers the sound.

"I don't know if you've ever had a balloon get caught up in a ceiling fan, just that rat-a-tat-tat sound, or like something caught in a car fan," he said. "It was basically just the sound, and it felt like someone had flicked my finger. It didn't even hurt or anything.

"The distinct sound was unique," Starkey added with a slight laugh.

What caused the sound was no laughing matter. That was the sound of Starkey, 30, a carpenter with M. A. Mortenson Co., losing most of his pinky finger to the grinding churn of a circular saw.

"I looked down and, basically, it had just shredded my finger," he said. "It didn't even start to hurt until on the way to the hospital. Afterwards, it started to throb, and then it really, really started hurting."

This was an accident that wasn't supposed to happen. Starkey, who's been a carpenter for seven years and has worked for the Brookfield-based general contractor for the last three, was doing something he's done countless times before.

On the morning of April 13, he was setting up forms for a concrete stoop at a Mortenson project in Sheboygan. He was working alone because his usual partner was at another spot on the job site doing pretty much the same thing. Then Starkey's foreman joined him to help out and speed things up. They were working well together, with Starkey on the outside of the box they'd formed and his foreman inside, but confusion arose over whether they needed to cut more boards.

"He was cutting some two-by-fours, and his back was to me," Starkey said. "What happened was he just turned around. He cut something, and he turned around with the saw, and I was there, and we just made contact."

Starkey's finger touched the blade through a 1-inch gap in the saw's guard, the only opening that left the blade uncovered. The machine was working properly, the guard was where it should have been, and the blade was even slowing down since his foreman had disengaged the trigger.

Sawing two-by-fours to make a concrete form is routine business for Starkey, and on that day, routine turned into the unexpected.

"You're not supposed to get hurt doing that," he said. "My finger had to be right in that guard. Crazy, really."

Starkey's accident broke a three-year string for Mortenson. Over the span of 1.4 million work hours in Wisconsin, Mortenson logged exactly zero lost-time injuries, nearly tying a company record.

Starkey's pinky is now half as long as it used to be, but he was back at the site within a week, and, after more than six weeks, he returned to heavy duty.

Survival is a word with many meanings. Not only did Starkey overcome his accident, but his employer did as well. In fact, like scar tissue replacing a wound to become tougher skin, the accident has made Mortenson stronger, said Scott Brooks, the company's safety director.

These photos describe the scene and causes of an April 2004 accident at an M. A. Mortenson Co. project in Sheboygan. A worker's finger came in contact with the saw shown above, slicing off most of one pinky. In response, Mortenson bought machines with a faster-acting brake. The injured Mortenson worker and his foreman were assembling a basic concrete form box, and Mortenson's safety director pins some of the blame on confusion over the need to cut two-by-fours. Photos courtesy of M. A. Mortenson Co.

"We could have focused on all the negative parts of the incident, and it probably would have taken us backwards," he said. "When you have this type of incident, a lot of people may say, and they have said, that it was just one of those freak accidents.

"That's a term I don't like because it says that we're going to accept these injuries no matter what, that there's nothing else we can do about it."

Given Mortenson's nearly spotless safety record, the accident sent ripples throughout the company. Corporate leaders from the Minneapolis headquarters came to Wisconsin, and the company's various safety teams met in the Brookfield office and on the Sheboygan job site to investigate the accident and figure out ways to improve.

For instance, soon after the accident, supervisors on every Mortenson project in the country conducted toolbox talks about circular saws, using Starkey's injury as a case study.

But what nagged at Brooks and his colleagues was that Starkey could suffer this injury even when the equipment worked properly. Like a car accident for an otherwise safe driver, all the pieces had to come together in just the right way — or, in this instance, the wrong way.

"You take one element out of our daily work that we do, one second out of our daily work, it puts you in a different place in a different time," Brooks said. "But my question is, 'How could we do better?'"

Mortenson wanted to eliminate the chance factor. Brooks and the company's yard manager started looking at the next generation of equipment and found a circular saw that has a more effective brake. They tested the kind of saw that Starkey's co-worker used that day against the new saw and found that the newer saw's blade came to rest in two seconds instead of 11 seconds. So Mortenson started buying those to replace older models.

The company didn't stop there. Morten-son looked at table saws as well. It came across a model that has a blade capable of sensing human skin. When a person comes in contact with the blade, the saw stops automatically and lowers itself back into the table carriage. They bought those, too. Mortenson has also ordered an after-market guard for table saws that functions as what Brooks called "a true guard."

"You can't slip your hand off and get into the blade," he said.

In all, Mortenson spent $5,000 on new saws and guards in direct response to Starkey's accident, and more equipment is on the way.

To be sure, accidents worse than Starkey's happen on construction sites. But for a company that prides itself on safety, there's no such thing as a minor mishap.

"Any injury you have, no matter how severe, is a shock," Brooks said. "How can we learn from this? If we don't learn anything from this lesson, then we're not going to improve."

Not all companies respond with the same diligence.

For instance, Patrick Ostrenga, a compliance assistance specialist in the Milwaukee office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recalled investigating a fatal accident. A worker had fallen from a scaffold because it was missing some key components.

"The first thing I asked was, 'Who ordered the scaffolding material?'" Ostrenga recalled. "The guy says, 'This is what they shipped us.' Rather than make the call for the right material, a guy died. The communication sucked, and a guy died because of it."

Most companies have made honest, concerted efforts to stave off injuries, Ostrenga said. But there are always a few that don't take it seriously, and it's apparent that mistakes are simply mistakes, and not an opportunity to get safer.

"Ninety percent of the time, you can tell within five minutes of showing up on a site," he said. "You walk in and ask, 'Who's in charge?' and nobody knows."

Paul Bloom, director of the Madison Fire Department's Emergency Medical Service, agreed, basing his judgment on years of responding to accidents as a trained paramedic. "You can tell which companies are more safety oriented," he said. "You can tell when people are coming up to you [after an accident] saying, 'We don't know how to help you.'"

For Hap Pigsley, safety director for Platt Safety Services, Milwaukee, survival starts and ends with accepting responsibility for any injury. "There are no such things as accidents," he said.

Assuming blame rather than casting it can mean the difference between repeating the conditions that caused an accident and preventing them from happening again.

"The first thing a bad company does is point fingers," Pigsley said. "The first thing a good company does is say, 'How did we fail?'"

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