The Blackburg Tragedy

What do you say to the survivors?

Dr. E. Scott Geller, a columnist for ISHN since 1990 and a psychology professor at Virginia Tech, was driving from his home to the campus this past Monday morning (April 16, 2007) for a scheduled 11:15 am class when his cell phone rang.

Turn around and go home, he was told. There's been a shooting rampage, an unknown number of students and teachers are injured or dead, the campus is locked down and you can't get in.
A day later, Dr. Geller was in the football stadium attending a campus memorial service with the President of the United States and thousands of others for the 32 students and professors massacred.

"Everything has stopped," he said. "Classes are cancelled for the week. What a tragedy. The worst in history."

No accident
What happened in Blacksburg, Va., Monday morning was no accident. But the effect on emotions was similar to a workplace fatality. The jolt is sudden, unexpected, shocking; the incident senseless, seemingly random and a horror.

And what the campus community is now experiencing in the aftermath mirrors a workplace after a fatality.

Activity comes to a halt. There is a lockdown or stand-down. Investigations begin. Surveillance tapes are reviewed, witnesses interviewed, timelines plotted, communications and personnel records reviewed. The cause or causes will become known later — if ever.

It happened at the Sago Mine in West Va. The BP refinery at Texas City, Texas. After the explosions of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles.

It happened at more than 5,000 work sites in America in 2005. The number of fatal job-related incidents reported by the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics totaled 5,702.
That's more than 100 on-the-job fatalities every week.

As the leadership at Virginia Tech is struggling with this week, what do employers say to victims' families back home? To friends, coworkers, witnesses, survivors? To investigators? To reporters?

How did this happen?
Thousands of workplaces grapple with this question, and the pain and suffering surrounding it, every year.

"It's something I never want to go through again," said a Ford Motor Company executive after a boiler exploded at Ford's River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1999, killing six employees and injuring two dozen more.

Of course he doesn't. That's why we need defenses. Dr. Geller would call it a perceptual bias: It can't happen here. Not at our workplace. Not to us.

Which leads to one of the most famous (infamous) sayings in safety: It won't happen to me. Accidents happen to the other guy.

BLS statistics largely support this common perception of risk: The rate at which fatal work incidents occurred in 2005 was four deaths per 100,000 workers. Odds are, you're right, it will happen to someone else, somewhere else.

Which can give a safety manager fits. He or she battle the long odds of lightning ever striking their work site in safety training classes with employees, in safety meetings with supervisors, in budget reviews with execs. It's too easy to calculate the odds and doze off in another hazcom training class, or turn down a safety initiative budget request.

Just one phone call
But all it takes is a call like Dr. Geller received driving to work, and nothing is ever quite the same again.

"It doesn't hit you until it gets personal," said Dr. Geller. "It's just numbers of people at first. But my secretary knew one of the teachers who was killed, knew her family, her two small children. When I saw how upset she was, well, it goes right through you."

"I'm still kind of shaky," a Virginia Tech freshman told an Associated Press reporter on Tuesday. She was heading for her car and home, tears streaming down her face. "I had to pump myself up just to kind of come out of the building. I was going to come out, but it took a little bit of 'OK, it's going to be all right'."

You can't stay locked down in a dorm, at home, or at work. The statistics are in your favor. But employees, supers, execs and organizations should give the need for safety the respect it's due. Despite the odds, more than a hundred workplaces will be jolted this week like Dr. Geller was Monday morning.