In review of Confined Space, I found the 3rd article was about my son's death and felt drawn to comment.

As a safety professional with multiple years of field work experience, I know that to call something an "accident" is misleading. The definition of accident is something in effect that is going to happen no matter what the individual does, or how much or little is in prevention. Now, an "incident" is what I term something that happens and is preventable...largely through the human factor. In my 32 years in industrial manufacturing, 17 of those in the safety area, I have never seen an accident. BUT I have seen a lot of incidents.

Prevention is the key... and training along with ENFORCEMENT OF SAFETY RULES is integral to that key. ALL LEVELS OF MANAGEMENT must accept the Safety Culture, embrace it as second nature, and follow up with its charges to see that they too live in that culture.

Here is a safety axiom that I agree with: If you have a hazard, and there is exposure to it even for a short period of time,and over any (given) period of time where the exposure exists, THEN injury (incident) is CERTAIN TO OCCUR. (You may have heard this in several forms elsewhere... this just happens to be the wording that I teach to my managers.) The objective is to ELIMINATE THE HAZARD, whether it be through engineering out the hazard, training, guarding, etc.

I reflect more often these days about how I can have a positive effect on those around me, especially regarding their safety. I only wish all of Corporate America held the same view of safety as I do, but then, that's my job... right? I consider it a moral issue.

In closing, my son's death devastated my soul and caused me to reflect on my faith in God. Out of all this my objective surfaced: communicate the necessity of safety at any cost. A report my son gave last semester in one of his classes was on the 2004 Tsunami. He commented at one point when reviewing the costs of an early warning system,"After all, who can put a price on human life."

Here was my Agronomy major telling my story for me. How ironic is that?

-- Donald Coit Smith