I got into Health and Safety By Accident:

This article was written by Steve Wallett about how he accidentally got into health and safety:

My path to this point in my career is quite unusual. l I got into health and safety by accident, literally as the following story shows.

Back in the mid 1990’s I was working at a Chemical Works on a very dangerous chemical plant. It used liquid Chlorine and an organic form of cyanide, which was reacted together to make another even more toxic chemical. 

We were rightly told when we first started working on this plant that just breathing in a small amount of any of these chemicals could lead to us being very seriously injured or even killed (Chlorine is often used as a chemical weapon, in some war zones). We were told if we ever saw anyone on the floor near this plant, not to approach them but to call an emergency and the fire team would go to the person with the right breathing apparatus on.

We had an antidote which had to be injected within the first three minutes to be effective as the chemical reacts in the blood to form Hydrogen Cyanide. Just one teaspoon of any of these chemicals on the skin was enough to kill. If we occasionally had to come into contact with these materials we had to wear a full chemical suit with self contained breathing apparatus, which looked not too dissimilar to a space suit.

One day after the chemical plant had been shut down for a few days for maintenance. I was pumping a mixture of these chemicals from a storage tank to another tank; I got accidentally sprayed on my left arm, wetting the skin on my left arm with this toxic chemical mixture. I was with two other workers who ran the opposite way to me as per their training. Had they helped me they could have been overcome with the chemicals too.

I was absolutely terrified and thought I was going to die but ran to the safety shower, as quickly as my legs could carry me, which was about 100 meters away. (There was a safety shower closer but it was right next to the pump which was still spraying out the toxic mixture.) Anyway I pulled the lever on the safety shower, pulled off my overalls and tee shirt washing myself as fast as possible in the area where the chemicals had contacted my skin. 

A site emergency was sounded as my colleagues broke the glass on the fire alarm call point and the site fire team attended to sort out the problem with full chemical suits on. I was taken to the first aid room where they washed my arm further and then took me to hospital. One of the managers said in jest, “Go to hospital that way if you die it won’t be my fault!” I know he only said it in this way to make light of the situation and he wasn’t being as nasty as he sounded.

I had not really thought much about health and safety up until this accident but two months after my accident happened the company had still done virtually nothing to prevent a similar accident from happening to me or anyone else, I was incensed!

The investigation into the accident concluded that a very small plastic plug about the size of a thimble had been removed from the underneath of a pump for maintenance but not put back into place properly, once the maintenance had been completed. 

We had already had a detailed check sheet for the plant, which we had to tick so that we didn’t forget anything. Just one line added to this list “check that the pump plug is in place and tight.” Would have prevented it from happening again. I made sure that this was done. This accident never happened again because of a simple amendment to an existing written procedure.

I was told that I should have been killed in the accident but because it was a very hot day on the day of the accident, my sweating had probably helped the chemicals to run off my skin and I got under the safety shower very quickly, which saved my life. Had any one of these safeguards or circumstances been missing don't think I would be writing this!

From that point on health and safety became increasing important to me and I got more and more involved with it, carrying out extra health and safety duties. 

Eventually I became the site safety rep and retrained in health and safety, ended up in me becoming a health and safety consultant in 2008 (after leaving the chemical industry), working for a national Employment Law/ Health and Safety provider.

In 2010, it culminated in me becoming a Chartered Health and Safety Practitioner (CMIOSH after my name) and in 2011 started up my own Health and Safety Consultancy, Wallett HSE Services Limited.

Since leaving the Chemical Industry, I have worked for well over 200 companies including a number of well known companies. I have never forgotten that good, robust and pragmatic health and safety procedures and policies, can save lives.