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Management Side
Week of 4 April 2016: Kicking off Safety Month

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A few weeks ago, an old friend sent me an email. It went something like this: "A friend remarked to me recently that it seems we are having more accidents, fires and fatalities in the industry than ever before. Do you have any explanation, Jim?"

My response was, yes, indeed, I do have an explanation and this is it. Paperitalo Publications does not shirk from reporting all that goes on in the pulp and paper industry worldwide. Further, our editor and publisher, Steve Roush, has done an excellent job developing sources in order to report on such matters in a timely fashion.

We believe the sad truth to be that accidents and other mayhem have been going on all the time but they have not been deemed worthy of discussion until we brought attention to them.

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So, yes, people are injured, sometimes fatally, and far more often than in the general prevailing perception. Fires happen even more often. We will continue to report these incidents as they happen.

As far as safety incidents go, I do believe there has been a change over the years. I was in a facility sometime ago, a converting facility, where in the last year they had sent eleven people to the hospital in an ambulance. This was an improvement over the year before, when they had over forty such incidents. But here is the difference: today we are sending people to the hospital when, back when I was a young fellow, we just put a Band-Aid on the scrape. Modern liability and reporting methods are increasing the level of treatment for minor cuts and scrapes.

This is no excuse and it does not explain the fatalities. A fatality is a fatality--and there is no excuse for a fatality, just as there is no excuse for a cut or scrape by today's standards.

Further, we all know by now that safety is an attitude issue, one that we must keep fresh in front of people all the time. It starts with the signage you have by your front gate or your employee entrance. What message are you sending with this material?

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I was visiting a mill a couple of years ago which had a large sign out by the road at the entrance to their property. This sign proudly proclaimed that this mill had been the North American Safety Leader for a certain year. The only problem was that year was already about five years in the past when I saw the sign. I chided the management team--"What kind of message are you sending to your employees, suppliers and visitors? That you were once a safe mill but no longer consider that important?" The next time I drove by that mill I noticed that the sign had been removed.

It is Safety Month at Paperitalo Publications. Let's start off by understanding two things: (1) serious, sometimes fatal accidents occur in our mills today, this is not something that happens in the past or somewhere else and (2) what we tell our fellow employees, through words, deeds and actions is extremely important to conducting operations in a safe manner.

Am I missing anything? Please take our quiz and tell us what you would like for us to cover in the balance of the month.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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