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Safety Reflections on the Loss of a Friend
There’s a reason we men and women of the safety profession do what we do. Linda Proulx was one of my best friends. On March 8, 2008, Linda and her 11-year-old step daughter, Julia, were killed in a highway accident between Fort McMurray and Edmonton. For more than two years, I’ve been reflecting on and trying to grapple with the meaning of her loss.
Losing Linda
Linda had a lot of qualities, including kindness and compassion. But the one thing about her I probably admired most was her unique talent of being able to make you laugh at anything. She could turn commonplace situations, even painful ones, into hilarity with the wink of an eye.
The death of Linda and Julia was, of course, devastating to her family and friends. But here’s what really gets me. More than 400 Albertans are killed and maimed in traffic accidents every year. The thought of Linda and Julia’s loss multiplied by 200 each year is mind boggling to me.
What Safety Directors Can Do to Prevent Highway Deaths
This simply cannot be allowed to continue. The government can and should play a leading role to stop the carnage on the highways by adopting laws that ban cell phone use by drivers and reducing speed limits.
But a big part of the burden falls on the shoulders of us, the safety professionals. The first thing we need to do is ensure that our companies have safe driving policies in place.
The second key piece is education. When we first get our driver’s license, we have to pass safe driving tests. After that, though, safe driver’s education is imposed as a kind of penalty on drivers who get into trouble. As a result, many if not most of our workers haven’t received any driving education since high school. Employers need to take the lead in remedying this unsafe and unacceptable situation.
Conclusion
Every death devastates the ones left behind. Sadly, each one of us probably has a “Linda tale” to tell.
But for safety professionals, it’s a little different. Just like the rest of humanity, the safety professional is a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a brother, a sister and a friend. What makes it different for us is that in a larger sense, the entire workforce is an extension of our family. Statistically, this makes us more likely to experience devastating losses; but having such an unusually large family also serves to motivate us and make the imperative to prevent needless loss of life a personal one.
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I know I will sound insensitive, believe me, I have lost probably more than my share of friends and relatives in my lifetime, so I know how much it hurts. But personal responsibility is just that: responsibility. Your friend was driving responsibly but the other driver probably was not. Piling up more and more government regulation is not the answer. Making cars and roads safer means more money out of everybody's pocket, even the people that don't drive will pay higher taxes. This is a problem that has no easy answer. Accidents will always be a part of life, and lets face it, when it's your time, it's your time. When God calls us home, we can't say "Not right now, I'm busy." Just know that your friend and her daughter are joyously doing Gods work now.
I have to agree with Barbara. Employers can provide the incentives for safer driving. Most if not all activities with safety regulations require some form of competency training and recurrent training to maintain the competency. Employers could require some form of safe driving training, such as defensive driving as a prerequisite for driving at work and recurrent training to maintain that authority. This skill would seamlessly transfer to operating their personal vehicles. The only drawback to this is not every person must drive as part of their job duties and obviously this training would not necessarily be extended to all company employees.
On the other hand, why not make this a requirement for license renewal? Licenses must be renewed every 5 years. It would be easy at that time to require everyone complete an exam. If a pass mark is not achieved, then training is required to renew the license. It could be possible to operate on an interim, graduated license until the training is completed. That would limit the negative impact for persons that must drive in order to work. Controlling the process could be simple by doing something like doubling the fines for any infraction while operating on the graduated license or imposing a substantial fine for persons that do not complete the required training within a specified time period.
Just my two cents; I'm sure I'm letting a cat out of the bag.
JP
"Individual responsibility" sounds nice and I certainly agree with the thought. However, everyone makes an error in judgement when driving, even the safest ones -- I know I have and I try to drive focused on the driving. Driving a motor vehicle must be considered a full time activity when you are doing it, not time being wasted unproductively, for instance.
Employers, media, safety associations, everyone need to actively promote safe driving. And, at the risk of sounding like a right-winger, there must be accountabilities.
But, money spent to make roads safer is not money wasted. It is very important that our roads are designed to be safe. Safety by Design must be ingrained in highway design. I remember when a newly designed interstate interchange was opened near Baltimore in the 1980's. They interviewed the designer(s) and one bragged about how they saved millions of dollars by creatively designing it. What they did was make the beltway look and act like an exit ramp (going off to the right), while the exit to another interstate involved just continuing straight. That section of the beltway probably has the most skid marks anywhere on it -- people realizing at the last minute that the designers duped them into getting off. Coming from the other interstate is just as stupid. I knew about the stupid thing and I still got caught by it for years.
Finally, I agree with the concept that every five years drivers should be required to show proof of defensive driving training and take an exam. One, it recalibrates everyone's brain and, two, it communicates society's standards of performance in a manner other than giving out tickets.
Oh, and State Cops should stop speeding. They exist to improve highway safety, not make things more dangerous. Nothing gets speed limits obeyed faster than a cop who actually follows the limit!!
Can you guess that this topic is near and dear to me.
Back in the day, I used to tell classes that almost as many US drivers were killed in one year than were killed in all of the years of Vietnam. It makes you think about our priorities.
Take care and drive safely.
John