By Phil Molé, MPH
Vehicle owners in Winston, Connecticut got quite a surprise when they returned to their car the morning of July 15, 2024. They heard the horn blaring and the radio blasting and saw a full-grown black bear and a cub trapped inside the car. The owners contacted state environmental conservation officials, who carefully opened one of the car doors, allowing both bears to run off into the woods. No people or bears were hurt in this incident, although pictures in the news story show that the bears did quite a number on the inside of the car before taking their leave.
This incident was the first of three episodes involving run-ins with bears in Connecticut over just six days—at least, three episodes we know about because someone reported them to state authorities.
Bear encounters in certain parts of the US are quite common. In fact, there was an incident last year in which a bear entered a bakery in Avon, Connecticut and ate 60 cupcakes before finally having its fill and leaving the store. (If my late father were around, he’d probably turn this story into a joke by adding, “A few days later, the bear sued the bakery, because he said the 60th cupcake made him sick.”)
There are many other examples of incidents between people and wild animals, some of which have more serious consequences. For example, people who encounter wild bison sometimes experience life-threatening injuries. A bison in Yellowstone Park gored a 25-year old woman from Ohio in 2022 after the woman came within 10 feet of the animal—much closer than the 25-feet distance that park officials tell visitors to maintain. Yellowstone emergency medical professionals airlifted the woman from park grounds to a medical facility, where she received treatment for severe injuries. Earlier this year (2024), another gore incident happened at Yellowstone, this time involving an 83-year-old woman, but with many of the same details, — she got too close to a bison, was gored, and then airlifted to the same medical facility that treated the woman gored in 2022.
When Situations Change, Change Your Perception of Safety Risks
Why do so many people find themselves in unanticipated and often dangerous confrontations with wild animals? Part of the reason is there’s a wide range of public perceptions about the likelihood of such confrontations. Let’s call these baseline perceptions because they’re the ones we hold most of the time and are rooted in the experiences we have most often.
For example, people have a wide range of baseline perceptions when it comes to the potential for a face-to-face with a wild bear. As the great Texas-born singer songwriter Lyle Lovett sang in one of his signature songs, titled (appropriately enough) “Bears,” “some folks say there ain’t no bears in Arkansas/some folks never seen a bear at all,” but Lyle adds that “some got a bear across the hall.” (By the way, as a quick fact check, there are bears in Arkansas, so the hypothetical doubter in Lyle’s verse above is wrong. A helpful fact sheet published by University of Arkansas states that over 3,000 black bears live in wooded areas throughout the state.)
Another part of the explanation is that people don’t do a good enough job adjusting their baseline perception of safety risks when they’re in different situations that may increase the chances of a wild animal encounter.
Some real-world details may help explain this concept. I live in Chicago, Illinois. There are foxes around here, and coyotes, but there are no resident bear populations, so encountering a bear outside of a trip to a local zoo is extremely unlikely. Because of that, I have a very low baseline perception of the risk of running into a bear while I’m in my native Chicago, which is appropriate if I stay in Chicago. But the problem is, when I hop into a car or (maybe especially) a plane to travel someplace far away from my hometown, I take my low perception of a bear encounter with me along with my suitcases and suntan lotion, even when I’m going to places where a higher risk perception is warranted. I say “especially a plane” because the greatly reduced time to travel huge distances by airplane adds to the perception that your situation and its associated exposure risks couldn’t have changed much.
Risk exposure levels change significantly if you’re going someplace that has wild animals like bears, bison, cougars, or alligators which are not found where you normally live. To adjust baseline perception of safety risks to something more reflective of actual risk exposure, you need to do some work. Research the native wild animals at your travel destination. Learn the specific locations they’re found in (e.g., rain forests, swamps), and specific details about them (e.g., knowing that aggressiveness in bison increases during mating season, which typically lasts from mid-June to mid-August, can be helpful). Learning this information, keeping it top of mind, and using it to adjust your behavior will help you stay safe.
Another consideration is that many people have a baseline risk perception of animals based on entertainment experiences, such as going to zoos, where conditions are generally safer if existing safeguards are in place. Those experiences, and the expectations created by them, don’t help people understand the much greater risks of encountering wild animals in their native habitats.
These lessons apply to many other areas of life, and certainly apply to EHS management, because there are many occupational health & safety (OH&S) risks you need to manage, and many ways that risk exposures can change. When those risk exposures change, your perception of safety risks, as well as your strategies for controlling and managing risks, needs to change, too.
Let’s look at some of the tools available to help you assess and control risks, and to update your baseline risk perceptions when needed.
Inspections are Part of a Proactive Safety Management System
Inspections are one of your most important methods for confirming that you’re really doing the things you say you’re doing. They’re also a great way to learn that you’re not doing things you should be doing, or that you are doing things you shouldn’t be doing.
Inspections are also very useful for detecting when things have changed. Maybe the last time you were in a warehouse area, the hallways had no tripping hazards or obstructions. Is that still the case? The only way to find out is to do an inspection. If you do find that hallways are obstructed, you need to adjust your baseline perception of the risk of potential trips and falls accordingly, until or unless you remove the obstructions, address the root cause for the obstruction, and have enough subsequent observations to feel confident that you’ve addressed the cause of the obstructions and prevented future occurrences.
There are a couple of considerations involved in conducting effective inspections. First, you need to have inspection checklists tailored for your workplace, or a specific part of your workplace. In the warehouse hallways example, you could make a tailored inspection checklist for that area to confirm that there are no trip hazards or obstructions. You also need to make sure you have easy ways for employees to conduct the inspections using approved checklists and can access inspection results from anywhere. Traditional paper checklists make that difficult to do but inspection software capabilities can help you improve the ease and accuracy of your inspections, and let you review inspection results for all your facilities from one centralized online location.
That latter point is especially important because the whole point of conducting inspections is to use the information in them to improve safety. For example, you can identify walkways where raw material or tool storage is creating potential for trips and falls, work out strategies for keeping the walkways clear, and then develop a specifically tailored inspection checklist to ensure those walkways stay clear.
Using and tracking that checklist is a good example of a leading indicator (also sometimes called a “leading metric”), which is a metric associated with tracking a safety activity you have good reason to think is related to achievement of a primary safety goal. In the example discussed above, the primary goal is to reduce the number or rate of slip/fall injuries but use and review of the checklist is a leading indicator because using it would presumably help you achieve your goal by making sure walkways are unobstructed. Using tailored checklists is also a great way to quickly identify when risk exposures have changed because of new hazards, giving you a chance to adjust your perception of safety risks and your risk management strategies.
Methods for Conducting Risk Assessments
As useful as inspections are, they’re not enough by themselves to keep your perception of safety risks sharp. You need tools specifically designed to proactively and systematically identify risks. Luckily, there are several good methodologies available, including:
Hazard Identifications (HAZIDs): a method of breaking down workplace processes to identify hazards and controls and assess their effectiveness at reducing risks. You can think of HAZIDS as brainstorming exercises for identifying risks that help build workplace engagement around safety and lay a foundation for more detailed risk assessments to follow.
Job Safety Analysis (JSA): a risk assessment method that breaks down a job into its constituent tasks to enable better identification and control of risks. One of the advantages of JSAs is that they leave fewer places for unidentified risks to hide, because the process of breaking down jobs into tasks encourages you to look more closely for risks in more places.
Risk Bowties: a visual risk management tool that helps pull together relevant information about risk pathways: the logical connection between causes and the accident or adverse event we’re trying to avoid, and between the event and its consequences, as shown in the image below.
Risk bowties provide a great opportunity for employees to participate in operational risk management, and their easy-to-understand visual organization makes them an ideal tool for training employees about workplace risks and the importance of having risk controls in place.
The Importance of Management of Change
There’s an important caveat with these risk assessments directly connected to this article’s theme: to be effective, your risk assessment must change when situations change. The encounters with wild animals discussed earlier happened because the people involved didn’t change their baseline perception of safety risks after putting themselves in situations where risks of wild animal encounters were greater. Of course, changes in risk exposure need not involve a change in physical location, because they may also stem from changes to details about work or the work environment in your current location.
Any risk assessment captures a “moment in time.” If nothing changes about the important details, like the physical work environment, details about how employees conduct the work, or the hazardous chemicals involved, the assessment remains accurate. However, if you make these kinds of changes to work at your site and don’t make corresponding changes to your risk assessments, you’re not adequately identifying risks as they are today, and you certainly can’t be effectively controlling those risks or communicating them to your employees. Your risk assessments are frozen in the past, and this places the safety of your people at risk.
Here are a few examples of changes that can increase risk exposures in your workplace, and should result in updating your perception of safety risks:
Introducing new process chemicals. Hopefully, this will be obvious. Potential exposure to hazardous chemicals is always among the most significant risks in the workplace, but not all chemicals are equally hazardous. Some chemicals have established Occupational Exposure Limits (OELs), which define the average concentration of a chemical workers may be exposed to for certain durations of time, often expressed as 8-hour time weighted averages (TWAs). Chemicals may also pose environmental risks by becoming hazardous wastes or having enough potential to cause harm to merit placement on regulatory lists such as EPA’s Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs) or Toxics Release Inventory (TRI)-reportable chemicals.
Changes to physical workplace. Changing the relative placements of equipment and employees may increase the exposure of some employees to workplace stressors like noise, heat, or indoor air contaminants, because of possible factors like working closer to furnaces or chemical storage areas. Changes to the physical workspace can also create risks of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) due to lack of ergonomics assessments or introduce potential for fall or trip hazards.
New employee uniforms. Here’s an example based on a real-life situation familiar to the author that might not be an obvious place where you’d think to be mindful of potential risks. Suppose a company wants their shop floor employees to convey a professional appearance and opts to purchase uniforms. There’s no safety issue with that, right? Don’t be too sure.
In the real-life manufacturing facility where this situation unfolded, management signed a contract to purchase and distribute uniforms to several hundred plant employees without conducting any prior safety assessment of the uniforms. They only learned of risks associated with the uniforms after the fact, starting when a manual machinist got the loose sleeve of his uniform caught inside the gears of the mill he operated, pulling his arm partway into the machine. The operator fortunately came away with only a minor scape on his arm treatable as first aid, but it could have been so much worse—he could have significantly injured or even amputated his arm. The uniforms had other risks, too. The material was flammable, and the company management had assigned the uniforms to welders and operators of several furnaces on-site!
In the situations discussed above, plant management made changes that affected risk levels without doing any prior review that could have identified and mitigated those risks. Management of Change (MOC) is the name given to such a process. MOC engages key stakeholders in the systematic evaluation and management of potential risks associated with planned changes, including changes to operations (e.g., new chemicals, new equipment), your facility or physical work environment, or the ways work is conducted. MOC involves a structured approach for reviewing planned workflows to assess the impact of planned changes on safety, health, and environmental factors, and to be sure to get the right approvals and put appropriate controls in place before implementation.
Think about all the different situations discussed in this article, from wild animal encounters to workplace safety risks. The common denominator across them is that situations changed, and perception of safety risks and management practices didn’t change with them. In EHS management, MOC is a great way to stay ahead of these changes so you can anticipate and control risks before they’re present.
MOC also connects to your existing risk assessments, because as you learned already, every risk assessment captures a moment in time. When you review planned changes via your MOC process and use risk bowties, HAZIDS, JSAs or other methods to identify the risk controls you’ll need to have in place or changes to processes assessed, you should update those assessments to ensure they still reflect current operational risk management practices and risk exposure levels.
What Can EHS Professionals Learn from the Connecticut Bear Incident?
One of the tricks to good EHS risk management is to try to strike the right balance between specific takeaways and general takeaways.
The specific takeaway is that you can’t always assume there’s no bear in your car, because sometimes, there might be. Related to that, you should understand the circumstances in which encounters with bears become more likely, such as being in or near wooded areas in regions where bears are known to live and having food present that could attract hungry bears.
The more general takeaway is to be very aware when situations change, because very often risk exposures change with them. Sometimes the change may result from traveling from a place with low risks of a specific outcome to places with much higher risks, as in many real-life wild animal encounters. Many other times, these changes happen in the places you’re already in, and in EHS management, in the places your people work every day. The changes can happen unintentionally, when (e.g.) walkways become cluttered with trip hazards, or can happen as the result of intentional changes to the workplace or the nature of work that bypass a formal risk assessment process.
Better risk management starts with having better baseline perception of safety risks. Tap into the diversity of risk perceptions in your workplace by empowering front-line workers to perform key safety management tasks, such as inspections or completion of JSAs and risk bowties. More frequent and accurate inspections and more accessible inspection results also help you identify unexpected new hazards in your workplace so you can be aware of them and eliminate or control them.
Finally, you need to stay vigilant by using specialized risk assessment methods, like HAZIDS, JSAs and risk bowties to identify and communicate risks, and MOC to assess and control potential risks before they’re present in your workplace.
Stay safe from bears and other wild animals by adjusting your baseline risk perception while on vacation and keep your workers safe by conducting and updating risk assessments in the workplace. You’ll have an easier time when you have the right tools to easily complete and share responsibility for key safety and operational risk management tasks.
Let VelocityEHS Help!
First, here’s a disclaimer. Velocity can help you improve safety in many different ways, but we can’t actually keep bears out of your car.
Now that we have that out of the way, here’s how we can help you.
Our VelocityEHS Safety software makes it easy for you to develop specifically tailored inspection checklists you and your whole team can use to proactively look for hazards in your workplace. Our solution also helps you conduct program-level audits, schedule and manage safety meetings, and initiate and track corrective actions, including the ability to prioritize actions, assign them to specific team members, and send notifications when due dates are approaching or past due.
For additional management maturity, use our Operational Risk software to engage your employees in identifying and managing occupational safety and health risks, and facilitate completion and use of assessments such as risk bowties, JSAs and HAZIDs.