Blazing Ice by John H. Wright Read Free Book Online Page A

“violating the corporate safety culture.” It hired me back the same day when I explained the fellow’s authoritative anger was probably more aroused when, in the face of abusive language, I turned my back on him and refused to engage in conversation. Funny how organizational culture worked.
    Back at the pier to finish the offload, I found the crew had all heard about the incident. “What happened?”
    â€œAh, nothing. No more bagpipes on trucks is all.” I shrugged.
    The corporate safety culture was founded in statistics. But I had my own notion of what safety meant: does someone get hurt?
    The number of times someone gets hurt is the safety
metric
. A favorable metric benefits the contractor: monetary reward, perhaps greater productivity, maybe a prize. When a COO, or a safety director, proclaims his intention to reduce the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to a more acceptable number, I listen for clues. Is there a compassionate interest in a real human being?
    Two months following the ship offload incident I accepted the job to head up the traverse project. I found myself in a large meeting room in the contractor’s Denver office. A dozen of us, including my boss, gathered to hear about “A New Culture of Safety.”
    The safety director stood at the front of the room before a screen displaying his PowerPoint slide show. He showed charts and numbers depicting Total Recordable Incidents reported by the previous contractor. He broke them down by category and type, explaining what was
recordable
and what was
not recordable
. And he explained how the Incident Rate was calculated.
    â€œNow this is the existing culture of safety,” the safety director said, “and this is how I want to change that culture …” He turned to face a new slide on the screen.
    â€œOf course we don’t want anyone to get hurt,” he interjected, looking back over his shoulder. The new image bore simple black text across a plain white background: “NO MORE FRONTIER ATTITUDE.”
    â€œI don’t want to see any more frontier attitude in this program,” he read from the screen. “That’s gone. A thing of the past.”
    I was supposed to explore for a route from McMurdo to South Pole. Lewis and Clark were supposed to find a route linking the Missouri River to the Pacificcoast, through their own frontier. Our mission was not as grandiose as theirs. We’d be well supported by any comparison. And we, as a country, weren’t trying to colonize the place, nor prepare the way for civilization’s march. But we
were
tackling a continent. “Frontier” meant remote, unexplored, dangerous, and wonderful. The dot at the bottom of my grandfather’s 1918 Rand McNally globe is surrounded by a watery Antarctic Ocean, enclosed by an archipelago of islands, all labeled
unexplored
. That wasn’t that long ago.
    Yet in this room paneled with acoustical walls and lit by filtered fluorescent lights, “frontier attitude” meant something undesirable.
    I raised my hand: “Would you explain what you mean by ‘frontier attitude,’ please?” He remembered the bagpipes, though his expression remained blank.
    â€œâ€˜Frontier attitude’ is responsible for the culture of safety that exists in the Antarctic program, the culture that has produced the high TRIR.” He fished for words. “I don’t want to see any
cowboys
in the program.”
    When he spoke the word “cowboys” his shoulders rose to his ears, his palms turned out towards me. He gave a couple of quick nods to co-opt my understanding.
    I knew what he meant. He implied a reckless character. But a lot of displaced cowboys and cowgirls came to the Antarctic program. They were among the most versatile, resourceful people down there. They could make a bad situation into a better one working with almost nothing. I needed cowboys on my crew. But I decided to shut up.