LESSONS LEARNED: A Safer Approach

What was supposed to be a festive day for Tom Heaviland and his crewmembers at Heaviland Enterprises turned out disastrous. It was 1:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 2003 and one of Heaviland’s crews was heading back to the company’s satellite office in Poway, Calif. As the crew proceeded down the highway, a burlap bag of debris flew out of the truck’s bed and into traffic. A female driver swerved to avoid the bag and was hit by several cars, resulting in a serious accident.

Not knowing that someone was injured, the crew pulled over, checked the load to make sure everything was secure and proceeded back to the shop. Another driver witnessed the accident, which led to an investigation. The accident has resulted in an ongoing legal battle and a stronger emphasis on safety at Heaviland Enterprises.

Heaviland, 47, who founded the $4-million commercial landscape company in 1985, says he’s now more focused than ever on making safety part of the “company culture” by talking, inspecting and “thinking, thinking, thinking” safety.

“If we are monitoring safety regularly and the guys know the seriousness of it, which they do because we’ve talked a lot about it, I can’t see this happening again,” Heaviland says. “Is it possible? Sure. But based on what we’ve been through, where we are today and if we really monitor and adhere to our safety policy, it shouldn’t happen.”

What were the consequences from this accident for your company? I’m in what’s called an insurance captive. It’s not your traditional workers’ compensation or vehicle insurance program. A group of specialty contractors have come together and we’ve formed our own insurance company, and it’s brokered through a local company here, but we’re set up offshore. With this type of insurance, if we have a great year with no claims, then we’ll get money back after about a three-year period with interest because our money is currently earning interest as it sits offshore vs. a traditional insurance company where if your premium is $100,000 and you have zero claims, the insurance company keeps the $100,000. With our program, if you have a $100,000 premium and no claims, you’ll pay approximately $40,000 in associated fees and administrative costs, so you get $60,000 back with interest. If you maintain a loss ratio of 60 percent or better, you should get something back. Basically, what this means to me is that I lost out on probably more than $100,000 with interest that would have come back in 2006. Instead, I’m going to get nothing.

If you had a traditional insurance program, would you be better off? In this case, yes. The accident would have cost the insurance company. If I were in a traditional program, my rates probably would go up to some degree. Since this accident was so serious, and it’s not like I will have one or two of these a year, the insurance company is going to look at this and say this isn’t an incident that is common and chances of it happening again are very slim. In a captive, your rate is determined by a five-year loss history, so one catastrophic claim will have some impact, but won’t adversely affect you because it’s based on a five-year history. So while there will probably be an increase in my rate, when they look at a five-year picture, it shouldn’t impact rates that much. Plus, the insurance company is also very interested in finding out what we have done to prevent this from happening again.

Is there anything you feel you could have done differently as the owner of the business to prevent this accident from happening? We take a lot of things for granted, including whether our employees are doing things right. You try to cover every base, you try to look at everything that can go wrong out there. But we’re driving vehicles; we’re operating equipment. We are in a very risky business, and once you get to a certain size, the odds increase that you’re going to have the occasional thing go wrong. What you want to do is make sure that it’s not something that could have been prevented and that it doesn’t happen again. If this were to happen to us again where a bag blows out, then I’m really negligent, and I haven’t done my job. But we’re a very safe company. I wouldn’t have been able to get into this captive program if I wasn’t because the guidelines to get in are very difficult. They want solid, safe companies. As the owner, I’m ultimately responsible and accountable for anything that happens.

Since it was an accident, what was the lesson? When you’re driving, you’ve got to make sure that everything, and not just your load, but your equipment or anything that is on the vehicle, is secured and strapped down. We log hundreds of thousands of miles a year with stuff on our trucks, and the larger your company, the larger the chances that something can fall off. If you can just reduce risk and do everything you can, and make the crewleaders aware of it, then you’re doing your job.

How are you making crewleaders aware of it now? We’ve talked about it a lot at crewleader meetings. We have a risk-control company that works with our captive and they have a guy who goes around and inspects companies and observes us in the field. We also do some additional training. We have a step-by-step process in securing the load. Now, we use cargo netting that goes over the load with crisscross ropes from one corner of the truck to another. And when crews drive in, on occasion they’ll be inspected by a an account manager or field manager. Every single load has to look like that, and if it doesn’t, they better have a very good reason why not. Otherwise, this is a companywide policy, and they’re breaking policy if they don’t follow it.

How do you enforce the safety rules now? We’ve always enforced them well. If there’s a violation, they’re written up. If it happens again, it’s a suspension. A third time would result in termination. One of the things we do more frequently now is safety inspections. It’s required by our captive, so we’re doing at least a couple safety inspections per month where we go out to a crew and just observe: Are they wearing all the protective gear? Is the truck properly parked with the cones out? Do they have Material Safety Data Sheets in the truck? Is their code of safe practices in the truck? We use a safety checklist when inspecting a crew.

How has employee response been to the inspections? We explain to employees what we’re doing and show them where maybe they’re missing a few things, but the one thing we need to couple with that is some sort of immediate reward if they do very well on an inspection – maybe give them a gift certificate somewhere or a monetary gift so they’re thinking about it. But our employees know we’re a safety-conscious company because we remind them of this often. It has to be a part of your culture, just like quality. You want to do quality work, but safe work is just as important, maybe even more so.

Has anything changed with your training because of this accident? We’re required by our captive and this risk-control company to have two tailgate topics, minimum, per month that a manager will go out to each crew and discuss. I think this month (June) was importance of wearing eye protection, and properly securing loads will be the second topic. And then before every crewleader meeting – we have crewleader meeting at least monthly – we’ll have a safety topic associated with that just because we’ve got everybody together. We’ve also implemented a full day every spring of safety training. We just started this a couple years ago. Someone comes in and does first-aid training for everybody and then all the managers and crewleaders go through CPR training. Around our building we set up all these stations and we had all our certified landscape technicians and our managers doing these different training spots. One area was on lifting, one was on all the safety gear and what you use on each piece of equipment. So we have these different stations and we rotate through, and it’s a full day dedicated to safety. Sometimes, the day will focus on equipment, so we have different stations with all the safety related to each piece of equipment, how to operate it and how to operate it safely and what safety gear to wear with it. We’re doing this every year – just putting a huge emphasis on safety with a specific theme or topic.

What else needs to be done? There’s always room for improvement. I don’t know that I’ll ever be satisfied. I have to get everybody just thinking, thinking, thinking. Something I took from David Snodgrass over at Dennis’ Seven Dees, Portland, Ore., is stretching. Every morning, before our guys do anything, they go through 10 minutes of stretching. That gets them thinking safety right away. Because when we get out in the field, they’re pushing, pulling, lifting, and if they’re not stretched out, more than likely they’re going to pull or strain or injure something. So every so often when we have our crewleader training, I expound on the importance of this stretching and why we need to take it seriously. I’m there quite a bit. If I’m in early, I’ll stretch with them, so they know that it’s important.