Those Few Ounces Of Prevention

Recently I published a post talking about the boot trucks visit, and how our technicians and parts personnel are put into steel toed, or in many cases steel toed and metatarsal protective footwear. Just after that post we were in fact visited by OSHA who praised the practice of our company insuring that level of protection was made available at company expense. During that interview I pointed out to OSHA that while indeed it is a generous program, it isn’t entirely altruistic, and it was just a week ago we were reminded of just that.

One of our technicians was taking a fork off of a lift truck carriage and had his grip on the object slip. The fork [rumored to be working in conjunction with gravity] fell to the floor but had its fall cushioned by the technicians foot. As so often is the case, falling objects don’t seem to only target the toes, rather the top of the foot seems to be a frequent resting place of these misguided objects.

Click to enlarge: Circled is the strike mark the fork left on the metatarsal plate

While the tech still received a bruised small toe, we were left thankfully with only minor injury where without the metatarsal protection we would have seen an employee dealing with some awful pain, and of course the expense of treating that injury, as well as an ugly mark in our recordable OSHA case log.

I can’t say how many boots this incident paid for, or the total number of similar incidents that have taken place. But certainly it helps us understand just how cheap our boot program really is.

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