Survivor of chemical plant explosion shares lessons in workplace safety
Garrison Wynn survived a chemical plant explosion because he trusted an employee.
In the instrumentation business at the time, Wynn watched a safety video, put on safety gear and was being led through the plant by an employee.
“This guy didn’t know where he was going,” Wynn said. “After a couple of minutes, I said: ‘Hey, you work here. Why don’t you know where you’re going?’ He said, ‘Well, there’s lots of construction.’ At that moment, there was a horn blast and the video I watched pretty much said one horn blast means you’re going to die and two is the all clear.”
Following the one blast, Wynn saw a puff of smoke before he was knocked off his feet.
“For a couple of seconds I was in the air,” he said. “On the ground, people were running and the person who was with me, who I thought didn’t know anything, did know where to run.”
Neither Wynn nor the employee were hurt, but 13 people were killed and 115 were injured in that 1990 explosion outside Houston.
“The message I got was when it comes to safety, everybody knows something you don’t,” Wynn said. “When this person said, ‘Run this way,’ my opinion of his prior knowledge was irrelevant. He worked there, I didn’t.”
Wynn’s career has taken many twists and turns. He started in the financial business before going into industrial engineering.
“I was also a professional standup comedian for six years and toured around the country with some famous people, and then in 1995 I started my own business where we were speaking at conventions and consulting,” he said.
He no longer owns the company, but the bestselling author travels the world talking safety. Wynn uses humour to convey a serious message.
The 56-year-old Texan was speaking in Regina at the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Health conference on Thursday.
“I speak at about 85 conventions a year and about 30 per cent of everything I do these days is safety,” Wynn said. “I combine safety, communication and leadership.”
One of his key safety messages is that employees must feel valued.
“The No. 1 thing that all humans value is feeling valuable,” Wynn said. “If people don’t feel valuable, they emotionally check out and they drop their awareness. The people who don’t feel they have a good job or their boss doesn’t care about them statistically have the most injuries. That’s based on research over years and years.”
To get his point across, he’ll tell a funny story.
“I talk about people working together, and while we don’t always get along we need each other,” Wynn said.
“I’ve always said that relationships are so important when it comes to safety because who is the last person to get pulled out of a burning building? It’s the guy nobody likes. So you might want to make a friend and get along.”
Employees who work as teams are 46-per-cent safer than those who don’t, he said.
“The safest thing you can do is to have people looking out for you, but you’re not going to have that unless you’re looking after them,” Wynn said.
He applauded the SASWH for holding the conference to educate health-care professionals.
“Most of the safety dollars and attention are focused on manufacturing and mining and oil and gas and chemical plants, but there are injuries in hospitals and medical facilities all of the time,” Wynn said.
Health-care providers can’t provide great health care if they’re injured.
“There’s a joke that the best place to get injured is at a hospital because I can be attended to right away, but it’s the worst place because what message does that send?” Wynn said. “Nobody wants a bleeding doctor to come and help them.”