At my first and last industry jobs, the local Safety Officers were promoted after many years of excellent line service, when they were paid too much just to be great supervisors, I guess. While very familiar with production, the safety job can include electrical, chemical, biological, machinery, sound, particulates, liquids, gasses, etc. - way too much for many HS graduates (no offense intended) to handle well after a few webinars. But since Safety is usually part of Operations, they don’t want to spend $$$ to hire an experienced industrial safety engineer when they can promote from the production floor.
Most of my work has been been biology/chemistry, with some production machinery involved. I learned early on, to never dismiss any safety citations as “stupid” - there might be a “stupid” regulation you just have to comply with and, more importantly, the “safety is our #1 job” mantra wins every time.
At my 1st job out of school, I had to buy caustic liquids containers and cabinets to store plastic jugs of particulate-filtered tap water, as the Safety Officer had watched a chemical safety webinar saying “purified water” was highly caustic. True that, but particulate filtration and chemical purification filtration are two very different things. But I could tell I was going to lose that battle and it was $$$ spent on safety, which wasn’t going to be questioned.
At my 2nd & last job, I had to buy lockable clear shelf enclosures to store plastic bottles of Sterile Water for Injection, as the Safety Officer was concerned that a custodian might knock a bottle off the shelf with a broom handle and break the bottles, with the label facing down, so nobody would know if it was water or some toxic stuff. Before I could stop him, one of my lab guys grabbed two bottles and bounced them against the tile floor, to show him they were unbreakable. Big mistake. How do we know that *every* bottle was unbreakable? What could have been solved by something cheaper/simpler now required custom lockable clear shelf enclosures with tubs draining into a holding tank in case of unexpected ruptures. The power of “Safety is #1” knows no limits… And, wrong or right, Safety Officers usually love their power over PhDs and Principal Engineers.
In both cases, my “go-along to get-along” philosophy worked, as the two guys would come to me to informally discuss stuff. They didn’t feel challenged and I was able to mentor them into becoming better professionals. That’s the part of my work I remember most fondly - helping the people I worked with do good work they could be proud of.
My work in the mid-70s before all this was as an industrial hot asphalt roofer. I saw people burned to death, fall to their death, pass out from heat stroke, roofing polymer fumes, etc. I quit and went to school when I found out they guys I thought were in their 50s were actually in their early 30s - the job aged those it didn’t kill.
