Breaking the job into steps and scanning the work area

In late October, Coldwater sent Dani's crew to a small above-ground valve station on a gravel road east of Tulsa. The job was a coating repair: remove flaking paint from 20 ft (about 6 m) of exposed pipe and two valve bodies, clean the steel, and apply a new coating system. It was not an excavation, there was no welding, and the line would stay in service. Sam thought it sounded like the easiest job of the season.

Dani asked him to break it into steps before they left the yard. He wrote three: prep, paint, clean up. Dani laughed, not unkindly. 'That's a job with three steps the way a hockey game has three periods,' she said. 'True, but it doesn't tell you where you'll get hit.' They sat down and broke it down properly. Then, on site, they scanned the area before finalizing the pre-task plan. This lesson teaches both skills.

Why steps matter

Hazards live in the steps. A coating repair has different hazards when you are unloading the compressor, when you are blasting or grinding, when you are mixing the coating and when you are cleaning brushes with solvent. If the pre-task plan treats the whole job as one block, it tends to list only the most obvious hazards and miss the ones that show up in the transitions: the moment someone climbs onto the valve to reach the top, or the moment a full drum of waste is lifted into the truck.

Breaking a job into steps also makes it easier to share the work of finding hazards. Each crew member can look at the steps they will do and think through what could go wrong. The operator thinks about moving and parking the truck. The person blasting thinks about pressure, dust and noise. The person mixing thinks about chemicals and fire.

How to break a job into steps

A good set of steps follows the job from arrival to departure. Dani's checklist for building it:

• Start with arrival and set-up. Driving onto the site, parking, unloading, setting up barriers and signs. Many incidents happen before the main work even starts.
• Follow the order of the work. Write each step as an action with a verb: 'lift,' 'cut,' 'open,' 'climb,' 'mix,' 'test.' If two people do different things at the same time, write both.
• Include the in-between steps. Moving equipment from one spot to another, changing tools, refueling, breaks, handovers.
• Include the non-routine steps you might need. Clearing a blocked nozzle, fixing a stuck valve, dealing with a leak. These are where people take shortcuts.
• End with clean-up, demobilization and leaving the site. Loading waste, removing isolations, restoring the site and driving out.
• Aim for five to fifteen steps. Fewer usually means steps are being skipped; more usually means the crew is listing tiny details instead of meaningful actions.

For the coating repair, Sam and Dani ended up with eleven steps:

Already, the hazards were easier to see. Step 7 was a working-at-height step that the three-step version had hidden completely. Step 10 involved lifting drums weighing 200 lb (about 90 kg). Step 2 was where the crew would learn whether any valves at the station were automated and might move on their own.

Scanning the work area

A list of steps tells you what you will do. A scan of the work area tells you where you will do it, and what is already there. Both are needed. A crew can have a perfect list of steps and still miss the overhead line, the wasp nest in the valve housing or the fact that the client's operator is about to start a pressure test next door.

Dani teaches a scan she calls 'up, down, all around, and behind you.' It is simple enough to remember on a cold morning and thorough enough to catch most hazards.

• Up. Look above the work area and above any route a truck or boom will travel. Power lines, pipe racks, tree branches, overhead valves, anything stacked or stored above head height, anything that could fall. In winter, look for ice or snow that could slide off a roof or structure.
• Down. Look at the ground and below it. Holes, soft spots, slopes, frozen patches, gopher and badger holes, buried lines and the locate marks for them, drains, valve boxes and covers that could give way. On gravel sites, look for spills and stains that could mean a leak.
• All around. Turn a full circle. Look at the station, the equipment, other people, the road, the neighbors, livestock or wildlife, and the weather coming in. Note where the wind is coming from. Note anything that is running, under pressure or could start on its own.
• Behind you. Think about your escape route and the line of fire. If something moves, sprays, falls or rolls, where will it go, and is anyone standing there? Where will you go if the gas detector alarms?

On the coating job, the scan turned up several things the steps alone did not: a wasp nest under the lid of a valve actuator, a gravel shoulder too soft for the compressor trailer, an automated valve that the client used for remote shut-in, a buried cathodic protection cable running from a test post along the line of the containment tarps, and a cattle fence with a gate the crew would need to keep closed.

Use all your senses

Scanning is mostly looking, but not only looking. Listen for hissing, running engines, alarms and the sound of other equipment. Smell for gas, solvent, smoke or hydrogen sulfide, though never rely on smell for gas or hydrogen sulfide, which can deaden the sense of smell at high levels; use the gas detector. Feel for vibration in the ground, heat from equipment and the strength of the wind. A good scan uses all of them, and the gas detector extends what your senses can do.

Look at the site from other people's positions

Each crew member sees the site from where they will stand. The truck operator sees it from the cab, with blind spots behind and to the right. The person blasting sees it from inside a hood with limited vision and hearing. A member of the public sees it from the road, maybe not noticing a hose across the shoulder. Dani asks each crew member, during the walk, to stand where they will work and describe what they can and cannot see.

What's different today?

The single most useful question during a scan is: what is different today? Most serious incidents involve some kind of change: a new person, a new tool, a different location, a change in the weather, a change in the schedule, a job that runs late. When something is different, the routine plan may not fit anymore.

Dani's crew asks about five kinds of change during every scan:

• People. Is anyone new to the crew, the task or the site? Is anyone tired, unwell or distracted? Is there a visitor?
• Equipment. Is anything new, borrowed, repaired or different from usual? Is any equipment showing signs of wear?
• Place. Is the site layout different from the drawing? Have other crews, the client or the public changed anything since the last visit?
• Conditions. Weather, light, ground, temperature, traffic.
• Plan. Has the scope, the sequence or the schedule changed? Is there pressure to finish fast?

The human side of scanning

Even a good scan can miss hazards, because people are people. A few states of mind make hazards much harder to see. Safety trainers often describe four of them: rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency. Each one narrows attention. Someone who is rushing looks only at the task, not the surroundings. Someone frustrated by a stuck bolt stops thinking about where the wrench will go when it slips. Someone tired misses small details. Someone who has done the job a hundred times sees what they expect to see, not what is there.

The pre-task plan cannot fix these states, but it can name them. Dani asks during every pre-job talk: 'Is anyone rushed, tired or not feeling right today?' and she answers first. On days when the crew is behind schedule, she says so out loud and makes it a hazard on the form, with a control: 'If we fall behind, we call Owen and move the finish, we don't skip steps.'

Making the scan a habit

The scan is not just for the morning. Dani teaches her crew to do a quick version whenever they move to a new spot, start a new step, or come back from a break. It takes less than a minute: stop, look up, look down, look around, look behind. Many companies call this a 'last-minute risk assessment' or a 'take five.' Whatever the name, the habit is the point.

When Sam asked how he would know he had found everything, Dani was honest. 'You won't,' she said. 'Nobody does. That's why we all walk it, and that's why we keep looking all day. The form is our best guess at 7 a.m. The job is what actually happens.'