Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro, brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded September 23rd, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer. Today my guest is Alan Davis. Alan is a CSP and director of Safety and Compliance at American Seafoods Company. Welcome to the show, Alan.

Alan Davis:

Thank you for inviting me.

Jill James:

Well, I've invited you several times. You just seem to have a very busy life where you somehow mysteriously are always on a ship somewhere, where there isn't a good wifi connection. So thank you for being here today and making the time for us.

Alan Davis:

Oh, I'm glad we could find the time that we could put it together.

Jill James:

Yeah. So Alan, you have a long and interesting story, and I cannot wait to get into it with you today for our audience. When we had our pre-podcast chat, I wrote a note in quotations, because this is from you, how you accidentally wind up in a profession to prevent accidents, and it has something to do with your childhood. So do you want to start there?

Alan Davis:

Yeah, sure. It was an interesting question prompt for me because none of us grow up playing in the sandbox as children thinking that we want to be safety professionals when we launch our careers and enter adulthood. I grew up on a farm and rural North Carolina. In thinking back over the accidents that led me to accidentally becoming a safety professional, there's a number of events that occurred on the farm where my grandfather got hurt and pulled a tree over on himself when I was four years old or five years old. My father was injured at one time or another. I have scars and actually sustained an injury myself that prevented me from following the normal career path that farm kids take to get off the farm and get an education.

Jill James:

Yeah. So do you want to talk about any of those pieces with your family?

Alan Davis:

Well, I think one of the things that changed my course along the way is, I had a small entrepreneurial venture where I was running a trap line, and I had kind of a Jack London experience where I fell in the water in winter. And in the process of trying to light a fire, I was unable to get the fire lit and decided that my next course of action was to run towards the house in warmth. We think that somewhere along the way, in that process of running through the forest trying to keep from freezing to death, I did some damage to my knees. Then it resulted in five knee surgeries between what? Seventh grade and 12th grade.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

The normal path that farm kids take to escape the farm and get an education is to join the military, see the world, earn some college scholarship kind of credits, and go from there. With my knee injuries, that path was closed to me, and it just so happened that in 11th grade, already trying to figure out a new path. I was at a career day and Dr. Isaac Barnett spoke about a program at North Carolina A&T State University that had just been started. You had to be a little bit of a business person, a little bit of a medical person, a little bit of an engineering person, maybe a little bit of a chemically person, and the mission was to keep people from getting killed, maimed, mangled, mutilated or sick. I had already been a volunteer firefighter and had started the path towards becoming an EMT. So, having an option laid out in front of me that would allow me to try to prevent things from happening looked like a pretty attractive opportunity. And with it being a new program and almost in my backyard, it was a pretty easy path to step onto.

Jill James:

And this is in 11th grade?

Alan Davis:

Yes.

Jill James:

Wow. That's amazing. For people listening, and we often talk about mentorship and the pipeline to the EHS profession being so slim right now, these opportunities like Alan's describing about someone going back to a career day at a high school can really have a large influence on a generation, and certainly it did on your life. That's wonderful.

Alan Davis:

Yeah. I've kind of taken it upon myself to engage in activities like that in a variety of ways to pass it on or pay it back.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Alan Davis:

I've only had one opportunity, I think, to go back to A&T and speak, and it was probably 10 years ago. But when I graduated from my program in 1990, there were four of us graduating.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

When I went back in 2010, something like that, there were 50 or 60 people in the program. So at least at that time, it had grown pretty considerably.

Jill James:

Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. Hey, I want to go back for a second to 11th grade because you have these parallel things happening, and I don't want to forget about the one. So you have a mentor come, tells you about this newish occupation, little sciencey, little this, little that, little this. But you had mentioned you were a volunteer firefighter, you had to be 16 years old, how in the world? And then let's go back to college, but let's talk about how you become a firefighter at age 16.

Alan Davis:

I have a checkered career path. It's kind of interesting. We had had a fire on the farm, and the local volunteer fire department had come and helped put out the fire. Growing up going to elementary school in a rural community, I had kids in my class whose parents were on the fire department and kids being kids. They all talked about joining the fire department, being firefighters when they grew up. I was also working off the farm at a family diner, food truck kind of combination thing, and had stopped at a car wreck and rendered aid at a car wreck. I wound up going by the fire department thanking the guys for helping put out the fire on the farm. The next thing I knew I was a cadet firefighter at the Williamsburg Volunteer Fire Department near Reidsville, North Carolina.

Jill James:

Wow. Apparently they didn't have an age restriction. I mean, I'm thinking about kids who work in the deli right now who can't run the meat slicer, but you, you're on the fire department.

Alan Davis:

Things were a little bit different then, and I'm a big fan of not age discriminating because we have young people that are mature enough to do great many things. Then we have older people that aren't mature enough to do the same things. It just depends on the individual.

Jill James:

That's right.

Alan Davis:

But at least at that time and in that place, you could become a cadet firefighter at 16. I started the path towards becoming an EMT not long after that, but due to age restrictions, I had to wait until I was 18 to take the test and become certified in the state as an EMT. I didn't wait until I was 18 to do CPR for the first time, I'm pretty sure, among all the other things that you respond to in rural America. I'm not sure if the statistic is still accurate, but at some point, I remember seeing something that said that 75% of the firefighters in the United States are volunteers. So there is a huge, huge cadre of volunteers in rural America that sacrifice an evening every week for training, go and attend additional training to build up their skills and certifications, and then functionally serve on a 24/7 call in their communities. So when the alarm rings you, if you're able to respond, you do.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. That's certainly true where I live. I live in a smallish city, and the fire department is a volunteer fire department. I know the firefighters in my community, and I asked the fire chief, when I moved to the community, questions like, "So I have this house, it's got all the bedrooms on the second floor, and this is the area. How many minutes? Do I need a ladder?" He's like, "It's going to take us 11 minutes to get to your house." These are the things that you can ask your local fire department, and it's such a rich and wonderful relationship when you can have it.

Alan Davis:

Yeah. Later when my career had me moving to Wyoming, I joined the fire department in Lyman, Wyoming, which is an even more remote and rural area. At one point in time, we had a call that it was, I think in excess of a 45-minute response time from the fire station to the event. We were moving rapidly. It was just a long way to get there.

Jill James:

Yeah. Well, very rural. Very rural. All right. Thank you for that. We probably will jump back into the fire service from time to time here, but if you don't mind, can we jump back into that other track? You went to college, you're in a class of four. Is that what you said? Graduating class of four. And shout out your university again in case people don't know that there's a program there.

Alan Davis:

The university is in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's North Carolina A&T, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, part of the NC State program.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wonderful. We've had a guest from NC State on the show a couple of years ago. Fabulous. Okay. So you graduate, class of four. What's your first job in this career with a little bit of this and a little bit of that? Which, gosh, that's such a good way to describe our profession, because it really is. It really is.

Alan Davis:

It was interesting going through the program. Two of the core professors were practicing safety professionals. Charles Crocker was a CSP working for Burlington Industries, and he taught a number of courses through my four years there, many of them in the evenings because that worked with his work schedule. And then Dana Ripley was the certified industrial hygienist, also from Burlington Industries, and they were doing their part to give back to the profession and build new safety and health professionals. Dana Ripley had been working with Sara Lee on a contract, providing some training and development for their in-house safety specialist and safety supervisors. So I did a summer internship with him helping do that. And it turned out I wound up being picked up by Sara Lee Knit Products Fleece Wear Division.

Jill James:

Oh, I had no idea they had that. I was just thinking of the coffee cake.

Alan Davis:

It's interesting when you say Sara Lee, everybody thinks cakes and pastries, but at that time, I believe Sara Lee Knit Products was 50,000 employees.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

Sara Lee Knit Products Fleece Wear Division was 5,500 employees.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

So think Hanes, sweatshirts and sweatpants.

Jill James:

Yes, yes.

Alan Davis:

My first job, I had two facilities I was responsible for, my first professional job in the industry. I had two facilities that I was responsible for in rural areas of Virginia, Rocky Mount and Gretna, Virginia, with a total of about 1,100 employees between the two facilities that they were taking cloth that our company wove and dyed. The locations I was at laid it out on forms, marked out the patterns, cut it with these giant electric knives that, looking back, are kind of terrifying.

Jill James:

I would've guessed that would've been a punch press, but okay, big giant knife. Okay.

Alan Davis:

They would lay the fabric back and forth out on these really long tables, mark out the patterns using plastic pattern boards and chalk essentially.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

And then they had these vertical electric knives that look like a combination of the electric knife you use for carving up your turkey and a jigsaw. And they would cut out the pattern, and then people would take those stacks of pants, legs or shirt sleeves or whatever to the rows. And there seemed like an infinite number of ladies mostly sitting at sewing machines, sewing away, making sweatshirts and sweatpants.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Welcome to the textile industry. Wow.

Alan Davis:

I have to say that I probably made the ugliest sweatshirt and the ugliest pair of sweatpants ever sewn because I sat down and tried making some myself.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, you got to do the street cred piece. You've got to try. Wow. So that's a lot of employees. It's hazardous work for multiple reasons. Were you the only EHS person?

Alan Davis:

So the division had a director and a couple of other people. There were 13 locations, and I had safety specialists, safety supervisor, responsibility at two of them. And after I'd been there a little while, we were working on upgrading the programs, policies, procedures within the division or subdivision. Most of the locations had been purchased from a family-owned company and had just been added to Sara Lee, so everything was in the process of being transitioned and upgraded. Shortly after I started, I wound up having a third office at the division headquarters where I would be there once or twice a week working on programs and policies for the entire division.

Jill James:

So what do you remember learning there? It's your first job. What was your big takeaway before you moved on? And how long did it take before you moved on?

Alan Davis:

I think one of the interesting things was my first day in the office. I'm 21 years old, I'm at the division headquarters in Martinsville, Virginia. And they bring in this lady that is 16, 17 years my senior, she is a nurse that is going to be working for me and reporting to me at my two locations. I'm looking at this lady that's older than me thinking, "Oh my god, how am I going to tell this lady that's older than me what to do?" And later I found out she was looking at me going, "Oh my god, this smart ass college kid is going to be telling me what to do."

Jill James:

That's right. Yeah.

Alan Davis:

And we were a fabulous team. She was such a delight to work with. Shout out to Cheryl Hooker wherever she is now. The biggest challenge I had with her was getting her to take her comp time because she worked so much. And at the time, in the niche that she was in, she didn't get overtime. She got comp time. Getting her to take a day off was a death defying experience.

Jill James:

That sounds very familiar. I had a similar colleague in my first job at OSHA as well. And yes, oh my gosh, she worked and worked and worked and then would randomly teach me things because I was a punk and she wasn't. So she'd mail me, through the mail, instructions written in longhand on how to make a Thanksgiving Turkey, and then included the special bag. You baked the turkey, and so it would never fail on you. I still have her handwritten directions to this day.

Alan Davis:

Cheryl was a fantastic person to work with, and it reminds me that I need to track her down. She also volunteered in a rural hospital on the weekends. It was more a thing that she was doing. She was working, I said volunteered. She was working, but it was really more of a volunteer thing where she was helping her community and helping staff at small hospital. Eventually, Sara Lee Knit Products went through a downsizing, at least in the fleece wear division, where evaluating the different locations and stuff, they shrunk things down. Officially, I got caught in that layoff or downsizing process. And that happened, I've only been there nine months or a year or something like that. So I'm just out of college, it's the early '90s recession, and I'm scrambling around desperately trying to find work because not working is a strange thing for me.

Jill James:

Not working isn't really an option, and we've already established you can't go back to the farm and the military's off.

Alan Davis:

Yes.

Jill James:

So where did you go?

Alan Davis:

I wound up getting an opportunity to interview with Church & Dwight, which is not a name that people recognize, but their brand name, Arm & Hammer, is recognized pretty broadly. Randomly saw a newspaper ad and accidentally found this advertisement while my family was on vacation. Submitted a resume to the recruiter that had posted it, and they were wanting somebody that had two years of experience as an OSHA inspector. I talked to them and proposed that my really weird rare degree in occupational safety and health might be kind of equivalent to two years of experience as OSHA inspector. And the folks in Green River, Wyoming took the chance to fly me out to interview.

Jill James:

This is a big deal.

Alan Davis:

I don't know what your experience with interviews and occupational safety and health have been, but mine have been that they're marathons.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Alan Davis:

This one was a prime example. The human resources manager, Tony Cortez, flew me out. So it was all day to get there. The interview began with an early morning breakfast, then a drive 40 miles out into the desert because it is a very remote location, an all-day tour of the facility, which included meeting with the plant manager, the engineering team. They made baking soda, laundry detergent, and carpet freshener at this location. And it's like an all-day interview plus a consulting session. And then it went into dinner. So it was basically a seven o'clock in the morning to nine o'clock at night interview. And Cheryl Hooker, the nurse that I worked with at Hanes, Sara Lee, actually, played a role in me getting the job. Tony Cortez told me at the time that they had other candidates that they wanted to talk to, and they would be checking my professional references. And I had just gotten back to North Carolina the next day and got the call with the job offer.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

He later told me that they made the decision quickly because he called and was checking my references. And when he spoke to the nurse, she told him that the best thing that she could say is that if we were ever going to hire a nurse in Wyoming and the nurse was going to work with or for me, she wanted the job.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh. That is fantastic.

Alan Davis:

It was such a huge compliment, such a nice thing to say, and got me a job at a really high-quality organization that really promoted my professional growth.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. That's so awesome. And yes, I've been part of marathon interviews before. It's, yes, all day affairs. And if we had more time, I'd share how I got my job at HSI, which was the most interesting interview I've ever had in my life, but we'll have to just put a pin in that and save that for another episode. But kind of amazing, right? So everyone's worried about this EHS professional. Are they going to be the safety cop? Are they going to be this? Are they going to be that? So yeah, you have to meet everybody because they're nervous about what is this going to be. So you land this job, you're still very young in your career. How do things go there?

Alan Davis:

It was interesting. Like I have experienced in several locations, they had never had a safety professional on staff. The entire corporation did not have a safety professional on staff at any of its locations.

Jill James:

Whoa. First one, okay.

Alan Davis:

I got to be Tony Cortez' guinea pig as he was getting his master's degree in organizational development. So a chunk of what he was doing was trying to knock some of the farm boy off of me and turned me into a more well-rounded professional. He encouraged me to go to things like the American Society of Safety Professionals' Professional Development Conference, which actually became a gathering for Church & Dwight people who had collateral assignments of safety. We went to one in Texas way back when, and it was a great way to meet and interface with other safety professionals. We all had divergent interest from our different locations and our different backgrounds. We would divide up, go out to different seminar sessions, and then meet for dinner at the end of the day and talk about the different things that we'd seen and things that we might want to try to implement. And we got to cross pollinate with other people from other places. It's actually how I accidentally met Scott Geller.

Jill James:

Dr. Geller who's been a guest on the show at least, I think, three times. Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

Yes. He's a fantastic person that I have thoroughly enjoyed knowing for 27, 30 years or something. And it's interesting how those random occurrences provide you opportunities of growth.

Jill James:

That's right.

Alan Davis:

Tony also sent me to things that most safety professionals might not be able to go to or want to. I got sent to a week of employee relations law.

Jill James:

Oh yeah, super important. Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

Yes, but perhaps one of the most painful weeks of my life.

Jill James:

Well, yeah. I say super important, and I do have a background working for OSHA and the government. So yeah, it's all with a grain of salt, what's baked into the cake. Yeah.

Alan Davis:

Half the attendees were human resources professionals. It seemed about half the attendees were attorneys that were beginning practice or in practice in employee relations law and then there's this one young safety guy.

Jill James:

You learned a lot. You learned a lot.

Alan Davis:

Yes.

Jill James:

Adding to what is the nerd dumb of our profession, I think one of my most favorite conferences ever was a worker's compensation conference, which same thing, attorneys, HR professionals. But man, I found it also fascinating. Loved it.

Alan Davis:

Yeah.

Jill James:

Yeah. Big nerd.

Alan Davis:

Yeah.

Jill James:

All right. So yeah, organizational development as a mentor, that's fantastic early on. So tell me more about that job.

Alan Davis:

Well, Arm & Hammer, Church & Dwight was a great place to work. Green River, Wyoming, that community was a great place to live. A lot of really, really good people there. One of the things that the organization wanted to do was build up their safety training. And they had a pretty aggressive timeline. I started in February and we were doing safety training in March.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

It was, I would call it, Death by PowerPoint, but PowerPoint hadn't been invented yet. It was death by transparencies.

Jill James:

I was going to say overhead projectors.

Alan Davis:

Overhead projectors. And being from the south, I have a tendency to speak slowly, and I am blessed with the voice of a hypnotist.

Jill James:

Oh, no.

Alan Davis:

So here I am, 22, 23 years old, in front of these people that are two or three times my age trying to explain to them eye protection and confined space entry safety. And it's trying to get everything that hadn't been done and get everything up to speed it. It's an eight-hour day. This plant operated with 12-hour shifts. So what they did was, with their shift rotation, you would wind up with a seven-day block out of every month where the shift workers were off. Well, we took that month, and on the seventh day, you came in to train instead of having that seventh day off.

Jill James:

Boy, I bet they weren't happy. Oh, my gosh.

Alan Davis:

They were getting compensated for their time. But yes, it's never fun to sit in a classroom for eight hours and listen to some young wet-behind-the-ears kid tell you how not to get hurt. At the end of the cycle where we had trained all four shifts with the death by overhead transparencies, we got together, we did solicit feedback from the crew. Feedback was that they would really like to do more peer-to-peer training.

Jill James:

Okay.

Alan Davis:

And what we launched for the next year's training cycle and building towards it was peer-to-peer team training, train the trainer kind of thing. Tony Cortez brought in a gentleman named Robert Mager, who was the guy that had written the books on Train the Trainer.

Jill James:

Interesting.

Alan Davis:

We solicited volunteers. There's air quotes around the volunteers, as some of the volunteers were the hecklers during the safety training that I had just done. Some of the volunteers were people that said, "That looks like fun," and stepped forward, but-

Jill James:

Important to have both actually.

Alan Davis:

So out of 220 some employees at that facility, we had 12 that stepped forward one way or another to become trainers the next year. We engaged in a process where I kind of scripted out training. We looked at the desired outcomes for each safety category, developed three or four desired outcomes that we needed to hit on, make sure everybody leaves with that foundational knowledge after the session. What we did is, over a period of months, we would bring in a fall protection specialist from a fall protection manufacturer. We would bring in a respiratory protection specialist from a respiratory protection manufacturer. And each of our hourly crew that we're being trained to become trainers wound up becoming 3M certified respiratory protection instructors, or DBI-SALA Fall Protection.

Jill James:

Shout out to DBI-SALA, a Minnesota-based company, I love them.

Alan Davis:

Yeah. I didn't think about the fact that I'm advertising for folks.

Jill James:

No, you said that company name. And I think they do a great job with education. I think they're known by another name right now. But yes, that was a fantastic way to do training.

Alan Davis:

Well, what we did is we did those foundational building blocks first, and then we brought in Robert Mager and his team, took these guys out of the plant setting, went to a nearby community college setting. So we're totally removed from the work environment and spent three days, I believe, maybe a little bit more, on how to conduct training. How do you deliver it? How do you not have the voice of a hypnotist and learn to modulate your voice some? How to mix up the training delivery so that you hit the visual learners, you hit the audible learners, and you hit those tactile learners, the people that need to get their hands into it or be engaged in it? We also learned things like, you're not supposed to embarrass the person that falls asleep during your training session. You're supposed to find a way to not draw attention to them while simultaneously waking them up, or how to deal with that person that keeps talking to his neighbor during your training session while you're trying to conduct training.

Jill James:

Well, these are wonderful gifts for a 20 some year old kid to figure out early on. Wow, that's fantastic.

Alan Davis:

They were great tips. And I think one of the hallmarks of my career, at least my early career, was that next February rolled around, it was our training month. I think February had been chosen as our training month because in the winter in February, the only thing that you can do in Wyoming is go snowmobiling or skiing. And most of our folks were not skiers. We lived in the middle of the desert, so snowmobiling wasn't that big of an option.

Jill James:

Yeah, it's kind of white out.

Alan Davis:

It's kind of a downtime in outdoor experiences in Wyoming. But our team, we spread the trainers that we had built up out based on what portion of the operation that they were from. So our operators that were the ones that manufactured the baking soda or the laundry detergent or the carpet freshener were in one group. Our maintenance team was in another group, and our warehouse shipping receiving team was in another group, and they were now learning from their peers. So basically, we had a three ring circus of training going on simultaneously at the facility. And I was running from circus ring to circus ring to circus ring, trying to facilitate, do quality control, assist where needed. It worked really, really well, but like I think several famous generals have said through the span of history, no good plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Jill James:

Oh, no.

Alan Davis:

We had some people who were fantastic rock on tours, storytellers, but when they started trying to do training, they were reading word from word from the script, turning the pages slowly and basically stuck. They had stage fright.

Jill James:

Voice of the hypnotist. Okay. Okay.

Alan Davis:

Yes. I tried not to take great delight in the fact that one of them had been one of my hecklers when I was doing it.

Jill James:

That was gracious of you.

Alan Davis:

I said, tried. But out of that group was born sort of an extended idea in that we now had this cadre of operators and maintenance people who had had each become subject matter experts in different aspects of safety as they went through these training programs and gravitated towards things that they had personal experience with. So we were invited to take our show on the road and go to some of the other locations that Arm & Hammer had. So I had the opportunity to take some of these hourly workers and fly from Green River, Rock Springs, Wyoming to Syracuse, New York and Greenville, South Carolina, so that our guys could deliver safety training at these other locations.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Gosh, they must have thought that was the coolest thing.

Alan Davis:

It was a lot of fun. They had each come up with things that resonated with them as ways of delivering understanding of why carbon monoxide is bad for you, or the importance of wearing safety glasses. We, again, did the feedback loop with our own employees at the Green River Plant. We got the feedback that they would like to see the instructors throughout their day kind of mixed up so that it wasn't the same person delivering all of their safety training throughout the day. And we had some of our volunteer "instructors" that decided it was not the thing that they wanted to be volunteering to do. We had some other people that stepped up and said that they would like to do it. So we established kind of a peer-to-peer mentorship program with the training. I'm very proud to say that we won Arm & Hammer's quality award that year because of our training program.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

And the next year, what we did is we established the idea that regardless of which group you're teaching and what specialty or what module you're teaching, you have to be prepared to teach at all.

Jill James:

Oh, okay. So you needed a Swiss Army knife for each.

Alan Davis:

So everybody had to be prepared to be the sole presenter for their group in case there was something that went wrong. But we also allowed them, regardless of which shift group they were in or regardless of what operational specialty they were in, they could trade. So the trainers would cut a deal with another trainer that that person would come and do their confined space safety, and the other person would come in and do their respiratory protection. So we basically let them work it out among themselves. We also partnered up the experienced trainers that had done it the year before with the new folks that had stepped up. And like all good plans, nothing survives first contact with the enemy. The first day that we're doing what would be my third training cycle at Arm & Hammer, we have an emergency. There is a construction project going on. A construction worker had gone back to his vehicle because he wasn't feeling well. Somebody had gone to check on him, and unfortunately he had no pulse and no respiration. Now, our location was so remote that we had our own ambulance. So building on that experience as a firefighter EMT, I'm essentially the fire chief for our emergency response program, including the emergency medicine part of it. One of my key trainers for the day, partnered up with a newbie, was my paramedic that was on shift. So one of the key trainers and myself that was bouncing around doing quality control are in the back of an ambulance going 60 miles an hour down the road, headed towards the hospital 45, 50 miles away. And as the ambulance doors were closed, the HR manager is yelling at me, "What do I need to do?" And I told him he needed to go check on this new trainer because he had just been abandoned.

Jill James:

In the face of a tragedy. Yes.

Alan Davis:

Yes. And I found out later that what had happened is, when the code announcement, the emergency announcement had gone out over the PA system at the facility, one of the trainers that did not have any training responsibility that day, and he was a key person in the maintenance department, had realized that this player had been moved off of the table and this player was by themselves. He went to his supervisor, said, "Hey, I need to go help this guy," and had already backfilled. It was already taken care of probably before the ambulance even got to the highway. So it was-

Jill James:

A great system. Yeah.

Alan Davis:

Out of what was a really, really tragic day with a lot of stress, there was this component where the people at this facility recognized what needed to be done, stepped up and did it without any micromanagement.

Jill James:

That's right.

Alan Davis:

It was a really cool place to work.

Jill James:

Yeah. That's a one way to define safety culture operating optimally for sure. So Alan, I mean, what a interesting way to start your career. Oh, that's fantastic, what a bar to set an expectation around. You're working with the commercial fishing industry. How did that come to be part of your life? You're in the middle of Wyoming, in the middle of a desert, Arm & Hammer, and now all of a sudden, how did this leap happen?

Alan Davis:

Yeah, that was another one of those accidental leaps. It was not something that I had planned. The facility that I was at with Arm & Hammer in the metrics of the time, they went three years without a lost time accident legitimately.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

A million and a half man hours with no lost time legitimately. It was not prevarication smoke and mirrors. There was no pencil whipping involved. We did have a major accident and it shook the organization or that location to its core, but it also reinvigorated their commitment to safety, everybody there. And it wasn't because of that accident, but around the same period of time, shortly after it, the company as a whole was going through some changes, and I don't understand the high finance decisions involved behind it, but the company decided that the way to deal with their issues was to lay some people off. And I wound up getting put on the chopping block.

Jill James:

Again.

Alan Davis:

Again.

Jill James:

Ugh.

Alan Davis:

Someone at corporate headquarters was going down the list and saw that this location had a safety person, but none of the other locations did. So obviously the Green River facility did not need a safety person, and I got to walk the plank.

Jill James:

Right onto a ship instead of off the ship.

Alan Davis:

Quite literally. At the time, Google didn't exist and there was a clipping service that was available. What they would do is, you would tell them what you were interested in looking for as a job. They would come through newspapers in their areas that you were interested in. And on Tuesday morning of every week, you would receive a FedEx package with job announcements.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

My partner at the time needed to go to a place with a larger university for her advancement. And I was looking in communities like Seattle, Portland, Reno, Salt Lake, and a company called Tyson Seafoods had a posting for a shoreside, emphasis shoreside, safety guy. They wanted to bring in a OSHA type safety specialist to help them enhance their safety policies, procedures, and practices onboard the ships and in their shipyard. So I flew from Wyoming to Seattle. I interviewed with Tyson Seafoods and met some great people. Steve Kennebeck was their director of risk or vice president of risk. I'm not sure what his title was. Tony Ford was their safety director. He was a retired US Coast Guard captain. And these crazy people hired me. Suddenly I found myself in what was, at the time, the largest commercial fishing company in United States.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

It had just been purchased buy Tyson Foods from a company called Arctic Alaska. Arctic Alaska was an incredibly diverse organization. It had built itself up from one boat to two boats to four boats to 34 ships of various sizes and sector categories. I knew that the pointy end was the bow. I knew the square end was the stern. I knew fishing was dangerous and that Alaska was cold. And that was about it.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

What I learned when I came in was that there were new regulations by the Coast Guard for fishing vessel safety. Those regulations had been written because of a number of tragedies. Some of those tragedies had befallen Arctic Alaska in their operations. So going through OSHA 300 logs or what was probably OSHA 100 logs at the time.

Jill James:

The 200 log? Yes, I remember the day it switched from the 200 log to the 300 log. We waited 10 years for that to happen. Yeah. Okay. Go on.

Alan Davis:

Going through those logs and seeing fatalities that occurred and major injuries that occurred and recognizing that the logs may not have been complete because there's little DUA in the regulations that technically if it occurs outside of three miles, it's not under OSHA's jurisdiction, therefore you're not required to record it. That's not my practice, not how I do things, but that's a little quirk in the law.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

Tyson Seafoods, kind of promptly, I came in the 1st of November in 1995. And January of '96, I was in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, staying at kind of an austere camp, sort of setting construction trailers, somebody once called it a man camp kind of thing, and visitating my benevolent presence upon the ships as they came in and went back out. And it was decided that for me to really learn the business, I needed to go get fishes. So I wound up going out on a ship that was at that time called the Pacific Enterprise with Captain Ray Hadden.

Jill James:

Different than Captain Kirk. Okay.

Alan Davis:

Yes. I wound up discovering that my highly tuned sense of equilibrium is not very happy with the motion of the ocean.

Jill James:

Oh, no.

Alan Davis:

The ship had been in for a brief repair, and it was what's called a catcher boat. Its mission is to go out with five crew members and one observer, catch Bering Sea pollock, and bring it to a processing ship that's anchored up in a bay on Alaska Island. We left at midnight and I discovered approximately 6:00 AM that the motion of the ocean did not agree with the retention of my stomach content. So that was fun.

Jill James:

Oh, no.

Alan Davis:

It took about six hours for me to get to where I could stand up right and move in forward direction, which coincided perfectly with them hauling back their first toe. So I got to learn about sorting fish and sorting by size and sorting by species. And as the day progressed and I got my hands into things and I'm doing things, my sea sickness abetted. So I spent three or four days on that ship with that crew, learning a little bit about that sector, and it was a great introduction.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

Wound up catching a sea plane from Beaver Inlet to Dutch Harbor, which sounds like a lot of fun, and in a way it was, but-

Jill James:

Sounds like another way to lose the contents of your stomach is what it sounds like to me.

Alan Davis:

Yeah, maybe the stomach.

Jill James:

Oh, okay.

Alan Davis:

The weather had gotten a little rough. So taking off in the bay in this plane that's called a Goose, it's basically a boat with wings and two engines, taking off, the pilot was in a hurry, the takeoff was rough. He climbed up over the mountains to the north of us. And as I had gotten in the plane, I looked down and there's this big steel ring between my knees, and I didn't really understand what it was for. But then as we started bucking through the waves, the cowboy background kind of kicked back in. And I realized that was to hang onto.

Jill James:

Oh.

Alan Davis:

We came over a mountain ridge so low that I reflexively lifted my feet as if my feet were going to be what was going to drag on top of the mountain. It's this very brief plane ride, but it's an experience I vividly remember.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh. You might want to do a new job.

Alan Davis:

Funny not funny thing is, three months later, that pilot and that plane tragically disappeared in that region without a trace.

Jill James:

Woah.

Alan Davis:

One of the highest occupational fatality rates in the United States is actually Alaska bush pilots. Bush pilots are the life blood of rural Alaska in getting goods and people where they need to be. Whether it's delivering pizzas, funny, out in rural areas or medications or getting people to where they need to be, the Alaska bush pilot is a career all in and of itself.

Jill James:

Wow. Wow.

Alan Davis:

I got the opportunity to go out on the boat that was at that time called the Bristol Enterprise, a hundred eighty five foot boat, with Captain Lauren Perry, participated in a different fishery. So similar but different gear type fishing for a different species, fishing in a different area. We went out to sea, and one of the things that's interesting is, in Alaska, we get these storms that if they were off the coast of Florida would be called hurricanes. In the Bering Sea, it may be called Tuesday. This ship was 185 feet, had a crew of about 45. We were fishing for a species of fish called rock soul. It looks like a flounder, for your listeners, from the southern state. It's a flat fish. You process it once it's caught and sort it in the factory. You process it by grabbing it by its nose and cutting the head off in sort of a V cut.

Jill James:

Okay.

Alan Davis:

I had been thinking about this ergonomically and looked at the knife and was scratching my head, thinking this is a weird knife and thinking that the knife interface was going to be the thing. I had actually picked up a couple of ergonomic knives to try before I went out, trying to think ahead a little bit. And then I found out that the real ergonomic issue was holding those guys by the nose while you made the cuts to cut the head off. My left hand cramped up way before my right hand did.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

But we went out engaged in that fishery and wound up having a three-day storm. That was a glory to behold. We had 30 to 35-foot seas for three days constantly.

Jill James:

Geez.

Alan Davis:

One of the fun things about fishing in the Bering Sea is that sea spray will freeze. Sea spray will freeze on your ship, and as the ice gets thicker, the top of your ship gets heavier. As the top of your ship gets heavier, it may eventually get heavier than the bottom of the ship. So there's all kinds of rhymes and jokes about it, but I guess the cleanest one is breaking ice isn't nice.

Jill James:

Oh, my gosh. These are hazards that nobody knows about unless you are in the commercial fishing industry.

Alan Davis:

Yeah. There are times that they basically blow the whistle and everybody goes out with baseball bats, or now we have these things that look like oversized sledge hammers that are made out of a high-impact plastic.

Jill James:

True.

Alan Davis:

And you are busting ice off of the railings and the bulkheads and throwing it overboard to take weight off.

Jill James:

Yeah.

Alan Davis:

But I got to spend two weeks on that vessel out at sea. Had some scary moments that still give me some reverberations, but it was a fantastic learning experience. I got to work with the engineers on fixing broken stuff. I got to spend a little bit of time on deck, spend time in the factory, spend time in the galley. I'm probably a little bit of a hands-on learner myself. I like to get into things, get dirty, build some camaraderie that way as well, feel what the job feels like to the person doing it.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Alan, how many years have you been doing this work in the commercial fishing industry now?

Alan Davis:

I have now been doing it about 24 years. I think I was with Tyson Seafoods for three years, three and a half years, something like that. Got caught in another layoff. Tyson Foods decided that the seafood sector was not a sector that they wanted to continue to be in and sold the company in pieces. Each ship is basically an LLC, or each ship is its own entity and operation in a way. So some of the ships went to one company, some of the ships went to another company. And in that process, I was laid off and I was hired by the University of Washington's Office of Risk Management to do loss control intervention. Transitioning to the University of Washington was different. It was my first time working in academia and out of industry. And things are done a little differently in academia.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Just a little.

Alan Davis:

The University of Washington has a large and fabulous safety department, but my job was in the Office of Risk Management. My mission was to analyze claims and trends, identify areas that the trends were occurring, go to those different departments or different organizations and try to lead them to the path of righteousness.

Jill James:

The gospel according to Alan.

Alan Davis:

So some of those organizations, I'd go knock on the door, either literally or metaphorically, and say, "We've noticed that you have injuries occurring in this kind of category. I'm here to help facilitate interventions in how these injuries are occurring and why, and work with you and the safety department to try to find a better path." Some organizations would open up the door and say, "Come right on in." Some organizations or some groups were perhaps a little less open to outsider interference, but there was a lot of good work done improving safety and health for different aspects of the university. I have to say, one of the career achievements for me was I got involved in the prevention of nurse back injuries. University has two major hospitals that it manages, and nurse back injuries back 20 some years ago were one of the things that caught our attention. I wound up working with a safety professional from San Francisco named William Charney, who literally has written volumes on healthcare safety. Just by happenstance, was invited to an event where he was speaking and he became my mentor and guide through healthcare safety and nurse back injury prevention. We conspired in numerous ways to try to make the world a better and safer place for healthcare workers. I was able to work with the two hospitals and implement something called a lift team where nurses would be able to page two people who were specifically and specially trained in body dynamics and patient movement, and had equipment stationed on various floors. So they would come help move patients and take literally the weight off of the nursing staff. A number that pops into my head was, in the first six months of the intervention at one of the hospitals, only on the one shift that the intervention was being experimented with, it reduced nurse back injuries 87%.

Jill James:

Wow, wow.

Alan Davis:

The ones that had gotten hurt had not called for the lift team to come help them. And I don't want to sound critical of those nurses and those workers. One of the big challenges in healthcare is, whether you're an EMT, a firefighter, a nurse, throughout that whole healthcare chain, we have a lot of people who are self-sacrificing to benefit others.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. Within my own family, my brother was a paramedic for over 20 years, and that's exactly what happened to him. Experienced a career-ending injury for the sacrifice of other people from lifting and carrying human beings for over 20 years. Yeah, I get that. I get that. I feel that. Thank you for that important work. Gosh, we need more and more people working on those initiatives for those really high hazard. What you don't necessarily always think about is high hazard industries, but those repetitive stresses are certainly, certainly there. Alan, I know we are having so much fun. I'm having a lot of fun. I hope you're having a lot of fun. We haven't even gotten to present workday. We may have to ship ourselves forward in time because I know there's some things I want to ask you about, especially initiatives that you're working on today at American Seafoods. So healthcare wise, University of Washington, do you find yourself next back on ship?

Alan Davis:

Yes. I had been working at the University of Washington. And through my work at the local chapter of the American Society of Safety Engineers, I had different recruiters that would call me and tell me about positions that they had open. I would tell them two or three people that would fit the opening that they had and sort of facilitate the process some. I got a call from a recruiter that I knew, a head hunter if you will, who had worked in the commercial fishing industry and knew that I had worked in the commercial fishing industry. And he said that he didn't want to talk to me about anybody else. He wanted to talk to me about me, that there was an opening at a local fishing company that I would be ideally suited for. And I promptly told him to go away in no uncertain terms.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm.

Alan Davis:

But at the end of the conversation, I agreed that I would call one person and ask them a question and sort of vet the company that I was being referred to. And I don't know what I was thinking. I called the same guy that originally recruited me to the commercial fishing industry. I called Steve Kennebeck, and he, the second he heard my voice, became very excited. And it turned out that he had done some consulting work for American Seafoods. One of the things that he had recommended to them, the company had grown to the point that it needed a full-time safety professional to facilitate their prevention work. They were using outside consultants. They were using outside consultants like Tony Ford that I had worked with when I was at Tyson Seafood. But having a full-time dedicated safety professional would be a good idea. So my one reach out to try to find out whether I should pursue the job at American Seafoods or entertain the job at American Seafoods had actually just written a big report for them, suggesting that they create a safety department. And two job interviews later, I wound up being offered the opportunity to leave the University of Washington and come back to working in commercial fishing. I guess I didn't say it earlier, but one of the things, working in commercial fishing, it is a hard working group of people.

Jill James:

I can't imagine.

Alan Davis:

Literally from all over the world. They so much remind me of the agriculture farmer rancher ethos that I grew up with, where you're getting things done, you're feeding the world, you're feeding your own family. And in a lot of ways, many of our employees may be supporting an entire micro-economy back home where they originally hail from. And working with commercial fishermen has been an honor and a privilege, and I know it sounds trite that there are-

Jill James:

It doesn't.

Alan Davis:

... so many heart rending, heartwarming, life-altering stories that I have heard, sitting at the table in the galley on a commercial fishing boat and asking a question similar to what we started today with, how the heck did you get here?

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Everyone's... Yeah, go ahead.

Alan Davis:

I've now been with American Seafoods for 20 years.

Jill James:

Wow.

Alan Davis:

I am super privileged and happy to work for American Seafoods. One of the things that I really like about our organization is that leadership here supports not just what I'm trying to do to make our operation safer, but they support me spending company time and my own, working with efforts locally with Seattle Fishermen's Memorial and with other organizations in our area and gear type. But they've also supported me traveling and going and participating in things like the US Coast Guard's Fishing Vessel Safety Advisory Committee. I served on that committee for 12 years, I think. They've supported me participating in fishing vessel safety forums with the National Transportation Safety Board. I have had the opportunity with the American Seafoods' support to attend three international fishing industry safety and health conferences. It's really great to work for a company that realizes that a rising tide floats all boats or raises all boats.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. Right,

Alan Davis:

That by making the industry as a whole safer, we make all of us safer.

Jill James:

Mm-hmm. You've also been working with your organization on sustainability things as well. I know you had a recent opportunity to do something pretty cool with fishing nets. Do you want to talk about that as we're wrapping up our time today?

Alan Davis:

Yeah. It was a little scary from a safety professional standpoint in some ways, but it all came out well. One of the things that the fishing industry worldwide uses is nets. Most of the nets worldwide now are made out of synthetic materials. And many of those nets are made out of multiple different kinds of synthetic materials. Now, over time, a net wears out. It gets stretched on one side, gets torn on another side, and you can do so many repairs and so many ways, but eventually it just isn't flying through the water the way it needs to be efficient. And classically, those nets would wind up going into a landfill, or at least you'd hope they'd wind up going into a landfill.

Jill James:

And not to the bottom of the sea.

Alan Davis:

Yes. So they're entering into waste stream. A young lady, who had worked as a National Marine Fisheries observer in the commercial fishing industry in Alaska, saw these large amounts of recyclable material that did not have an outlet or a stream or a process within which it could be recycled, and thought that it was a waste and that there was a better way to do things. So she has started an organization called Nets Your Problem. What they do is facilitate nets and other commercial fishing gear going from various communities in commercial fishing into different processes by which they can be recycled. One of the challenges to that is in separating those materials. You can't just take a 25,000 pound net and dump it into a blender and out comes a material that you can use to create other products. So those materials need to be separated out and there's no mechanical way to do that. So some of the folks that Nets Your Problem and some of the folks in American Seafoods got the kind of crazy idea that instead of paying a third party to disassemble these things, that we would try taking one apart ourselves. So the Tuesday after Labor Day 2022, we had a approximately 2,000 meters of net stretched out. We had people from Nets Your Problems, from American Seafoods' office staff, from the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers Association, and from our insurance company, all gather together on Tuesday morning. I provided some knife 101 instruction, which was kind of interesting because I had never thought about how to train somebody not to poke themselves or cut themselves. But we had supplies and materials and a little circus tent and tables and chairs, but it was six hours of manual labor with knives cutting apart this net and batching it up into different material types. And at the end of the day, we had over 19,000 pounds of material sorted out into different bales or bundles ready to go into different recycle streams or waste streams, actually not waste streams. All of the material, I believe, is destined to be recycled one way or another. And that number does not include the chain that we worked to separate away from the net. At one point, I had, I don't know, over a thousand feet of chain that was still in one continuous run that we had swirled around into a giant pile, but we didn't have the ability to weigh it because it was too much. But it was really great being able to take this material that 10 years ago would have gone into a landfill, and instead break it down into its component pieces and be able to put it into various recycled streams so that it can get used, it can have an additional life and not be wasted.

Jill James:

Oh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic.

Alan Davis:

And I'm really happy to say that with all those office people running around with all those knives, nobody got hurt.

Jill James:

Yay. Another great... Yeah, you're a good trainer, Alan. You're a good trainer. No doubt about it. You've sent me the pictures of this particular day and it's just phenomenal to see it. I don't know if those are personal pictures or they ended up in a press release, but they were pretty fun to look at.

Alan Davis:

I think that they were part of the press packet or whatever that went out. It was a good event. For those of us that are used to driving a chair in an office, it was an event that might have left some of us sore for a week or so.

Jill James:

Yeah. If that was an official press release, then maybe we'll have to include that in our show notes so people can see this because you've told a great story around it, and it's really wonderful to see with the pictures. Alan, I know that our time is coming to an end, and I didn't even get to some of the things I wanted to ask you, so I think I might put you in the hot seat now and say, will you come back? Because one of the things that I'd love to talk with you about, and I bet our audience would love to hear about, is how you've bridged over all these 20 plus years in the commercial fishing industry, compliance with the general industry construction and commercial fishing, all of the regulatory bodies and how you wade your way through that, to use water analogy, I guess. I would love to have that conversation with you at another time.

Alan Davis:

I think I would be open to doing that. And it is interesting, the number of regulatory bodies that commercial fishing has to interface with, I think, would be the polite term to use because we have National Marine Fisheries Regulations. National Marine Fisheries is under the agency of NOAA, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. We interface with the Coast Guard. We interface with OSHA, sort of rarely but occasionally with state program OSHA kind of agencies, but we also are making a food product. So we have state and federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the FDA that we interface with. At one point in time on one of our smaller vessels that we used to manage, I had five different government agencies in the wheelhouse, and the wheelhouse on this particular ship was smaller than my office.

Jill James:

Yeah, it's a little different. I'm thinking of the meat packing industry and how they have one set of inspectors in a plant on the shore, on the ground in a factory. Alan, yes, please, if you will, come back for that. And I just want to say thank you so much for your investment with us today, but also your investment in our industry for our profession and the ways that you move things forward. The passion that you bring to the work is really admirable. Thank you so much.

Alan Davis:

Thank you.

Jill James:

And thank you for spending your time with listening today. And more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe an iTunes, the Apple Podcasts app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals like Alan and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jaraysi, our podcast producer. And until next time, thanks for listening.