Well, similarly to my final challenge, I went to bed way too late last night, and then got up extra early to get this stuff to work, and lost. I had to report out yet again, that I was incomplete.
This doesn’t make any sense. Like safety, communication has been ingrained within me from my former career. If something went wrong, whether that be a unit shut down, we violated a permit, someone got hurt, or simply that we were not going to make our monthly production targets, I was trained to communicate early and often, and I did.
You communicate early as a method of bidding for help to mitigate the consequences of what could result if nothing were done or if you had no help. This gets you help. I mean, if you have release an EPA reportable quantity, you have one hour to report it to the state police and DEQ among other entities that must be informed. One hour to develop a quantifiable estimate for how much of the material, and sometimes of each material which requires looking up all the vapor pressures, has been released; determine if it is a violation of the RQ or close enough that you should just go ahead and call as there are high-penalties for not calling within the hour; then make like seven phone calls to report it, all while you’re also trying to mitigate and stop the release. Sometimes turning a valve doesn’t do it–sometimes, there’s not a valve.
Have you ever taken an eye-ball guess of the mass of a vapor cloud. Next time you’re cooking, try to guess the mass of a little steam–a chemical (yes, chemical) that you see probably daily.
Now consider trying to eye-ball a cloud of HF versus Cl2. HF looks massive even at teenie-tiny quantities. It’s so light and reacts immediately upon contact with any moisture, so it turns white and makes a giant, poofy (dare I say kind of pretty), billowing cloud that, depending on atmospheric conditions, could be like half a pound. Cl2 on the other hand is Elphaba-green with maybe a touch of mustard yellow, heavy, and falls densely compared to HF. A cloud of a seemingly similar volume–as I recall Blaze the monster truck singing to my children this evening: the space you take up is volume–could, again depending on atmospheric conditions be well over ten pounds (and yes that math doesn’t add up, but I did say, depending on atmospheric conditions. This includes wind speed, humidity, temp, etc all of which play a big role in this). By the way, 10 Lbs is the RQ for both cl2 & hf. The majority of others are 1000 or 5000 Lbs. So now, try guessing if a cloud of Cl2 is ten pounds or a cloud HF is ten pounds.
And I can tell you that in the moment, it all looks (and smells) like a lot stuff you don’t want to be anywhere near. I’ve had managers and operators though, eyeball these, which is very impressive. I”ll be ready to make the calls, and they’ll ask for video even, and say, “no way! That is not ten pounds of HF”. “Really? Because this cloud is huge!”. As I said, most of them have been about a half pound despite looking like 15 to 20 to me. HF & Cl2, were not my point though. Communication! When events occurred, I was trained to communicate upon knowledge receipt. 6:37PM, I’m on my way out of the plant, and I see a leak, I don’t leave–I make calls. To be clear, depending on the size, I would call the Health, Safety, & Environmental department first and then my immediate superior or his, if he was not reachable. And actually, sometimes, if it was dire enough, I’d radio the operators first as those guys are the ones who are qualified and trained to stop it, which is the first priority, but that doesn’t mean you have more than an hour to call it in. One hour.
So communication. In fact, we had accountability meetings in every single one of my roles where we had to report out our metrics daily. These aided in the communication. I think I’m going to go back to this practice. Everyday, I’m going to mark my progress and note anything that may be at risk. That’s easy–except that not once have I believed that I wasn’t going to finish my stories, and it’s pushing on not ever having actually finished my stories. Argh. How do you quantify something so abstract when you don’t know the difficulty–i mean, it’s kind of like eye-balling an HF cloud vs a Cl2 cloud. It takes practice.
Perhaps I’ll break every story down into minimal tasks and report out that way and treat out morning meetings more like that–red or green. If I’m more than 20% red on Tuesday, I should report out that meeting the iteration is at risk. More than 40% on Monday, at risk, and so forth. 20% per day. But then I need to rate each task based on complexity; still that’s do-able, and while it seems like extra work, maybe there’s even value to taking the time to do it. There is, because your customers are important and deserve to know where their product is at.
Ah this is so easy. I don’t know why, this skill/training, has not crossed over for me. Why this one died when it was heavily ingrained in me. My communication skills look like they suck right now–and, well, they do! They suck, because I am not practicing the skills that I’ve already acquired and mastered–i’ve let them go for some reason. It’s time to bring those back and do like I have for every other job–i mean (oh the irony), I implemented this process at two of my former jobs, because communication sucked. LOL?
Yikes!
PS. When it comes to HF, you don’t want to see ten pounds of it. That stuff is mean. I’ve seen it–it’s wispy in relatively small quantities and billowy in slightly higher quantities. It’s a very dense white cloud, and it smells like sweet vinegar that tickles your nose. That’s in extremely small quantities. It’s easy to smell and very recognizable. You smell it before you feel it, but you may not recognize it until you feel it start to tingle and tickle the inside of your nose. It reacts with the moisture on your skin, on your eyes, in your nose–any mucous membrane it can make contact with. Then it penetrates and starts eating your bones and any free (or otherwise) calcium in your blood.
It takes the surface area of like a penny to be fatal if not treated. A drop could kill you, but it’s elusive–like a brown recluse, you may not even feel the initial bite or notice it until, well, you can’t not notice it.
A drop on your skin that gets wiped away quickly, might tingle, but it won’t cause any real pain–not immediately, especially if it’s dilute, so you may think it was nothing, just a drop of hot condensate. But then it penetrates and attacks your calcium supply. Hours later, you could be in so much agonizing pain that an injection under your fingernail containing the antidote: calcium gluconate, would be the best feeling & relief you’ve ever experienced, ever. I heard this story in my first job from a friend/co-worker of the man it happened to. I have been fortunate to not personally know anyone who has died, but I’m only two degrees removed from that as well.
The people who make your stuff take a lot of risks every day for you to enjoy convenient transportation, your air conditioning & electricity, even your plastics, papers, and electronics, and the extra padding on your mattress or in your bra, so essentially, for you to have a comfortable and convenient life. Don’t get me too wrong, I know I seem to be driving a condescending and maybe even condemning point here that my reader may be ungrateful, but that’s not my intent. The truth is that, at least in our country, all the people who make the stuff in your life choose to do that work, and they are highly trained to perform the work as well as effectively respond to hazardous events.
Anway, communication is important. Thanks.