What Responding to Workplace Emergencies Taught Me About Prevention

I spent over nine years as a firefighter and paramedic. I've responded to workplace emergencies across construction sites, manufacturing plants, warehouses, and commercial facilities. Falls, amputations, chemical exposures, entrapments, cardiac arrests on the shop floor.

Every scene is different. But over the years, three patterns showed up so consistently that I stopped being surprised by them — and started being frustrated by them.

Pattern 1: The Paperwork Existed, But the Practice Didn't

At almost every serious workplace incident, the company had documentation. Somewhere in a binder or a file cabinet, there was a safety manual. There were training sign-in sheets. Sometimes there was even an OSHA 10 card in the injured worker's wallet.

But when you looked at the actual conditions — the actual way people were working when the incident happened — the documentation and the reality were two different worlds.

The safety program existed on paper. It didn't exist on the floor.

This is the gap that kills people. Not the absence of rules, but the absence of practice. The absence of someone regularly walking the site, watching how work actually gets done, and closing the distance between the manual and Monday morning.

Pattern 2: The Supervisor Knew

This one bothered me the most. In the aftermath of an incident, when we'd get a picture of what was happening before the call came in, it was almost always the case that a supervisor was aware of the condition or the practice that led to the injury.

Not maliciously. Not negligently, in most cases. They just... knew. The way you know the check engine light is on but you're still driving to work. It was a known deviation. It had been happening for a while. Nobody had been hurt yet.

Until someone was.

The supervisor isn't usually the villain in these stories. They're usually someone who's been given production goals without safety authority, or who has never been taught to recognize and address risk before it compounds. Supervisor safety leadership isn't intuitive — it's a skill that has to be developed.

Pattern 3: The Worker Didn't Understand the Risk

Recklessness was rare. In my experience, the vast majority of workers involved in serious incidents were not being cavalier about safety. They were doing what they thought was normal. They didn't fully understand the specific hazard they were exposed to, or the severity of the potential consequence.

This is a training failure — but not the kind most people think. The worker might have sat through a generic safety orientation. They might have watched a video. They might have an OSHA card.

What they didn't have was job-specific, hazard-specific training delivered in a way that made the risk real and personal to them. There's a massive difference between "fall protection: don't fall" and "this is the specific edge you'll be working near, this is exactly how your harness needs to be connected, and this is what a 6-foot fall onto concrete does to a human body."

Specificity saves lives. Generic training checks boxes.

What I Do About It Now

These three patterns — the practice gap, the supervisor gap, and the training gap — are the reason CDRisk exists. Every service we offer targets one of them:

• Monthly inspections close the gap between documentation and practice
• Supervisor safety leadership coaching gives supervisors the tools to see and address risk
• Job-specific behavioral training makes hazards real and personal, not abstract

I stopped responding to emergencies and started trying to prevent them. The patterns are predictable. That means they're preventable.

If you want to know where these patterns might be present in your operation, [schedule a free safety assessment](/free-assessment). We'll walk your site with the eyes of someone who has been on the other side of these calls.