The reason we have OSHA in the US...

While I intend on finding some kind of desk job when I finish up with PC, in the past I've had a fair amount of work experience in the realm of non-desk job / OSHA regulated stuff. If you don't know (or have forgotten), OSHA stands for Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It's Uncle Sam's workplace watchdog that makes sure people aren't chopping their fingers off or running people over with forklifts when at work. I do feel that OSHA is a good thing, but often times people in the construction, manufacturing, and risk averse industries feel that OSHA rules with a heavy hand. There are often complaints that OSHA's regulations are overly conservative or completely unnecessary, and having worked in the construction and engineering fields, I can understand these complaints.

But I also see why OSHA is a good thing. Take Mali as a case study for example... People using grinders and welders without any kind of protective equipment. People lighting cigarettes off the arc of a welder. People working in unventilated spaces or in excavations that haven't been shored up. No closed-toed shoes. No helmets. No guards on machinery with exposed moving parts. I see a lot of people with massive scars from severe wounds on hands, arms, legs, and feet.

As I've mentioned before, my latest project has been well construction. I've found that on top of teaching the villagers a new method for well construction, I've also had to dedicate a fair bit of time to safety lessons... even concepts that seem fairly obvious to me. For example...

- You shouldn't lower heavy objects into a well directly above someone standing in the bottom of the well. What happens if you drop the heavy object?

- You should make sure that the rope, poles, and beams you are going to use to lower someone into a well can actually support the weight of the workers.

- You should use a rope when going up and down a well shaft, instead of trying to play "Cliffhanger" by scaling directly up and down the loose earth wall of the well.

- You should anchor your rope to something that won't move instead of having someone hold it while a person dangles suspended several meters above the bottom of a well shaft.


I also had a bit of a scare recently with the second well I built in village. My counterpart and a mason were working in the well about three meters above the water surface and 2 meters below the top of the well. My counterpart had been doing some strenuous work in the well and was standing on top of the bricks making up the well lining, in between vertical strands of rebar sticking up about 2 feet out of the bricks. All of a sudden he stopped talking as if to catch his breath, was quite for a few moments and then slumped over between the vertical rebar and the well wall. He fainted. For a second I was seriously freaking out. My counterpart is in his 50's and I thought he was having a heart attack or something.

Fortunately he became conscious soon after, but was pretty weak for a while. The mason in the well, another laborer and I had to pull him out of the well so he could recover. He could have easily been seriously injured by falling onto one of the vertical strands of rebar or by falling into the well where he could have broken something or potentially drowned before anyone would have been able to pull him out.

My counterpart is fine now. I suspect that he was just very dehydrated, low on electrolytes, and... old. I think he forgot that he can't do things like he did when he was in his 20's.

Apparently workers fainting in wells is not uncommon in Mali either. In many places the water table is several dozen meters below the surface, which means men are working in enclosed, unventilated spaces. They end up fainting because air isn't circulating to the bottom of the well fast enough and the workers end up using all the oxygen and pass out. This was not the case for my counterpart, who was only a few feet below the surface.

But the lesson here is that well construction has very real risks and can be dangerous. I've heard stories in the past of people not putting any merit into safety and having a well cave in on workers, resulting in severe injury or death. I find that it is impossible to to eliminate all potential hazards in a workplace, but at least in the US we are very aware of workplace safety. In Mali it's not on the horizon of consideration. I've been here for a year and still don't even know the word for "safety" in Bambara.