Risk Management: Address now, avoid problems later

Gordon Graham here and thanks once again for taking the time to visit my little corner of the Credit Union website. I have a monthly opportunity to give you a view of some of the things that I am thinking about – that may or may not apply to each and every one of you, but hopefully there will be something in here that is of some value to you. And for those of you still active in the business, if there is something in here that piques your interest, take it back to work and share it with as many people as you can.

Let me start with this thought for today – and then I will move onto my focus for this piece. I am preparing this piece in New Hampshire at a beautiful location on Lake Winnepausakee. As I look at the license plates most common in this State, I see the motto “Live Free or Die.”

Apparently these people take this seriously for I have never been in a state where the seatbelt usage is so low. I know many states have a usage rate of over 90% – and I would be shocked to learn if this state had a usage rate of anything higher than 50%. When I checked online about this I learned that thirty-two of the fifty states have a “primary” seatbelt law (meaning that a cop can pull you over for not wearing a seatbelt) and seventeen of the states have a “secondary” seatbelt law (meaning that you can be cited for not wearing a belt, but the reason for the traffic stop cannot be the seatbelt violation) and if you are doing the math on this – forty-nine states have a law regarding seatbelts.

And then there is the Granite State. “Nope – no one is going to force me to wear a seatbelt and we will fight any attempt to make that a law.” Unfortunately for the citizens of this state, the “laws of physics” still apply and without the restraint device in use a minor collision can result in a major problem. You will not be surprised to learn that this state does not have a “helmet” law for motorcyclists. “Live Free or Die” indeed.

For some reason the above makes me remember a conversation I had with the Governor of Wisconsin years ago at a traffic safety conference. Apparently his staff briefed him on who I was and my position on things related to traffic safety, and just before my presentation he asked me to “respect” the anti-helmet law people present at the conference.

At the time I was still employed in my career job in law enforcement and the last thing I need is the Governor of Wisconsin calling the Governor of California and telling him that I did not heed his wishes – that would not be good – so I made no comments about motorcycle helmets to the conference attendees.

But when I identified the group in the audience who was “anti-helmet” I noted that many of them had motorcycle helmets with them. I found this a bit confusing so when I was done with my talk I made it a point to talk to the “anti-helmet” people (who were a very nice bunch including many Veterans of the armed services) and the conversation went something like this. “We are opposed to helmet laws, but only a fool would get on a motorcycle without a helmet.”

All of the above is remotely tied into to my focus for this brief piece. Every state has different rules for different things – and what is a crime in California might not be a crime in Nevada. You can insert any two of the fifty states in the prior sentence and it would be accurate.

Within any state – each jurisdiction has different ways of doing business and what might be a “crime” in Los Angeles County may not be criminal behavior in Orange County. And once again, you can substitute any two of the fifty-eight counties in the previous sentence and it would be accurate.

With respect to police and fire operations, each political subdivision (read: city or county) has a different way of doing business and there is no “standardization of best practices” in our respective professions. Almost every fire department and police department has a different way of doing business. I comment on this issue regularly, and in my last writing I proposed a solution – but this is not my focus in this piece.

Obviously I am leading up to something. You would have to be living under a rock to not know that Tiger Woods has lost his edge and Charlie Sheen has lost his “sitcom” and that there is an ongoing “re-engineering” of government going on around America. In past pieces for this and other websites I have talked about “regionalization and consolidation” of public safety agencies and this has generated a lot of comments from people. Whether you are “pro or con” on this issue is inconsequential. It is going on around America and inside each of the fifty individual states.

So what is my point? I was recently perusing a copy of “USA Today” (September 27) and there was a piece in there about the merger of United Airlines and Continental Airlines. The title of the story was:

United pilots cite fears on safety.

Here is the gist of this story. Apparently, every airline has a different way to fly their planes. Commercial airline pilots follow precise directions from everything including who talks to ATC and who does what if something goes wrong. Pilots at two different airlines might follow different procedures even if they are flying the same type of plane. So now that United pilots may be flying with pilots formerly with Continental – and even if they are each “checked out” on the 757 they are operating – they might have a different way of handling a given situation. I can think of dozens of scenarios in which this “different way of doing things” could end up in a less than desirable situation.

So with all of the above in mind here is my summary for this piece. If your department is merging or consolidating with another fire department – please be aware of the “risk” that members of other departments may have been trained to handle a given task differently than you have been trained. This is an “identifiable risk” and as such it is a “manageable risk” and it must be addressed.

I guarantee that it will be addressed by the “lawyers” after some tragedy occurs, but having the lawyers fix out problems is usually too late. All of us in both of our professions need to address these issues before they become problems.

Anyhow, that is all for now and as always I welcome your comments.

Take care and stay safe.

Gordon Graham
President, Lexipol