Safety professionals try true stories to get point across

[thedrifter]

May 19, 2003

Safety professionals try true stories to get point across

By Connie Cass
Associated Press

In peace and war, off duty and on, a few hundred service members die in accidents each year, and thousands are injured. So promoting everyday safety is a serious military strategy.
But how to sell brash young warriors, primed for bullets and bombs, on the mundane merits of seat belts and safety goggles and look-before-you-leap?

The Navy?s safety team has a battle plan: Skip the platitudes in favor of telling sailors? and pilots? true stories about bang-ups and blunders, from the comic to the tragic.

The result is a sort of macho show-and-tell that gives a far more frank, and funky, glimpse of military mistakes than the government typically reveals.

On a Web site designed for sailors and Marines, but open to everyone, the Naval Safety Center presents a photo gallery of screw-ups, both military and civilian: An errant missile scoots across a flight deck while a crewman scrambles away. The bed of a dump truck rises into overhead power lines. A woman drives her sedan into a wide puddle that turns out to be deep, too ? and swallows up the whole car.

Occasionally, they throw in something shocking: a close-up of a crewman?s scalp scarred by an airplane antenna, a sailor?s jaw blown open by a practice bomb, the open hatch where a Marine fell 20 feet to his death. One disturbing article describes how a Marine was crushed and nearly killed by a moving steel door.

?If people hear they?re going to a safety lecture, they plan on taking a nap,? said Derek Nelson, in charge of the Naval Safety Center?s five magazines, Web site and posters. ?But everybody likes to hear stories. ... It?s a little harder to dodge the reality if it?s a true story that happened to your peer.?

One reality the Norfolk, Va.-based center wants to drive home: In a typical year more military people are killed or injured in off-duty accidents than on the job.

Last year, 393 members of the Navy, Marines, Army and Air Force were killed in off-duty accidents. Vehicle crashes were the leading killer.

So far this year, more than 175 have died accidentally while off the job ? surpassing the 151 reported killed in the Iraq war, as of Sunday.

Most of those lost in Iraq were killed in action, but more than one-third died in helicopter or vehicle crashes or other accidents.

History shows a spike in off-duty accidents as troops come home from long deployments, eager to celebrate. As sailors and Marines return from the war, the safety center is emphasizing warnings about drinking and driving, avoiding fatigue on long drives home, using the buddy system on leave and safe recreation.

?We look at losing a young man to a skiing or boating accident just the way we do at losing him on duty,? said Rear Adm. Stephen Turcotte, commander of the center, which is responsible for probing every on-duty accident.

The Army and Air Force also have safety centers to investigate accidents and promote caution, and their own giveaway magazines and Web sites.

But they don?t match the naval center?s wealth of snapshots and anecdotes, often spiked with sarcasm and self-deprecation. Turcotte credits a long Navy tradition of poking fun at one?s own gaffes and aviators? penchant for ?hangar flying? ? spinning yarns about their close calls once safely on the ground.

The tradition has expanded to first-person accounts of numerous motorcycle crashes, lawnmower accidents (one correspondent included photos of his shredded work boot), and even the smoky, smelly result of leaving popcorn unattended in the microwave one time too many.

The Navy Safety Center Web site attracts 250,000 visits per month, about half of them from outside the military.

Many are attracted by the ?Photo of the Week,? where they can see a crewman dragging a snake off the tarmac by its tail, the remains of a frightened deer that jumped off a bridge and crashed through the windshield of a Dodge Durango driving below, and a rat electrocuted when it squeezed into a wall outlet in a Navy building.

Names are sometimes withheld to avoid embarrassing the accident-prone. And Nelson said he tries not to overdo gruesome material, despite its shock value.

One of the center?s most-requested posters was a photograph of a finger stripped to the bone, with the missing flesh lying alongside it ? a reminder that rings can become caught in machinery.

?I hope it kept people from wearing their wedding rings,? Nelson said, ?but sometimes people just like to look at gross photos.?

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.


Sempers,

Roger