The opportunities
afforded by existing technologies are too great to envision, much less
enumerate, but I’d like to suggest a couple you ought to watch.
Over the past
several years we’ve experienced an increase in the amount of night and inclement
weather work, both of which place a premium on situational awareness. During
this same period we’ve witnessed a significant increase in the use of hearing
protection gear—plugs, Mickey Mouse ears, or acoustic earphones—and while there
is much to be said for the health aspects involved, the isolation from the
immediate environment introduces dangers of a different sort to work sites.
There’s
more…
Cell phones and
text-messaging devices of all kinds are ubiquitous today, and they’re in the
hands of a generation who grew up with them and are if not addicted to them,
certainly spring-loaded to taking advantage of their wonderful capabilities. The
flip side is that despite the hogwash we tell ourselves about being able to
multi-task, we can’t…at least not simulaneously. Sequentially we can, but our
success at this is really a function of a well developed habit pattern, which is
unlikely in the work context.
There’s no better
reminder of this than the recent Los Angeles MetroLink crash where it was found
that the engineer was text messaging as the train sped past a warning
signal.
OK, so maybe
you’ll agree we’ve got a situational awareness problem. The question is, what do
we do about it?
It would be nice
to be able to exclude iPods, cell phones, etc., from the jobsite, but that
doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the present, especially since equipment
manufacturers are eager to point out the MP-3 enabling gear in their machines.
The next best answer is to provide constant reminders of these risks to our
workers at daily meetings, at lunchbox training presentations, through signage,
and by other attention-getters, until we’re able to bring some existing
technologies to bear.
While still in
its infancy, military commanders now have the ability to monitor the precise
position not only of aircraft and vehicles, but also of individual soldiers …
and then direct their activities via discrete communications. If you are using a
GPS (or laser) base station and can communicate with your people and equipment
in real time, you are well on the way to having what amounts to a job-site
collision avoidance system. What’s missing is the black box that integrates
location data, looks for potential collisions, and issues some sort of warning
or command.
Is this too far
out there? I don’t think so, particularly when you think of what’s happened to
dirtmoving processes in the last decade. It’s truly astounding what technology
makes possible these days. It seems that our biggest problem lies in deciding
what we want and then asking for it