The most important reason for workplace safety is not at work at all
For most people, the most treasured moments of their lives happen outside of work, which is why it’s so important to come home safely. The message is simple – an accident at work doesn’t just affect you, it also affects your family and friends.
For nine year old Owen Bevan ‘that day’ in 1984 started like any other. His father headed off to his job as a backhoe operator and his mother dropped Owen, his four brothers and two sisters at school.
The children were picked up in the afternoon, taken to their grandmother’s and Owen and his older brother were collecting eggs and feeding the chooks.
It was then that he found out his father wasn’t coming home.
Owen’s father had been crushed between a backhoe and a nine-tonne roller. Not once, but twice. The first blow crushed his pelvic region and fractured two lumbar vertebrae. The second strike fractured his thoracic vertebrae and at least seven ribs, shattered his sternum, punctured his lungs, and ruptured his spleen.
After what Owen described as ‘an eternity’ his father eventually did come home. But the man who went to work ‘that day’ never truly returned. While the family were grateful for his survival, Owen’s dad was 70 per cent incapacitated. At 38 years old the father of seven could no longer run around and kick a football. He could barely watch his kids play sport due to the pain of simply getting in and out of the car. He suffered from chronic pain, depression, paranoia, isolation, sleep deprivation and recurring nightmares. And his family suffered with him.
“The pain and the loss for my family appeared in many different ways and from many different means,” explained Owen.
“I remember hearing him screaming in his sleep where in dreams Dad would relive the nightmare of the incident – with one difference. In his dreams the roller was coming back for a third and final strike.”
“He always told us that he woke prior to it striking; if he ever didn’t wake up that would mean that the roller had of course beat him.”
There is no doubt that the workplace also incurred financial costs or productivity losses. But 24 years after ‘that day’ Owen, his father and his family are still paying the price for what was a preventable workplace incident.
Owen Bevan is now a Regional Operations Manager with Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. He shared his story with hundreds of workers during Work Safe Week 2007 in the hope that when you consider risk management you look beyond the workplace.
“Consider the people”, he says. “The people who work with you. The people you have a drink with on a Friday to celebrate the end of a good week’s work. Then picture them returning home from a day’s work and saying to their loved ones as they walk in the front door – I’m home.”
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Last updated 22 July 2008
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