When is safety unsafe?

I have just sat through two days of mine site inductions. To avert your immediate tendency to want to ‘switch off’, I urgently assert that this is not a rant about the ever-frustrating and productivity-retarding runaway phenomenon that is ‘Occupational Health and Safety’; far from it.

In fact, the last two days have been, at the very least, relaxing and, at most, absolutely comical, with an almost constant banter between us (the biologists (N=2)), and the hydrocarbon infused pilots of the big yellow Tonka trucks. These guys all considered themselves the consummate taxonomists, referring to the Northern Quoll (the focus of our current survey) as the northern numbat, mainland quokka, the great Australian gerbil and the short-eared lesser-bilby.

My apologies as I have digressed somewhat. What I really want to discuss is the merit of Venomous Snake Relocation training in the work place, with particular attention on mine sites in Western Australia. Not just the one I am on: All of them. I am one of the select few in Western Australia who are fully qualified and endorsed by the Department of Parks and Wildlife to teach people how to safely capture and relocate snakes that are a nuisance in the work-place. The demand from mining companies for such training is incessant and these companies are willing to pay top dollar for skilled trainers. So it would seem counter intuitive that I would challenge the necessity for mine site personnel to undergo such training.

Make no mistake; I adore venomous herpetofauna (i.e. reptiles and amphibians). I always have and likely always will. Contributing to the welfare of this much unloved fauna group has always been one of my highest priorities and, as such, I spent many years as a youngster voluntarily saving snakes from people. That was until the inevitable encumbrances of children, work and home duties left me insufficiently idle and no longer able to immediately respond to those cries for help. I have, since, sent many years trying to raise the profile of snakes and increase public awareness and safety of people who might inadvertently encounter a snake. Yes; there is a place for volunteer snake relocators and they do an amazing job of preventing our native herpetofauna from meeting an untimely demise. For the most part, they are passionate amateur herpetologists that live, eat sleep and breathe snakes.

However, I question the merit of training mine site personnel that are not herpetologists or, at the very least, hobby reptile keepers, to relocate nuisance snakes on mine sites or in the work place. Having conducted innumerable Venomous Snake Relocation training courses over the last 10 years I can state, with confidence, that the majority of people I train have no more than a passing interest in relocating snakes. More often than not, they are long term FIFO workers that are just looking for another certification to add to their resume or another excuse to take a couple of days out of their monotonous rotation to do something a little bit ‘exciting’. Don’t get me wrong: if my company offered to pay me to do a training course that sounded even remotely interesting I would jump at the chance. Everyone is entitled to drain as many benefits out of their workplace as they possibly can. More importantly, I am certainly not intimating that snake relocation is a highly evolved skill, the training for which should only be offered to a select few of sound body and mind. No, grasshopper, this is not so.

My concern centres on the safety and well-being of those I am training. In short, I conduct a two day, slow and progressive hands-on training course where trainees build their confidence and skill to a level such that they can demonstrate to me, at the end of the second day that they can competently and confidently get an agitated snake in a bag without hurting the snake or themselves. Having witnessed this I provide them with an endorsement that is, in effect, a certification that they are now a qualified Venomous Snake Relocators. They can then take that endorsement to any mine site and go on the ‘list’ as a snake catcher. Never mind the fact that different trainers train to use different methods and thus different mine carry different equipment: that is another story.

What is, perhaps, my greatest concern is that the person I train today may not encounter a snake for a week, a month, or a year. How then do we know (how do they know) if they are still capable when it comes time to bag their first snake? I can assure you that, for many of the trainees, the morning after the training is possibly the last time give another thought to venomous snake relocation. That is, until they are called upon months later to remove one. Evidence supporting this conclusion comes from the very limited number of trainees that even bother to follow through with their legal obligations to apply for the actual Wildlife Licence to remove venomous fauna. Instead, their name simply goes onto a list and when the call comes, they need to respond. Now, everyone has the right to refuse to undertake a task if they believe it to be unsafe and, therefore, the ‘qualified’ relocator has every right to raise his hand and say “No thankyou, please try the next person”. However, I am pretty sure that ego and bravado assert a small influence on this decision making process and, on a mine site, the average Joe is not going to concede that he is too nervous to undertake a task he has, clearly, received the requisite training to do. On the flip side, a great many relocations on mine sites are executed on snakes that were merely passing through and represented no threat to anyone and no loss of productivity. They are captured and relocated just for the sake of it. I have the data to back this statement up, should anyone wish to challenge this assertion.

Below is the most common pyramid or hierarchy of hazard control used in many mine sites. In the first instance, snakes cannot be eliminated. Following on, they are not a piece of machinery or equipment, so they can’t be substituted out of the equation in an operational scenario. Their presence in the work place could be engineered out, but that is grossly impractical, unless you want to encapsulate the mine site in a bubble, barricading it off from the natural environment in which it is set.

At the other end of the pyramid is Personal Protective Equipment and most mine sites have got this pretty well covered. As a general rule all personnel at work are required to wear ankle height boots, long pants, gloves, glasses and hard hats. Unfortunately, this is not the case back in camp where shorts and thongs are combined with a quiet beer or two and more relaxed and less attentive demeanour. When engaged, PPE does help to protect the individual, which is perhaps the best we can hope for. However, it does not allow ‘old mate’ to get back into his donger after a drink at the ‘wetty’ when there is a Mulga Snake perched on his front step, nor does it allow him to commence work in his D10 Cat Dozer when there is a Taipan sitting on the ignition switch.

So that leaves us with Administrative Solutions, which encompass education, training and, in many cases, isolation and exclusion. Venomous Snake Relocation is a very good tool to reduce the overall risk that someone on the mine site will be bitten by a snake causing severe injury or even death, providing the relocator is an experience herpetologist that has relocated many snakes in innumerable situations previously. However, calling upon a person to relocate a snake when that person has merely attended a two day training programme and is not a bonifide herpetologist that is 100% committed to developing his/her skills on a very regular basis, is a very bad idea that needs serious redress.

Where does that leave us? Option 1 is to rely only on Venomous Snake Relocators that have taken it upon themselves to undergo appropriate training in their own personal time, who hold a current Regulation 17 licence issued by the State Department of Parks and Wildlife and who can readily demonstrate a continuous history of snake relocation at the work site and, more importantly, at home on their own time. If such a person does not exist on the mine site, then that is too bad. Option 2 is to just leave the snake to go on its merry way and to cordon off the machine or the affected area until the ‘perceived threat’ has passed. This may seem impractical but I have been on sites where the entire mine site is shut down when a little white box beeps and says there is lightning someone on the horizon! So my suggestion is not as impractical as it sounds.

What should we not do? Offer training to anyone who wants a day or two off to break the monotony of their day to day work life and who will never give a snake, or its welfare, another thought once the course is over and the certificate of competency has been signed and issued to them.

Am I being synical? Maybe. Am I being sensible in challenging what has become so broadly accepted as the norm? I think so. After all, improvements in safety come from continual change and the never ending pursuit of Zero Harm to People and the Environment.