Santa Clara - Day Four

Well, it's become even more interesting in Santa Clara.

Yesterday we had an incident where the driller hit one of his helpers on his hard hat with a shovel. the helper was on his knees cleaning off the auger, and the driller was shoveling soil. the driller brought the shovel across and the shovel struck the hard hat. I reported that as a "Near Loss"; an event that nearly resulted in a loss (this time an injury). I found out today that it actually counts as a non-injury loss (or something like that).

Then today the driller stepped down from his platform and caught his heel on the cuttings tub (a square bin with raised sides that contain the cuttings coming up the auger from the borehole). He fell to the ground missing hitting anything else in his path.

These are just two of 17 incidents that have occurred in the past 4 days. Primarily I think it's a case of the crew rushing and not paying complete attention to what is going on around them.

Tomorrow, our Health and Safety representative, a representative from the driller's company, and the ExxonMobil project manager are coming out to discuss safety on the job site.

It should be interesting.