ALEXANDER GREEN
Joint Base Safety Office
Installation Management Command
Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington

In college, I worked as an intern for a mechanical contractor, installing HVAC and plumbing for large industrial projects. During the last of my four semester rotations at this company, I was assigned to work at a vehicle manufacturing plant that was being built in the area. There, I would learn a painful lesson on the importance of always wearing your personal protective equipment.

For the first time in weeks, I was off the job site and inside an air-conditioned office. I expected an easy day of paperwork and meetings, but within the first hour, I was called out to the shop to help scrap a broken rooftop unit for useable parts. I knew I didn’t have my safety shoes, but I’d been working in the field using heavy equipment for months, so I felt this task would be a breeze.

My manager hopped in the seat of the industrial forklift while I began hooking the straps to different parts of the broken rooftop unit. After the unit’s main body was disassembled, the forks on the lift needed to be widened to hoist the pieces over to the dumpster. My manager raised the forks and tilted them down to make the adjustment easier. It turned out that this process made it slightly too easy to adjust the forks. With one pull on the left fork, the entire piece slid off of the machine and directly onto my right foot.

The pain in my foot was sharp, but I was able to attempt to walk it off. After taking a couple of laps around the shop, spouting several obscenities, I sat down and slowly removed my right boot. When I finally was able to pull off my sock, I discovered my big toe was pointing directly toward the wall to my left.

Once at the hospital, the first thing I had to do was provide a urine sample for drug testing. This was followed by an X-ray, a broken-toe diagnosis and an appointment to see a specialist. About a week later, I made it to the podiatrist and, due to the severity of the fracture, he informed me I would need surgery on the toe. Surgery was set for about two weeks later, and during the wait, my whole foot grew larger and blacker and bluer.

When the day finally arrived, I went to the hospital before sunup and began the pre-surgery process. They wheeled me into the operating room, transferred me to the table, put the mask on my face and went to work. I woke up a few hours later in a fog, unable to feel my entire foot due to the pain block they used prior to surgery.

You never realize how important one toe can be to almost every task you perform throughout the day. I was unable to walk, drive, shower or do several other mundane tasks until doctors removed the pins from my toe. Even after the pin removal, I walked with a limp for more than two months. To this day, I am still unable to bend that toe anywhere like the other one, and on cold days, it is painful to walk on.

The pair of safety-toe shoes that was sitting in my garage at home would have saved me a lot of pain and inconvenience, as well as the company from having to go through the workers’ compensation process. Unfortunately, due to my own complacency and a lack of safety mentorship in the company, the mistake was made and the toe was broken. As is the case in many mishaps, a company-wide policy was issued requiring workers wear safety shoes at all times, and an extra guard was added onto the forklift to prevent the same accident from happening again. Had safety been our main priority that day, this mishap could have been avoided.

FYI

According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations, “ The employer shall ensure that each affected employee uses protective footwear when working in areas where there is a danger of foot injuries due to falling or rolling objects, or objects piercing the sole, or when the use of protective footwear will protect the affected employee from an electrical hazard, such as a static-discharge or electric-shock hazard, that remains after the employer takes other necessary protective measures.”

OSHA’s foot protection standard requires safety-toe footwear meet the American National Standard Institute (ANSI) standard Z41.1-1967. This ANSI standard requires these safety shoes to meet compression and impact tests. To determine if safety footwear meets the requirement, check for the "ANSI Z41.1" marking in the shoe.