Risk Management

Or: Juggling Chain Saws on the Playground

What to do when you have to teach young people knowledge, skills, procedures that relate to the participation with or manipulation of dangerous materials or processes? From crossing the street on a second grade field trip to the market, to the athletic fields, to the art and science labs, there is risk of injury in every aspect of education, but the public, policy and law makers and the chattering classes take for granted that all that exists within the context of education should be without risk of harm to students.

There is a train of thought among some in education that all risk, all danger, all variables related to harm can be eliminated during school hours. Look at all we do to make our schools safe; from metal detectors, searches, backpack and locker regulations, to what foods we serve in the cafeteria that may on the off-chance expose that one student to a possibly damaging food product; then there's the asbestos/chemical substance/tobacco/sugar/fat lobby seeking to eliminate all harm from the hours young people spend at school by straining out every possibility of potential injury.

But what happens when, in the process of teaching how to create an outstanding outcome by means of using inherently difficult materials or during the learning of complex skills, some weird variable pops up and the worst of scenarios occurs?

Take the case of the young girl killed while participating in a Junior Lifeguard training activity off the coast of Huntington Beach, California.* The boating procedure that caused her death is done hundreds of times by instructors and trainers throughout the country, but this one time a freak variable occurred and the young girl is no longer with us.

What to do? Cancel the program? Eliminate this portion of student training? Add more training to the instructors and pilots? Learn the procedure only on days of glassy calm? In this case, the program has been in operation for forty five years. The pilot, highly experienced, has devoted himself to this for twenty years.

The chemistry lab is one example of a place at school where students can get interested in a professional career in medicine or science or engineering, but the nature of the lab, and the materials being worked with entail risk. Even something as innocuous as baking soda and vinegar, if mishandled, will produce an explosion with flying pieces that will cut, or injure an eye (even while wearing safety glasses).

Sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, magnesium, iron oxide, aluminum, even common materials like bleach and ammonia must be handled safely, but sometimes mistakes happen, lapses in attention or judgement occur, and there is an accident. Is this cause to eliminate these types of instruction? The alternatives to learning in context with the materials themselves leads to far less understanding, with inferior preparation for later learning. There is only so much you can learn from the interactive textbook on the Cloud, or the wall poster of the periodic table, or from Youtube and the History Channel.

In my classroom we learn about the practical application of math and science as it relates to the engineering disciplines, and to do that, we use processes and machines to mold, shape, cut, sand, melt, twist, bore the materials under study to obtain real-world experience with the science and math principles and theory, and gain expertise and mastery with the materials themselves. 

For instance, in order to understand and learn the relationship between the terms clearance, tolerance, and fit, engineering terms having a direct bearing on Newton's laws of motion, students build mechanisms with moving parts that must fit inside one another with little friction, (wheels and axles) or force the movement of air (aerodynamic theory by building model rockets) in such a way as to learn how Newton's laws are in action with the common materials and technologies we use every day. Is radiation a wave or a particle? Theory can be elegant and sometimes cute, but working with the thing itself (electricity) makes the learning real and immediate and captivating.

It's not unusual to get a cut or scrape or a pounded finger or thumb or a low amperage shock. Safety is stressed constantly throughout the process, practiced by the students and the instructor, and a great deal of time is spent learning procedures and methods to stay safe around hand and machine tools.

But supervision only goes so far. It's a line young people must step across that sometimes twitches back on itself.

When you hand your kid the keys to the car, you do so with an element of trust based on confidence you have built, founded in turn on your personal judgement of your kid's skill level which is in turn based on the repeated observation that she/he has their own refined judgement to perform safely with this dangerous tool (for the auto, like it or not, is a dangerous tool). We give it little thought, but the young person with the car keys has the entree to immolate him/herself and a carload of other young people. Then there's the math angle; new drivers are inherently prone to damaging themselves and others (statistically speaking).

In education of any sort, there is the element of trust and confidence that must be granted or instilled in young people in order for them to have a sense of confidence and competence in their own skill or set of skills; when faced with a complex task or set of tasks that taxes the intellect or the ability to manipulate materials to obtain a preset or directed outcome, confidence in oneself based on empirical experience leads to success more often than not. 

Once the instructor, teacher, or parent is confident that the young person has mastered a skill, the young person must operate it independently to demonstrate to her/himself that "yes, I can do it!." The joy, relief, sometimes intoxication with newly learned abilities and the revelation of new competencies can spark a life-long love of learning in sometimes otherwise jaundiced pupils.

The alternative is to watch the teacher do all the work with risky/dangerous materials, many times a pointless observational exercise with no hands-on participation on the part of the student. (why do so many kids check their head out of the learning process? Ask them-- their perception is that school is boring and has little relevance to their lives)

In the situation with the Junior Lifeguards, hearing a lecture or watching video on what to do when you find yourself overboard in the sea just doesn't compare or have the same effect as the visceral and affective impact of actually practicing in deep salt water, even under controlled conditions.

But what about that one student you can never turn your back on for fear he/she will intentionally/maliciously do something really stupid/vicious? The playground and the common areas of schools (and classrooms as well) cannot be watched everywhere and at all times. Would we as a society permit such surveillance, or fund the educational establishment in such a way as to put adult eyes everywhere? And then the meme of "who will watch the watchers?" **

Students having the confidence built on experience with bullies or just plain randomly dangerous people have to speak up for themselves or have the confidence to speak up to us, and we have to protect them without being second-guessed by others who would do violence to us via the legal system.

When things go bad, it's the teachers and administrators who've put their pink bodies and livelihoods on the line so that young people will be educated, that get hammered, and from every angle. The legal angle notwithstanding, how do you cope inside your own head when you've done everything right, followed the procedures, done due diligence, and it still goes down flaming? It's wonderment that anyone at all still volunteers to teach school in our current dispensation of teaching and learning. 

What's the payoff when there are so many pressures to keep all the chain saws juggled? It's definitely not the money. It's when that one or two mediocre students come back several years later and tell you and show you what they’ve achieved because of the trust you have granted and the confidence you have instilled.

* Parsons, Dana, Death devastates Junior Lifeguards, Los Angeles Times, 6/16/09, p.A3

** wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F

Yomitan

© 2009 Joseph Petito

    Such an odd place. I was a little slow and didn't get it at first- a bunch of wide asphalt roads pushed through a two-hundred acre cane plantation, with a highway off in the distance. Later, someone pointed out that it  was one of the original World War II airfields from where Kamikaze rocket propelled flying bombs were launched on the invasion force coming ashore in April of 1945. 

    The though of it: guys my age, much like me, same dreams, same longings once stood where I was standing, drank some sake, maybe sang a song, saluted the emperor, and strapped themselves into a flying thing full of high explosive to smash themselves into the invading American ships.

    Thirty three years later I was sitting on my gear waiting for the air to come pick us up so we could jump. Pilots would have to put time on their logbooks to stay proficient, and the jump club needed the free lift, so it was a moment of perfect opportunity for both; skydiving while doing a service for our country in a foreign land. Since we weren't paying for the cost of the jump like we would have to do stateside, everyone chipped in for a case or two of some libation for the aircrew, a champion deal all around.

    In the Spring of 1978, it was hot. Okinawa hot. A young California boy spending summers riding his bike to the beach thought he had arrived, soaking wet, in hell. The rains would come down until the roads were awash and just breathing was difficult, then the sun would burn through the clouds, steaming the concrete and crushed coral until it didn't matter that you were soaking wet from the rain. Umbrellas were out while in uniform, and wearing a raincoat or poncho was worse than useless; the sweat under the stinking poncho was worse than the rain from the sky. I just walked (or marched) around rain-soaked with starch from my cover leaking into my eyes until the sun came out and soaked me with sweat.

    The parachute club kept me alive in this foreign land. It was the one place where I could escape the squadbay and duty and the mess hall and Camp Hanson and Kin Village and do something different, or nothing. Ranks didn't mean much there. Captain Mott was a Mustanger with some Base organization at Camp Butler, I never asked what, but he was always Frank to me. Petito was too many syllables, so I became "Pete;" not too familiar, not to off-putting either. On Christmas day of 1977 we sat in the old Quonset hut that was the parachute club, he building parachutes with a sewing machine and sharpening stone for his pocket knife, and me reading some trashy science fiction, comfortable with each other's company, but lonely- his wife and daughter on mainside at Pendelton, and my family snug and comfy in Torrance.

    Just having a place to go to to get out of the squadbay stew and high-decible stereos was relief enough even if I had to sleep on a wooden parachute packing table. Nicholson and I would pack our trash and take the military shuttle from Hanson to the Kadena East gate and then a taxi to the club just south of Kadena, or the Japanese municipal bus down highway 58 past the SR-71 hangar on the northwest side of Kadena to the former Camp Kuii. If it wasn't raining we could shimmy under the fence, lugging our gear, or if it was, go through the gate, past the hospital to get to the club, situated in a warren of old abandoned huts left over from the Vietnam era, or possibly even WWII. The weather on Okinawa beat things up and it was hard to tell how old the buildings were.

    But there in the cane fields with the damp breeze blowing off the ocean, we could hear the CH-53, coming in from Futenma to pick us up. It's such a bizarre, unexplainable sound. I will be in my garage in Torrance, here in 2009 diddling with some rusted piece of junk, and then will come the distant whisper of a CH- 53 flying over far up in the sky going who knows where, and I will have to run out to look up. It's a sound that stirs the past, digging the depths of my emotions. The thing will fly overhead, or maybe a flight of them, grey and ugly, and tears will come to my eyes, for what I cannot explain, and I look up and pray and bless those people inside who put their pink bodies on the line for me, even in this so distant future.

    The CH-53D came in off the ocean, did a one eighty and flared in the middle of the baking asphalt, wheels bumping on the hydraulic shocks, and then settled in like a big green fish on rocks, blowing hot JP-5 exhaust over us. Nothing happened for a minute, then we could hear the thing power down and begin to see the rear rotor blades. Before, they had been a shining blur; now they became four blades turning, then slowly winding down to stop. With that, the rear ramp came down and one of the crew came out, helmet visor down and holding the talk switch to his chest, trailing the intercom wire. 

    Frank went up to meet him and thy yelled in each other's ear for a minute, and then they went inside to talk to the pilots and verify scheduling. Frank came out after two minutes or so and told us that the crew had a scheduled stop for forty minutes before taking off again.

    We were disappointed of course; we wanted out of that asphalt and cane sauna. Once on the bird and flying, the breeze chilled the sweat and things got comfy until we got up to about six or seven thousand feet, and then it got cold. At ten thousand, we were freezing, the sweat not having dried off in the damp weather and the blast of downright freezing air through the windows made us huddle up shivering in the seat and pulling our gear around us for warmth. Up in front by the door, the inscrutable crew chief in his flight suit just shrugged into his flight jacket, put on his fireproof gloves, and sat indifferently next to the front door, staring at us sitting in the nylon seats or on the slippery aluminum deck plates with our hands in our armpits and breath steaming.

    Someone pulled out a hacky sack and we kicked it around for awhile, then a deck of cards, and then out came the football until someone got a good scraping on the asphalt. Scrapes and cuts are always unfun, but on Okinawa it was different. It was so hot and constantly damp and the bacteria so prolific that wounds had to be dealt with immediately and constantly attended to or they would blow up and the doc would have to take off a hunk off your hand or arm to stop it from taking over your whole body.

    By then the shitter was starting to spool up, so we got on our gear and walked up the ramp in the reverse order that we would be getting off. Going off last, I went in first and sat by the port window with its brace for an M-60 and the racks of radio gear. We sat for awhile, anticipating, broiling in the hydraulic fluid-fumed air until everything got up to speed and temperature and pressure, and then the pitch of the noise changed, we rolled forward a bit and then were off, nose to the pavement, flying forward and up.

    Up front with the pilots, Frank, who had a D parachute license, was acting as Jumpmaster, directing us to the dropzone. He put on an extra flight helmet so he could talk to the crew, and gave course corrections. These pilots had never flown jumpers before, so they had to be talked through the procedures, good training for future use.  At two thousand feet and directly above the drop zone, he gave a hand signal and someone threw a roll of toilet paper (with a rock jammed in the tube) off the ramp in back. It was partially unrolled, so that when the wind caught it, the white flimsy stuff would unroll fully, giving us a falling marker to determine wind direction at altitude.

    Then it was time to climb, and you could feel the pilot pour it on. The nose tilted forward, vibration increased, the pitch of the blades dug into the air and pushed us down into the seats. The roar was deafening, frightening, exhilarating, painful at the same time, and the smart guys had put in earplugs long ago. The rest of us just sat there suffering and shivering in the swelter of sound.

    Finally it was time to go. The crew chief moseyed back to the ramp, plugging in his headset, latching on a safety belt (he wanted to stay aboard, and good riddance to us) and worked the hydraulic controls to lower the ramp to a slight down angle. Frank got down on hands and knees on the ramp, his head over the edge into the one hundred twenty knot slipstream to see our heading, and gave hand signals to the crew chief to relay to the pilot which way to maneuver to get us on target.

    When we were close, he got up, and that was the signal for everyone to get in position to jump. This had all been planned out beforehand on the ground, with everyone walking through the motions they would do in the air, holding out their arms like they were flying, and practicing for variables or emergencies: The twenty boys and girls were going to go out in two groups, and then fly the groups together and link up, opening the two circles into one large one, then break off, track out, and pull. Each person had his/her place in the echelons, squeezing in tight with one group immediately behind another on the tilted ramp and gripping each other's jumpsuit in the order they would go off. Everyone was tense and on their toes as Frank started the count shouting "Ready!!" then everyone picked it up-- "Ready! Three-Two- One-Go!" and they all shuffled off the ramp, falling and falling into the thin, damp air.

    I was last, and not part of either group. We followed the U.S. Parachute Association rules strictly, and I didn't have enough jumps to have gained the experience to be part of the formation, so the plan was for me to wait five seconds before getting out, and then flare and watch distantly from above as the formations flew together. Once the formations broke up and everyone tracked out to pull, I would pull first because I was higher, and so not risk a collision with the others. That was the formula.

    But as in algebra, formulas encounter unanticipated variables, and today things did not go well. The first group came together fine, going off the ramp at the proper speed and angle, falling flat and stable in about five seconds, everyone grinning at one another with wind- buffeted cheeks, gripping the jumpsuit fabric on one another's wrists. 

    The second group fell over one another getting off the airplane. Going off the ramp, the first three or four people went too low too soon because the last three or four, holding onto them, weren't moving fast enough, which pulled the last few in the group over the top of the bunch and the whole second echelon tumbled over one another into a jumbled up cluster of independent people just knocking each other about at a hundred miles an hour (relative to ground speed). After about ten seconds or so, each person had got themselves falling flat and stable again and began to fly separately to the first group below. 

    This variable was part of the plan too. If one or both groups disintegrated, the individuals would independently fly to whatever collection of jumpers had come together and re-attempt to form the circle.

    On the ramp at ten five with everyone out the door and the empty, cold aircraft behind me, I stood at the edge and took a picture with my cheap Vivitar 110 camera, threw the camera onto one of the nylon seats and then ran down the ramp and into the cold air like Superman. I went into the rush of freezing air and immediately went down head first, looking up at my boots and the ramp of the fading CH-53, it's blades a blur and sunlight sparkling off the windows. The crew chief just stood there, upside down in his greasy flight suit and leather jacket, staring at me from behind the safety of the aluminum edge of the ramp, one hand on the hydraulic control and a fist on his hip, like grandma at the back porch tisk-tisking the kids running wild in the backyard.

    Turning over to fall flat and stable like I’d been taught, I looked around for the others. There they were, hundreds of yards away and seeming to be a mile below me. I put my hands back at my waist to form myself into a wing, put my head down and tracked in the direction of where the people were swirling around forming a circle. The wind was crackling around my ears, roaring and buffeting, but I felt myself grinning at the sheer pleasure and fright and noise of it all.

    Heading in toward the circle I realized I was getting too close, so I flared and watched. Looking at my altimeter, we were at about eight with a lot of time left. But I was losing altitude in relation to the circle. Everyone there had on running shoes, hockey helmets and a proper jump suit with baggy elastic bands that formed the fabric into pillow-like poofs of cloth that caught the wind, but I was wearing a shiny old Nomex flight suit, a motorcycle helmet and my utility boots, so I fell faster in relation to the group. 

    Passing through seven I fell past the growing circle and had to look up at them, and looking up caused me to angle away backward and increase my rate of decent. I was blowing it and I knew it. My instructions were to stay high and about fifty yards away, but I had gone low and was thirty feet away. This was a dangerous no-no. What to do? I was going lower still, because the group, together, fell slower than an individual falling alone, and my rate of decent increased in relation to the group forming the circle.

    I panicked, mentally locking onto the idea that I had to get out of there fast and pull. I looked for the dropzone, finding it straight ahead of me but far. I put my head down, arms and hands back, and tracked toward the landing area, flying under the forming circle above. Flaring again, I put my left hand over my head, reached in with my right, tucked in my knees, and pulled. Out came the pilot chute and sleeve, then the lines shooting out of their rubber bands, and the canopy ballooning out, jerking me up by my shoulders and crackling open. Instant relief.

    But I was under a canopy now at about four five and from above came the sound of the fabric of twenty jumpsuits flapping in a one hundred ten mile an hour breeze. This was not good. I could not have done anything worse. I was under a canopy under twenty people in free-fall. The group was breaking up and tracking away to pull, and here they all came, falling at me at a hundred plus miles an hour. This is how people die and I knew it and they knew it and all I could do was cringe and shrink up into the smallest ball I could, but my canopy, and old 28 foot modified reserve chute was big and round and happy up there at the end of my harness, blocking the view of twenty people falling right at my stupid head.

    What can be worse than the knowledge of imminent death by blunt force impact that you can hear coming at you but not see? Down came the people, falling past like flapping stones, one splitting the air no more than twenty feet away, and one by one they looked up, waved, and pulled. The canopies, pretty, tiny rounds and squares, opened nicely far, far below, and the jumpers flew them to the drop zone. I however was two thousand feet above the proper opening height and so the wind blew me far, and there was little I could do. Had I been flying a square, I might have made twenty miles an hour forward speed, but with my old round, originally designed to be an ejector seat emergency chute, I could barely make five, and so off I went South with the wind to the perimeter fence of the cane field near a big water storage tank bordering a neighborhood. If I was a thousand feet higher, I would have gone into the ocean.

    What a mess. I pulled up on the rear risers and hit the ground, rolling a bit, and then collected my canopy and began the walk back to where the group was in the middle of the cane field. 

    Since I was half a mile away, it took a while, the parachute and rigging and pilot chute a big mound in my arms, sweating a river in my old motorcycle helmet and dreading having to face Captain Mott and the rest. What would I say? No excuses, but apologize straight away and analyze what I had messed up so that next time I would do it better. But would they trust me next time?

    I felt like such a sorry lump, walking up to the group with my pitiful bundle of orange and brown and green and white. I dumped the parachute gear on the old runway and threw off the harness and reserve, noticing everyone else packing their parachutes while not noticing, or attempting to not notice, me. Going over to Frank, I apologized, and he just stood there staring, listening, and heard me out. When I was done, he said, "don't apologize to me, apologize to him." The him he was referring to was the Staff Sergeant who had come down closest to me. I went over to where he was packing his square and apologized again and he looked at me, obviously not happy; I could tell he was restraining himself, and he didn't say much. Just "Oh well- we'll try it again next time." You put your short life into someone else's hand and trust them with it, and when they make a mistake and blow it drastically and you still live to tell the story, what do you do?

    No one stared, but everyone knew what had taken place and that it was only by the Grace of God or by whatever powers they believed in that a medevac helicopter was not on the hot asphalt hauling a couple of us away in bags, me being the cause of it.

    They packed their chutes for the next lift, and I packed mine, but I sat this one out.