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Dock Management Progress Section How Successful Dock Operators Have Met Problems of Giving Best Service to Ships ADIEU Loading Steel on Southern Pacific Freighter TUIAVIUIUATVUTAUUTUUUATU HULU TLA UL | i HUHNE Reduce Accidents on Piers _ By CommonSense Methods OU are bound to have about ‘ so many accidents, no matter what you do. Accidents have to happen every so often.” These words express an attitude toward sys- tematic efforts to reduce accidents which has been expressed time and time again. There has been a tendency in each basic industry to believe that their industry is “different”; that safety educational work “may be all right for some industries, but it can’t get very far in ours.” This attitude has been particularly persistent in the shipping industry, due, perhaps, to the conditions perculiar to that in dustry. A ship is delayed and arrives in port a day late, and its sailing date is only a day or two away. This means that the cargo must be discharged and the new cargo loaded is “double time order.” The very nature of the work Photos by Underwood & Underwood 28 BY A. MARK SMITH is such that every man must depend upon his own carefulness for the pre- vention of accidents. The workers themselves come and go, drift from one pier to another, and it is common knowledge that longshoremen are floaters. This con- dition has made organized safety work look practically impossible to ex- ecutives in the shipping industry. Safety Increases Efficiency As a matter of fact, there has been a reluctance to engage upon any very comprehensive program of accident reduction on the piers, because it was felt that nothing of any importance in the way of results could be accom- plished, and that therefore it would be better not to start a project that could not be carried to a successful con- clusion. It was felt that any attempt to install an accident reduction pro- gram on the docks would cut down MARINE REVIEW—May, 1927 the efficiency of the crews, and that less tonnage would be handled if the dangers of the job were emphasized in the minds of the men. If a ship had to be discharged under the pressure of making ready to sail at a certain date, there was a con- viction on the part of the dock superintendents that it would be incon- sistent to ask longshoremen to “make it snappy” and at the same time caution them to be careful. In the face of these apparently in- surmountable obstacles, certain execu- tives of the Southern Pacific Steam- ship lines who were doing some ad- vanced thinking about accident re- duction, became convinced that sys- tematic safety educational work could prevent accidents in marine work just as effectively as has been done in a number of other basic industries where “insurmountable obstacles” had