Why “HalenHardy”?

Why-HalenHardyPeople ask me all the time, how did you come up with the name HalenHardy? Well, when I was growing up, my dad, Don Beaver Sr., and grandfathers, Pete Beaver & Tom Lee (pictured at the right) were the main male role models for me. Together they taught me to love God’s great outdoors and value of hard work and a great attitude.

My Pappy Tom lived a couple blocks from our home and I had the honor to work and play at his side nearly every day. He had a pretty straightforward outlook on life. Work hard first…then play hard. He would take me fishing as soon as I finished helping him in the garden, shop or Grandma’s ceramic studio. When the chores were done, we’d take off in his ’61 Rambler Classic to fish at Tipton Run or Bald Eagle Creek.

Pap would always encourage me to smile while working. He’d say, “I love a hale and hardy boy.” Hale, meaning cheerful and useful. Hardy, meaning robust & tenacious.

Long after pap passed in the early 1970s, I’d often be inspired by the memory of his “hale and hardy” instructions.

In 2012, our sons, Josh and Troy, along with partner Carl Cohen were looking for a name for our new venture aimed at developing products and services to improve environmental, health and safety practices for heavy mobile industries. One night I was racking my brain when Pap’s favorite phrase came back to me. I hopped up and scribbled the phrase in text-like fashion on a pad near my bed….”Hale n Hardy”. When I woke in the morning, the name for our company was clear….HalenHardy.

Today, HalenHardy provides products and services across multiple industries, including oil & gas, mining, construction, emergency response, remediation, transportation, utilities and demolition. The company’s mission is to provide “Tools to Tackle Crappy Jobs . . . Safely.”TM

HalenHardy’s Latest Innovations are Designed to:

• Provide sustainable leak and spill clean-up solutions;
• Reduce the number of slip and fall accidents in the workplace;
• Limit access to dangerous work areas;
• Reduce worker exposure levels to unsafe industrial dusts.

We Subscribe to Four Guiding Principles:

• Treat Others Well – no one likes working with (or for) jerks. At HalenHardy, we’ll treat you the way we want to be treated.
• Build Sustainable Products – When we minimize waste, we maximize efficiency and results. It’s better for the environment and the bottom line.
• Superhuman Service – We put our customers’ needs at the forefront of all we do.
• Onward. Upward – We strive to continuously improve our products and services to help our customers reach their goals.

Our offices and manufacturing facility are located on Main Street in our hometown of Bellwood, Pennsylvania. And, we recently added a warehouse in Zanesville, Ohio to better serve its oil & gas and emergency response customers.

Onward. Upward.

Donny Beaver

Slips and falls are usually in the top 2 or 3 incidents in the O&G industry, costing billions of dollars each year in injuries, insurance and administrative time.

If slips and falls are not in your top 3 types of injuries, STOP READING right now. You already don’t have enough hours in the day. However, if slips and falls rank in the top three, you may want to continue.

According to nearly all industry experts, lagging indicators (OSHA recordables, lost work days & workers’ comp MOD rates) are helpful to show compliance with safety policies. However, safety professionals are increasingly using leading indicators to help prevent injuries before they happen.

When it comes to slip and fall accident prevention, leading indicators can be found by “following the footprints”. It’s sort of like CSI work.

The first forensic work is to review your slip and fall incident reports for the past couple years to see if your company has any discernible patterns. You should build a small spreadsheet with the following data.

• What are the places where slips occur?
  -On the well pad liner?
  -Working on top of equipment?
  -Climbing into and out of truck
• What job functions are most likely to have slipping incidents?
  -Mechanics
  -Hands
  -Drivers
• Are there any incidents that may not look like a slip and fall but slippery surfaces are the root cause?
  -For example, one company found that truck drivers had a high rate arm strains and dislocated shoulders (no, it wasn’t from lifting too large a coffee travel mug). Actually the root cause was slippery grab bars and climbing steps on the cab during wet weather.
• Are the slips seasonal?
  -More in winter than summer?
  -What time of day?
  -What were the weather conditions?

Once you have a good idea where, when, how and to whom the slipping incidents are occurring, it’s time to pull your team together and review the data. It’s best if you can have a combination of team members that include:

• HSE
• Operations
• Workers
• It usually helps to have a pair of “outside eyes” to review the process with you

We have discovered that the team should be no larger than three or four internal members and one outsider. In addition, the attitudes and personalities of the team are very important. You want to assemble people who exhibit the following attributes:

• Problem solvers
• Safety conscious
• Positive attitude
• Willingness to participate

In addition, you will need to have a strong leader for the team who will ride-herd and make sure the team stays on task.

With the current price pressures and time constraints in O&G, it may be hard to assemble a group to add “one more project” to their already overloaded schedule. However, we have discovered that the best time to deal with these kinds of issues is when the market is slow. Remember, if this is a “Top 3 Injury” incident problem for your company, it will be worthwhile to invest the time to “dog it through”.

Once your team reviews the data you’ve assembled, it’s time to take a field tour and visit the actual places where the majority of incidents occur. It’s helpful to have a checklist of the top 3 to 5 places where incidents occur and visit them during the same time and conditions under which they occurred.

For example, if the majority of incidents occur at night in rainy weather, then you should look at the problem under the same conditions. In other words, don’t look for icy well pad liners in July.

In addition to looking directly at the places past slipping incidents have occurred, you should also look holistically at all the adjacent areas and conditions.

• 

  Greasy, oily walking and working surfaces. If it looks slippery, it IS slippery.

• Steps
• Ladders
• Frame Rails
• Platforms
• Diamond plate
• Look for footprints on top of grease or slime (many times you can actually see skid marks)
• Grab bars in climbing areas (or lack thereof)
• Look for “wear patterns” on surfaces.

For example, you can almost always find worn areas on steps and bumpers where workers climb the same path all the time (especially if they have sand or dirt on their boot soles that grindaway the paint or even wear out metal over time. One very interesting wear pattern we observed was a worn out warning label on a diesel fuel tank on the driver’s side of a frac pumper. Before it wore out, he label used to read, “WARNING: Do not step on fuel tank”.

• Ask the workers in these areas if the stuff that looks slick has ever been a problem in the past. If not, can they show you any areas where they think might be a problem. Although some workers may be reluctant to share, we’ve learned that about 50% of the workers will open up and share, IF they know you are doing this survey to help keep them safer.

Depending on your company culture, we have found there are two ways to conduct the slipping audits:

1. Unannounced – just show up and begin the process
2. Pre-announced – Review with the crew what you are doing and why.

While many prefer to preannounce, there are certain cases when a surprise visit will also yield good results. We’ve found that a combination of the two techniques can help gather a more robust picture of what’s really happening.

After you gather all your forensic data, it’s time to assemble it and develop an action plan. In part two of this series, we will discuss the next steps.

For more information, please contact Donny Beaver at dbeaver@halenhardy.com or on his mobile phone at 814-571-9779

Original Article Published by ONG Marketplace – April/May 2016