The induction at the gate

I do about twenty sites a year. That means I sit through about twenty site-specific inductions a year, and I want to tell you what one of those is actually like from where I stand, because I do not think the people writing them have ever received one.

Six in the morning. Fourteen of us in a group outside the gate house because the training room is being used. A safety coordinator with a clipboard, no mic, standing upwind of a compressor skid, going through evacuation routes, muster points, the site specific LOTO variation, who the confined space attendant is, which alarm tone means what, and the thing about the north yard where the rail spur runs and you have got about four seconds of warning.

All of that is genuinely important and I catch maybe half of it. Not because I am not paying attention — because I am forty feet back in a group of fourteen and there is a compressor. And here is the honest part that nobody at a plant wants to hear: we fill the gap in later by asking each other. Contractor to contractor, in the lot at lunch. Which is a game of telephone about muster points, conducted by people who arrived that morning.

About a third of the crews I work with, the first language is Spanish. For them the same forty minutes is worse in a way that is not subtle. I have watched a guy get handed a badge after nodding through an induction he did not follow, and then watched him spend two days working out the site by watching what everyone else did. That is how people get hurt and it is not his fault and it is not really the coordinators fault either, its the format.

The last two sites I have been on did it to phones. Scan a code at the gate house, earbuds in under the muffs, and the coordinator talks at a conversational volume while walking us to the actual muster point instead of describing it. Picking Spanish is a two second thing that nobody has to raise their hand for, which matters more than you would think — asking for the translated version in front of thirteen other guys is a thing a lot of people will just not do.

I heard all of it. That is the whole review. I heard all of it, on both sites, for the first time in about nine years of doing this, and I did not have to reconstruct anything in the parking lot at noon.