For five years I taught in the Industrial Safety Unit of the Department of Occupational and Technology Education, a dynamic department within the College of Education at the University of Central Oklahoma.Courses I taught included: Safety Education, Process Safety, Product Safety, Measurements, Industrial Safety I and Industrial Safety II, and, Security Management.  I also taught courses for Business Education majors including Computer Applications, Computer Lab Management and Consulting Skills.  I was assigned the role of Program Advisor over the BS Degree in Training and Development and taught courses for that program. 

The National Safety Council publishes four textbooks to advance the skills of professionals in the safety field: Management and Administration of Safety Programs (Industrial Safety I), Engineering and Technology for Safety (Industrial Safety II), Security Management and Industrial Hygiene.  I did not—and do not—teach Industrial Hygiene.  

With several years of experience in industry, and having acquired a consulting relationship for the US Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) through the State of Oklahoma’s Department of Mines training facility—the Oklahoma Miner Training Institute—I am well prepared to teach the safety courses I was assigned.  I especially enjoyed teaching Product Safety which is founded on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s role and guidelines.  As a product line supervisor for FMC Corporation (the first time I was employed there), I was cognizant of the need to provide a knowledge base for students that included all sixteen components of Product Safety.  Here at Cameron University, I still provide my Workplace Safety students with an overview of those sixteen components, including examples of bans and standards.  All manufacturing entities must employ competent people to provide their customers with products that do not injure.  Litigation continues to provide substantial funds to injured customers, and their legal representatives, when a product causes an injury. 

I divide Process Safety into two, distinct, arenas: Manufacturing Process Safety, and the Process Safety Management (PSM) Program.  Everything humanity uses—look around you!  Everything you see about you—started from one of two sources: We either grew it, or we mined it.  After we grew it or after we mined it we “processed it” to make something for a consumer to purchase and utilize: a Product.  Process Safety and Product Safety overlap one the other.  A safety professional must not only have a foundation in both, s/he must also be taught to see the overlaps as unique involvements wherein the Worker, the Environment and the Machinery come together and invoke hazards that are constantly staring us in the face. 

Manufacturing Process Safety required an understanding of multiple areas in a manufacturing facility: Shipping and Receiving, Raw Product Storage, Fabrication, Machining, Part Preparation (de-burring, cleaning, painting or other finishing), Part Storage, In-Facility Transportation, Production Line Issues, Quality Controls, Security, Personnel Training, Product Labeling/Packaging/Storage/Shipping, and many other arenas that support the act of manufacturing: Sales, Research and Development, Telecommunications, Personnel Management, Plant Management, Supervision for Safety, etc.

Process Safety Management (PSM) Program

The Process Safety Management Program was developed to provide guidelines for feed-forward plants (as opposed to feed-back operations) such as oil refineries, food processing, cosmetic production, chemical processing (including smelting operations for mined products and chemical processing of agriculture-based products) and a host of other processed-product generation activities.  Process Safety has a unique capability of killing large groups of people from explosions during processing or after processing during shipment (the Texas City explosion of fertilizers stored in a freighter ship), or leaks during processing (Bopal, India), or the Piper Alpha fire in the North Atlantic.  Whereas manufacturing accidents usually involve a few people or, most often, one person, chemical processing accidents are often catastrophic.  The PSM Program was evoked to attempt to provide a mechanism for process facility safety professionals to use when addressing their specific process: It does not detail the types of valves, piping or storage because there are too many, diverse process facilities and more emerging everyday.  Compliance with the safeguard evaluations outlined in the PSM Program is always a “work in progress” because of the aging factor, raw materials discrepancy factor and, now, the terrorist factor. 

Safety Education was a wonderful course that provided fundamental insights to students who used the course as an elective.  My classes always had too many students in them to learn their names, but I enjoyed receiving excellent reviews. 

Industrial I and Industrial II were for those students majoring in Safety, as were the Process Safety and Product Safety courses.  Industrial I dealt with the management and administration of safety programs in compliance with identified methodologies and federal laws that mandated specific actions and reactions such that an industry or business had to adequately prepare its employees for hazards they would encounter working in a specific environment, and respond appropriately to events wherein the result of the event was an injured employee, a sick employee or a dead employee, or, as in the case of Process Facilities: many dead, many sick and/or many injured.  Industrial II dealt with the engineering and technical aspect of providing a safe and healthful environment.  Machine guards was a particular aspect of Industrial II—and was included in Manufacturing Process Safety lectures—that I enjoyed teaching.  Students had to “fabricate” a guard for a specific machine tool.  The guard had to comply with “best engineering practice” and it had to perform as expected under repeatable tests. 

Measurements was a fantastic course to teach.  As a certified Oklahoma public school teacher with minor endorsements in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, I was able to bring to the classroom some fundamental perspectives of safety measurement methodologies the students could employ.  I especially enjoyed teaching students the differences between temperature measurements and the fact that they are all rather odd, as well as the history of the Periodic Chart.  The fundamentals of analyzing a chemical equation was especially enlightening when I showed the students that the chemist was concerned with the chemicals (and so are safety professionals) but the safety professional was concerned with the processes impacting those chemicals: milling, grinding, heating, valving to move the chemical from one point to another, pumps, effects of industrial processes—the arrows in the equation are more important to a safety professional than the symbols representing a particular chemical.  The trucks transporting the chemical, the packaging in which it was shipped or received, the storage of the chemical before introduction into the process, the methods of moving the chemical into the plant, the equipment needed to control it, contain it and/or correct for when things went wrong, is the fascinating work of the safety professional that is facilitated by the Measurements class. With a strong background in security that included several years as a police officer and my time in the Navy (two tours at the Chu Lai Combat Base and a short tour of duty on the U.S.S. John King a guided missile destroyer), I created and taught the first course of Security Management to students enrolled into the safety program at the University of Central Oklahoma.  Using the National Safety Councils textbook, with substantial supportive materials, I prepared safety students to enter the realm of security programs in industry and business. 

Later, those years of work, coupled with a call to provide insights in Information Security, worked together to help me prepare and present courses in the compelling arena of Computer Security using the Department of Defense Information Assurance Curriculum as a standard.  One thing in life merely prepares us to do the next thing life demands.  “All things work together…” it is said, and it is done.