FEATURE
Our World Revolves
By Avery Wheelock President, Worldwide Safety Group
W
ith this month being Safety Awareness month I want- ed to provide a small piece of
reading material to possibly get you thinking about making our great outdoor amusement busi- ness industry just that much safer. My name is Avery Wheelock, President of Worldwide Safety Group Inc., and we perform all kinds of inspection and consulting services to the industry. For those of you who don’t know me, I was born and raised in the Carnival business in upstate New York and have seen and done a few things in my 40+ years of playing car- nival. All that and 50 cents will still only get me half a cup of coffee but I’m going to share what I can with you anyways. Many Carnivals and a few amusement parks are already
open for the season and the rest of the industry is getting ready or soon will be uncovering equipment to get it ready for another season. As we are beginning to have employees come back to work, we want to make sure that we are train- ing those employees in the jobs that they will be doing. It doesn’t matter if the individual has been a worker for years, they still should receive a refresher session to go over their job duties and be made aware of any company policy chang- es. All new hires should receive training as well and all this training must be documented in their employee files. We always talk about training and the importance of it to
show that we are serious about safety in our industry but ask yourself are we really serious about Safety? It is more that just putting on a “Safety First” shirt and wearing a hard hat while working setting up or tearing down. Is there actual hands-on training in addition to the classroom training with pictures? Does the company have a trainer that has been trained to be a trainer? These are things I want to get you thinking about. We can talk about specific training like how to operate a kiddie ride and how to make sure all the seat belts are buckled before we press that green button, but I want you to think also about what that operator should be doing while the ride is in motion? Is there an assistant for loading and unloading? Do the employees have specific po- sitions that they are supposed to stand in to be safe and be able to maintain visibility of the riders during the ride? Are you getting the idea yet? There is not one training
course for all the different pieces of equipment we operate whether it be a super spectacular ride or a bounce house, each device has different training and different documen- tation to be completed. I like to see training forms that tell
exactly what they are trained to do, and that the trainer states they trained the person, and that person acknowledges that they were trained. It is also important to have a statement on the document stating but not limited to “I have been trained to perform the duties above
and all of my questions have been answered or addressed” this statement being signed by the employee also helps to show in the event of an incident that the employee was trained and that the company “Cares” about safety. Well, that is the hope anyways.
Around Safety!
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