Safety Training With A Competitive Edge

Accidents of any kind are never good, and our crew at Lyman-Richey Corporation is always working hard to prevent them from happening. 

That's why Field Safety Specialist Peyton Connelly and Safety Administrator George Claxton spent several weeks this fall traveling to our plants and conducting a kind of test and competition to help train drivers with their depth perception and backing-up skills.

"As a ready mix delivery professional, you're going to spend half your day driving your truck backward: backing up to a load, backing up to a boot, backing up to a washout, backing up to a job. It doesn't really matter, you're going to back the truck up half your day," Connelly said.

The drivers pull the truck from the starting position and back it into a space marked off with safety cones as they try to get as close as possible to a wall made of two overturned tables without hitting them.

Once they've signaled they're done, the safety guys stop their timers and measure the distance between the truck and the tables to get a score. 

Connelly said exercises like these tend to stay with people more than a lecture and slideshow presentation would.

"When you do a safety meeting inside the office and just standing up there talking in front of people, people don't really get involved. A lot of times half the people you'll lose, half the people will be engaged. But when we're doing these interactive safety meetings, people get involved, people have fun with it."