Page 58 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

We cannot be an excellent
company if we’re not excellent in safety.
We pride ourselves on being a family business and truly caring for people. That’s why we are committed to safety now more than ever.
It’s a never-ending journey to always get better, which is part of our DNA.
– Duane Doyle Jr., president of Peterson Tractor, Peterson-Cat
had still been in there. We really shouldn’t have been using a forklift because that’s not a real safe piece of equipment. It could drop without the guy even doing anything. An overhead crane would have been better. What I learned was: never put yourself in the way of kinetic energy—or stored energy—because if it moves or drops, you get in- jured. I was young enough, I probably didn’t think much about it. Years later, I’m thinking: Wow, I could have lost a bunch of fingers.”
Malerie Carr
to Peterson in 2003, they began building on the foundation their prede- cessor and mentor, Mike Gillen, had established. Building relationships was key. “I needed peo- ple. I needed their help to be successful,” says Carr, “because then I
Senior learned another valuable lesson on the Warm Springs Dam project in the late 70s. “One story Vern Renwick [veteran field mechanic] drilled into us on the dam was about 657 scrapers. In the early days of the 657s and large scrapers, the wheels would crack due to fatigue or bad metal- lurgy. Those big wheels were held together with a huge row of bolts holding the planetary final drive in place. If someone was working on it and didn’t know the wheel was cracked, once they loosened the last bolt, the air pressure in the tire would blow that whole wheel assembly off. And, the mechanic with it because they weighed several tons. We saw pictures of one blown 100 yards away.Thankfully it never happened to us on the dam. We learned from other people’s experiences and mistakes. There’s all kinds of ways to get hurt in this industry.”
Peterson’s safety journey has come a long way since then. When Tyler Dougall and Malerie Carr came
could pull from their experiences and make it more engaging. When I started to see how much more powerful that was, and got others to speak about their experiences more than I was talking, that’s when the training became effective.”
From there, safety meetings evolved to include more interactive, hands-on activities. By injecting some fun into the meetings, Malerie was able to gain their attention and their respect. Take fork- lift certification. “Instead of sitting in a classroom and talking about how to operate a forklift, we had timed forklift obstacle courses. The guys got to drive the forklift a little bit faster than normal and mix in a little camaraderie. I’m a believer in letting them push the limits a bit in training be- cause it helps them understand and appreciate the equipment. And fun helps training stick better. You could tell who was comfortable on a forklift, and who was not. Many of them were amazing op- erators.”
When she first started, Carr and her counterparts took on much of the safety related issues them- selves—safety training, shop inspections and acci- dent investigations. Since then, a lot of the training and shop inspections have returned to the service managers and parts managers themselves. “To have a healthy safety culture, the employees should be the ones driving it, not us,” says Carr. “But their managers are the ones that have to enforce it. They set the tone. They do the accountability. And their word is going to carry a lot more weight than what the safety person says.”
56 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG