The human side of the safety equation

Daily Herald Editorial Board

It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to say that Notre Dame’s attitude toward the death of Declan Sullivan has been insensitive or cavalier.

Nor would it be fair to say the university or its personnel were entirely indifferent to safety last Oct. 27, when a 53-mph gust of wind threw to the ground the hydraulic scissor lift from which the Long Grove native was filming football practice.

But a comment from university President John Jenkins bears emphasis: “(The school’s) protocols and procedures were not adequate. Many people contributed to that, within the athletic department and outside the athletic department.”

Indeed. Without naming names, Notre Dame checked off a list of its failures in a final report on the case Monday. The school’s wind-monitoring equipment was inadequate. The scissor lift was not designed to withstand high winds when extended. The responsibility for monitoring safety of the lift was vague.

The U.S. Department of Labor adds several more, including that training of lift operators was inadequate and the equipment was not inspected for safety often enough. In the painful clarity of hindsight, the reports and fines add up to one unmistakable conclusion: Responsible people weren’t paying enough attention.

The school says its personnel monitored weather information eight times that fateful day, including just eight minutes before the website it monitors updated with information that would have exceeded its threshold and forced it to ground the videographers like Declan. That timing is heartbreaking, to be sure; but it also leads to the inevitable observation that it shouldn’t have taken electronic instruments to determine that conditions for the lifts were unsafe.

Every person on the field that day had to know how those winds felt. We can only surmise now that they were distracted by their own pressing interests or an unreasonable confidence in the system monitoring the numbers. To some extent, people in such circumstances don’t have to know specific numbers. Someone in authority, it seems, could have and should have realized that conditions were unacceptable.

Nor is it enough to note, as the university tries tastefully to do, that Declan could have lowered his lift to a safer height had he felt himself to be in danger. The fact remains he was a 20-year-old kid working under the guidance of people on whose experience and maturity he relied.

So, is the lesson here that institutions need to have better equipment and better systems in place for dealing with dangerous circumstances? Well, yes, that’s one lesson. But equally important is the human half of the safety equation. To note that that half was the greater failure in the death of Declan Sullivan is woefully insufficient today. But it does reinforce how critical human judgments are in such circumstances, and perhaps will lead to some better judgments in the future, whether at Notre Dame or wherever the threat of imminent danger may surge.