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Calvin: Thanks for coming on to the Safety Talks show today, Doug. It’s great to have you out. It’s a fantastic day in Calgary. It’s good to be talking about Fall Safety. So we’ll hop right into it. How did you get into safety?
Doug: Well, I had an unfortunate accident when I was younger. I was in high school. I was about 16 or 17 years old, and I was working in the wood shop and I had an accident on a band saw where I cut my finger off. So, it was about 75% cut-off and I thought I was going to lose my finger at that time. And I had convinced myself, well, I guess, I’m going to lose a finger. But because it was such a clean cut, it was sewn back on, and it’s good to go today. And that was, you know, 37 years ago. So, it really gave me a respect for working safely especially around machinery, and then that stemmed into safety in general.
Calvin: Awesome. So, I know you have a mechanical engineering background but how did you get into Fall Safety?
Doug: I got into Fall Safety when I started work
ing for an employer here in Calgary in 1997. And they were a fall protection engineering training firm. And so, that was my first introduction to Fall Safety. And I just loved doing it. It was so exciting. Believe it or not.
Calvin: Yeah, I was going to say most people always say, Fall Protection, yeah, it’s exciting!
Doug: Yeah. The thing that intrigued me the most was the physical science aspect of it, the gravity, literally, of it. Fall Safety really is protecting people from falling towards the Earth due to the Earth’s gravitational field, which is affected by everything within relative proximity into the earth including the moon. So, the gravitational field of the earth is actually quite large. It goes out about a million miles from the Earth. Now without getting into too much depth of what intrigued me about it was, it was the physics of it, primarily, that really interested me and intrigued me.