Speaker emphasizes the need for factories to put safety first, every day

Columbus, Ohio — Kina Hart lost her left arm in an industrial accident when she was 20 years old, working in a factory to pay for college.

It happened just after she started on her first day on the job. She told the story to kick off the Environmental Health and Safety Summit, held July 17-18 in Columbus.

An upbeat speaker, Hart mixed in poignant details and humor into her first-person account of how and why the serious accident happened — and how it impacted her family, friends and coworkers.

"The reason I share that story with you is that I know that's how so many people are when it comes to their jobs. I know that every one of you here work really hard. Your employees work really hard. This isn't just a job. It's not just a paycheck," she said.

The Environmental Health and Safety Summit was sponsored by the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors, the American Mold Builders Association and the Association for Rubber Products Manufacturers.

Yes, the money is important, Hart said. A manufacturing job pays the bills and puts food on the table. In Hart's case, it was paying for college, where she dreamed of getting an education to become a dentist.

"But I'm here to tell anybody that'll listen to say there is no job, there's no paycheck, there's absolutely no amount of money that would ever be worth any part of you," she said.

She wasn't trained for her summer job at an Alaska salmon processing plant. It did not have lockout/tag-out procedures for the conveyor belt that ripped off her arm. But Hart accepts that she shares some of the blame by not trusting her gut instinct that the job was hazardous. She "gave away [her] safety" — with tragic, life-changing consequences.

And Hart said that could happen to anybody at any factory. She urged management to spell it out to new hires that no job is worth getting injured.

"This is the one time in our lives where we need to put ourselves first, when it comes to safety," she said.

Losing her arm at a young age was hard to overcome. She had to relearn how do everyday things — tie her shoes, make a sandwich, open a jar of peanut butter — with just one arm.

Employees need to think safety all day, every day. "But do we always do it? and 'always' really being the key word here. Because safety can't be most of the time. We know that. Safety can't be 'almost always.' It really does require a 100 percent commitment," Hart said. "I think it boils down to us. We are the people who make those day-to-day decisions that really dictate our own personal safety. And I think safety means something personal."

Hart knows just how personal safety really is. Attendees at the conference already knew how the story ended. Hart doesn't wear a prosthetic arm. She gets phantom pains common to amputees.

"To me, this is very ugly. It's painful frequently. But the worst part of what happened to me was it was 100 percent preventable. It did not even have to happen," she said.

She graduated from high school in 1988, she said, showing the audience a slide of her '80s-style, big-hair days as a cheerleader. Her father was a logger in forests of the Northwest; her mom stayed home to raise the kids. They told their children that college was a good idea, but they couldn't help to pay for it.

Hart got some scholarships and went off to college. But needing money, Hart and her girlfriend decided to head to Alaska between their sophomore and junior years. They got hired at a salmon plant. Back then, the agreement was the factory would pay airfare, housing and food and the college students would pay them back for those expenses at the end of the summer.

They spent the first three days hiking and exploring. But their names weren't showing up on the roster that the foreman, Joe, posted each day for work. "And that was making me nervous," she said, "because I kept a list of how much I owed this company, it was getting pretty close to $2,000. And I thought gosh, at this rate, I'm not going to get to go to school. I'm not even going to leave Alaska — I'm going to stay here and just pay back expenses."

So Hart went into Joe's office, explained she was paying for her school all by herself and needed to work. "And I told him, I said, 'Joe, I'm a really good worker. And I'm a hard worker. And if you just give me a chance, I'm not going to let you down.'

"We talked a little bit more. And I think mostly, I just bugged Joe, until Joe finally said, 'OK, Kina, I'll give you a chance. I'll let you start tomorrow. You can be on the cleanup crew.' And that made me pretty happy," she said.

A photo taken just before they started work showed Hart and her friend sporting raincoat-style gear and smiling proudly.

"This picture was taken June 23, 1990, at about 8 o'clock in the morning. By 8:40 this very same morning, I will have already lost my arm. So not even an hour on the first day," she said. "When I see this picture, I think, there really isn't anything that could have prepared me for what was about to happen. So I'll tell you that day, that changes your life forever, starts out like every other day. Just a normal day."

Hart and her friend went down to a large building full of large conveyor belts and machinery. Joe the foreman handed a sponge and a bucket to each member of the five-worker cleanup squad.

"He said, 'I need you guys to clean these conveyor belts. I want you to clean the top and the bottom and everywhere in between.' The night before, a load of salmon had come through, so really, we were just tasked with cleaning that salmon debris off the belts for the new load coming in later that day," she recalled.

Joe left the building and they started working on the first machine. Hart cleaned the underside. Here comes the trusting-your-gut moment that never came to this young woman: "So I was under there cleaning near one of those two-inch rollers with a little green sponge. And that sponge kept getting pulled into the roller. And I'd wait for it to come out the other side, and I'd grab it. and I'd clean a little bit more and it'd get pulled in again. And I'd wait for it to come out the other side and I'd grab it again. This happened probably five or maybe six times. What I remember thinking: This, what I'm doing, this seems a little bit dangerous. And what do we all know about that, if something seems dangerous, it is dangerous."

But she ignored her inner voice and kept on working. "My next thought was, 'I wonder if I should say something? I wonder if I should ask?' Say, 'I'm not sure we should be cleaning this machine while it's running? I saw how it pulled my sponge out and I thought, what if it pulled my finger? That might pinch me, and that would hurt. I wonder if I should ask?'" she said.

"I talked myself out of asking really fast, 'cause remember, just the day before, I was the one begging for this job. Just the day before I was telling Joe that I would do any job. And that I was a good worker. And a hard worker. And that I wouldn't let him down. I did not want to be the person to tell Joe really, two things: One, I don't know what I'm doing. And two, I'm scared. I'm scared that this might hurt me. So I just kept cleaning."

These are the types of conversations factory workers can have with themselves. They want to do a good job.

"The next thing I did is something I hope none of you never do and I hope none of your employees ever do. And that is, I just completely gave away my safety," Hart said. "Because I was thinking, 'Well, I don't really know what I'm doing, but they all know what they're doing. And they wouldn't ask me to do this if it was dangerous.' So without my coworkers even knowing it, I was counting on them to take care of me," she said. "Not something I'd do again, but that's exactly what I did that day."

Joe walked back into the building. He told the workers to split up. Somebody get on this other machine. "I ran over there because I was still trying to impress Joe. 'I'll do it!' He said, 'OK, Kina, don't forget to clean underneath.' He left the building again at the machine he was pointing to, by far the largest conveyor belt in the room. So I thought, 'OK, I'll clean the bottom part first. It's the hardest part to clean. I'll come around the top and I'll be done with this in 45 minutes, no problem.'"

Then fate intervened.

"So I walked around the machine, I got on my hands and knees and I crawled underneath and I started cleaning near that end roller," Hart said. She switched to her left hand because her right hand put the conveyor's roller too close to her face.

A normal day at work. Until it wasn't.

"I put it in my left hand, and that way when I reached up to clean, I could lean out of the machine, just a little bit. The very second I reached up with my left hand to start cleaning, near that end roller, somebody turned that machine on," she said.

The guy was going to hose down the top of the conveyor belt.

"Now this time, obviously, it wasn't my sponge that was caught. This time it was my entire arm. Literally just a second, that's all it took. My arm went up and around that roller." Her head hit a bar and she grabbed with her right hand and held on as tight as she could. "I knew that was probably the only thing from keeping me from being pulled in, all the way. That machine had a hold of my jacket, which was across my neck, so I couldn't even yell for help," she said.

Hart remembers almost every detail from that horrific day — down to the boots and clothes she was wearing.

"But I wish I could forget the sound that machine made. Or the sound my arm made when it broke. And the thoughts going through my head, and really, how afraid I was, thinking, I hope somebody finds me, soon. I hope somebody turns this machine off. I hope somebody saves me. But all the time knowing that this, this was probably going to kill me. So I just hung on."

Finally, somebody shut it down.

"My arm had gone through that conveyor belt and it was crushed. It broke at the shoulder. And that conveyor belt just continued to pull until it just literally just ripped it off. Broke my collar bone. I had a severe neck injury and a head injury," Hart said. She suffered a collapsed lung. Lost a lot of blood.

They flew her to a trauma center in Seattle and called her family. She was there for two months.

"That day I made some choices. That day I did some things that caused a ripple effect that hurt people that I care about," Hart said.

Her parents made the three-hour drive, and her father stayed with her the whole time. He kept saying how sorry he was. "The hardest thing for me to hear my dad say is, he said, 'Kina, I am so sorry that I didn't just get a better job and pay for your school. That's what I should have done.' So now this man — someone who has worked so hard his entire life — now thinks it was somehow not good enough."

All the people she worked with at the salmon plant that day quit and went back home.

A few years ago, Hart went back to Alaska to the factory where she lost her left arm, to do some safety training with employees. She asked about Joe, the foreman who gave her the chance.

"This impacted Joe's life in a very negative way. This pretty much destroyed the man that Joe was," she said.

Joe died about five years ago, and she never got to see him again after the accident. "I wanted to tell him that I was OK and that he could finally forgive himself," she said.

Now Hart speaks at safety conferences. She meets people who say, 'Well, they didn't train her; they didn't lock out the machine.'

"But I knew it was dangerous and not quite right. If it was today, I would ask. I would not give up my safety. So I have to take some responsibility for that ripple effect that I helped to create," Hart said.

Her goal of becoming a dentist was over, and for a while, she wallowed in self-pity. She got her degree and became a science teacher near Spokane, Wash.

Hart feels lucky she got a second chance. "Every single day, I have a very physical reminder to give my life some purpose," she said.

She spreads her message: "I read not too long ago we have 7.5 billion people on our planet. But there's only one of you. That's why I think it's very important that we try to make safety a very personal priority. It has to be about you."