Getting Under the Surface of Slip and Fall Injuries with Patrick Dooley

In 2019 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were
190,000 slip and fall events that resulted in time away from
work.  60% of those were falls on the same surface. 
Any surface is the interface with our shoes and together they
provide stability for our base of support while moving. The
surface composition and condition are key to the efficiency of
our movements.    A stable surface compatible with
the work being done is a good place to start when trying to
prevent Slip and Fall events.


On this episode of the MEMIC Safety Experts Podcast, I speak with
Patrick Dooley, CSP and Senior Environmental Health and Safety
Specialist for LL Bean.  We are going to get under the
surface of slip and fall injuries and discuss how understanding
your surfaces can help reduce slip and fall events.


 


Peter Koch: [00:00:04] Hello, listeners, and
welcome to the MEMIC Safety Experts podcast, I'm your host, Peter
Koch. I expect many of you listening out there have had the
chance to walk on the beach. Well right now I want you to think
back. What was it like? Was it Rocky where the rocks big or the
little pebbles? Was the sand hard or was it really loose the
surface move underneath your feet when you walked when we
expected a surface like soft beach sand or the gravel around
where the surf breaks can be just what we want. But when that
surface changes to something we aren't expecting, it can cause us
to stumble or at the very least break stride. Think about it. So
when our foot or shoe interacts unexpectedly with the surface,
our base of support changes as our foot, knee or hip moves
farther to the side or four and a half feet. So when we're
walking or working, most of the time our base of support is our
feet. So right now, if you can [00:01:00] safely do it, stop and
put your feet about shoulder width or maybe just a little wider
and then steady yourself and keeping both feet on the ground,
shift your weight from one side to the other side and then back
again should feel pretty stable, balanced. Even if you shift your
weight pretty far to one side, you're still going to feel pretty
balanced as long as your feet are going to be on the floor.


Peter Koch: [00:01:23] When you move side to
side, I want you to think about how far your center of gravity
and that's right around where your belly button or your belt
buckle is, how far that moves from side to side before you might
feel like you're going to tip over. So depending on how far apart
your feet are, your center of gravity can move quite a bit from
that center position. You can move it almost all the way to the
outside of that foot, to the side that you're standing on now.
And again, only if you can safely do it, move your feet closer
together with your toes or your shoes touching or maybe almost
touching. Now shift your weight from side [00:02:00] to side
again. And do you feel the difference? You should even see the
difference in how far your center of gravity moves before you
feel unstable, because the closer your feet are, the smaller that
base of support is. We fall when our center of gravity moves
outside of our base of support. The larger or faster the movement
and the smaller our base of support is, the more likely we are to
fall. It's just physics. You really can't get around it. And we
take for granted the surfaces that we walk on during the day.
That's really neither good nor bad. It just is like you're going
to walk across the tile floor in the bathroom or you're going to
walk across the rug in your home, or you're going to walk across
the concrete at work and you take it for granted.


Peter Koch: [00:02:45] However, the surface is
an important piece. It's the interface with our shoes. And
together that surface in our shoes provide a platform of
stability for our base of support while we walk, move, lift,
reach, roll or whatever [00:03:00] motion or ambulation that
we're engaged in at the time. That surfaces composition and
condition are key to the efficiency of our movement. So it's
reasonable to think that a stable surface compatible with the
work being done is a good place to start when you're trying to
prevent slip and fall events. But how do you know what that
surface is? How do you know how stable it is? How do you know how
slip resistant it is? And unless you're fortunate enough to have
built a custom facility, most of us have inherited the surface
that came with the building. And even if you did build a new
facility, some of the walking working surfaces may have been
specked out by the architect and not the safety engineer. They
may look good, but they're not compatible with the work, meaning
that they don't have enough inherent friction to keep you from
slipping or too much and may cause you to stumble. This is where
a thorough surface or floor care and maintenance program really
comes into play. So understanding all the components that go into
[00:04:00] keeping us upright when we're walking and working
around the business.


Peter Koch: [00:04:04] And there's a lot that
goes into one of those programs. And I don't know if you're like
me. When I first started out, I was thinking, I don't need one of
those. Our floors are just fine. And then if you look back at
some of your statistics, it might show a different story. And if
you look at it nationally and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has
some stats that should make you look down at the floor a little
more closely, because in 2019, BLS reported that there were more
than 190,000 slip trip fall events that involve days away from
work, and 60 percent of those were events that were a fall to the
same level. So not a fall from a height, like a ladder or a
vehicle, but a slip and fall on the same surface. So gaining
insights to where to start and the pitfalls that you might look
out for are key no matter what you're doing, if you're just
starting out to create your own slip and fall program or if
you're really evaluating an existing program [00:05:00] for your
company. So that said on the podcast. With me today is Patrick
Dooley, CSP, and senior environmental health and safety
specialist with L.L. Bean. And we're going to get under the
surface of slip and fall events and what steps L.L. Bean has
taken to manage the surfaces its staff work on at their
facilities. So, Patrick, welcome to the podcast today.


Patrick Dooley: [00:05:21] Well, thank you very
much, Peter. Happy to join.


Peter Koch: [00:05:24] That's great. And, you
know, you and I and a couple of others from MEMIC, we ended up
doing a podcast, not a podcast, but a webinar a few weeks back on
Slip and Falls and talking a little bit about Libyan's experience
managing slip and falls at their store. So I wanted to have you
on and just maybe take a little deeper dive into some of the
things that you did, what you learned from your experiences, some
of the challenges that you ran into and what maybe some actions
that you took. So I'm hoping that we can get into some of those
conversations today as we move forward.


Patrick Dooley: [00:05:58] Absolutely.


Peter Koch: [00:06:00] Before [00:06:00] we jump
into the bean’s plan or process, tell us a little bit about your
background. So what got you started in safety and how long have
you been in the field? And maybe how long have you been at L.L.
Bean?


Patrick Dooley: [00:06:12] Well, thank you. So
as of right now, I am lucky enough to be in the field of safety
for the last 20 years, have a degree in safety studies from Keene
State College. And I've been lucky enough to be with L.L. Bean
the last 14 years.


Peter Koch: [00:06:29] That's pretty awesome.
And Keene State's got a pretty long history of having of putting
out quite a few really good safety professionals with their
safety studies programs out there. So were you able to jump right
from Keene State to beans, or did you have a couple of places
that you stopped in between?


Patrick Dooley: [00:06:49] So in between the
year 2001 and leading up to L.L. Bean, I was able to hold a
couple of different positions within safety included lead in
asbestos abatement [00:07:00] and consulting, as well as working
for a temporary agency and doing safety for all of their temp
hires and working with actually MEMIC to help with our lost
control. And then I was fortunate enough to land a job with L.L.
Bean, and I've been there ever since. And the best part about
L.L. Bean is that it's not singularly focused into just the
retail division. We have a manufacturing division, we have our
fulfillment centers, we have our facilities. So it's a lot more
expansive than what people might think of LLB.


Peter Koch: [00:07:37] Yeah, it's not just a
store. And, you know, we were talking before the podcast. Neither
you nor I are native to Maine. We're actually both native to
Connecticut and then moved to Maine for our wives, which is kind
of cool. And, you know, I had known of L.L. Bean while I was
there in Connecticut and had come to Maine and actually shopped
at the flagship store. But I had no [00:08:00] idea the extensive
facilities that L.L. Bean has between, you know, research and
design and manufacturing and then shipping storage besides the
retail facilities. So that's pretty, interesting. You get but you
get to see a lot of interesting things just within the L.L. Bean
ecosystem.


Patrick Dooley: [00:08:21] So the L.L. Bean as a
whole, when you look at it with all the different divisions that
we have from a safety perspective, you're able to apply all the
knowledge you've learned over the years and gain knowledge as you
go along. It kind of opens the doors for a lot of folks. It's eye
opening. Most folks in our profession get kind of siloed into
manufacturing or transportation or construction. And, you know,
here at the L.L. Bean, we've been afforded the opportunity as
safety professionals to explore all of those avenues. And it's
been great.


Peter Koch: [00:08:58] You even have I mean,
even [00:09:00] at the retail store, you even have hospitality.
So you have there's a little food outlet there, a restaurant that
you have at the flagship store. People wouldn't think of that
either. So when you explore L.L. Bean from a safety perspective,
it's like almost working in a little city because you have all
these different nooks and crannies that have different needs. And
then you have the connection with the public. So it's not just
workplace safety, as you might have in manufacturing or you might
have in an office building or someplace else. But you have a
pretty strong connection with the public that you're going to
have guests and staff encountering different exposures together.
Even so, you're planning on both sides, which from my
perspective, I always think that there is a definite overlap
between what you might do for guest safety and what you're going
to do for workplace safety. There's a definite overlap there.


Patrick Dooley: [00:09:56] And I would even
extend it even further to guests, to [00:10:00] the community,
because majority of the. Places where we reside throughout the
country right now. We expand our offerings into the community
from our outdoors discovery programs, so things are available to
folks and it's not just the branding thing, but we want people to
be outside and be in the outdoors. They're not just our guests,
we are actually the guests to the outdoors. Right. I mean, that's
the whole point. But how we do it and how we make people be safe
and do things is I mean, that's what we've been very successful
in, even through this whole pandemic.


Peter Koch: [00:10:33] So that's pretty cool.
And not just all of the different facilities that you have, that
do different things. But you have locations across the country as
well, which is something that didn't exist back in the 70s.
Right. It's you've expanded across the United States. So you have
54 locations or something like that across the United States.


Patrick Dooley: [00:10:56] Now we're across 19
different states [00:11:00] and there is roughly 54 locations
with soon to be a couple more opening this year. But within this
past year, those 54 locations in 19 states offered up many
different challenges throughout the pandemic, as anyone could
imagine.


Peter Koch: [00:11:18] So I'm sure they have.
And in all those different states, there are you know, there's
different like you said before, there's different cultures that
you have to work through and within there's different facilities,
challenges. There's different perceptions from the public that
you might have to manage as you go through there. All of these
things kind of fit into that overall safety puzzle. And I would
imagine, like one of the common things that you have for
exposures across all of the different facilities and no matter
what they do is slip and falls or slip and falls. So slip and
fall exposures, how different are they across the different
facilities and how different are they maybe [00:12:00] in
different states or maybe in the different areas that you would
have work going on, whether it be a public facing or outdoor
center or manufacturing and warehousing?


Patrick Dooley: [00:12:13] Yeah, I mean, if you
look at it from a retail standpoint, I'll start with that is we
are in those 19 different states. So what is the environment that
we're in? You know, where we're not in sunny Florida where we may
get a little bit of rain. We're in Park City, Utah. We're going
to go for the big end of town that's known people their ski and
we're in the Adirondacks and in New York. Same thing. Hopefully
it's snow season and the rain events and everything else that
comes along with New England. So a lot of the things that go into
planning and engineering and thinking about how we build out our
stores, slips trips and falls have to be kind of in the
forefront, not just from our customers, not for our employees.
It's things [00:13:00] that we need to think about. And those are
things that maybe when we're building out these stores 10 years
ago, we didn't have so much forward thinking. But now as we're,
you know, 10 years later, we're trying to figure it out and say,
oh, you know, we need to look at more of what's the impact to not
only the customer or the employee, but sustainability to floor
care and maintenance programs. What does that all look like?


Peter Koch: [00:13:30] Yeah, it's all one big
puzzle, really. And if you just, I remember in some of my past
experiences or other working with clients at MEMIC or working
outside of MEMIC before I came to MEMIC thinking about the
flooring or the surfaces that you're going to have people walking
and working around. It sometimes started with the idea of what's
it going to look like? And we never really talked about how are
we going to maintain it, what [00:14:00] type of footwear is
going to be on it, how much traction is going to be there?
Basically, they figured, well, we're going to put it in and then
if we have to replace it, we’ll replace it in 10 years. But
frankly and historically, those products, especially in those
high traffic areas, never lasted the time that they expected to
because of either increased traffic levels or, you know, I can
tell you, you talked about Park City, Utah. I was the question
that rolled through my head, when you're saying that was I wonder
if you got anybody in ski boots walking through one of those
stores. And I think from a slip trip and fall standpoint, ski
boot on any surface is one of the most difficult things to try to
figure out, because there isn't really anything that's going to
be great, because you can find something that works for the ski
boot, but then it's near impossible to keep it clean.


Patrick Dooley: [00:14:52] For sure and one of
the things that architecturally what was looked at when stores
are being built, not just L.L. Bean, but other places [00:15:00]
is. Does it look how does it feel? Is it on Brand in what ended
up happening from. And from our standpoint is we were having like
four or five different floor textures within one building. So now
your floor care and maintenance program becomes a little bit
crazy and the costs are a little bit different because you're
vacuuming one space, you're mopping in another and you're dry
mopping in another. So it just adds to a lot of the confusion.
And like you said, it's, you know, depending on the area your in,
that may not be the way to go. So 2021, let's revisit that and
see how we can make improvements on that. Not only impacts our
employees, but the general public that comes in to visit L.L.
Bean.


Peter Koch: [00:15:46] Sure. So we're going to
talk about the refurbishment program that you guys went through
and specifically about some of the flooring. But I think it's
worthwhile talking a little bit about some of the challenges with
slip and fall prevention and [00:16:00] kind of how they affect
the big picture. I think some of the big ones are in and you
alluded to this in our webinar, perception is one of those
things. Visibility is another. And then surface traction. I think
those three are pretty sizable. And we can address some of those
as we go. So let's really start with surface traction and what it
is. And why is low traction a problem?


Patrick Dooley: [00:16:26] I think it is an easy
question to answer. But at the same token, it isn't because it's
one of these things that people don't see. Right. It's invisible.
So problems with these surfaces cause what the majority of the
slip trips and falls for the most part, if we see a puddle on the
floor or something that looks slick or, you know, gum or leaves
or whatever, we can kind of focus on that. Right. But if we're
not wearing proper footwear, you're not going to get the right
amount of traction. [00:17:00] And the amount of traction depends
on what kind of flooring you have. So if you go see not only
attraction's really invisible, but it also isn't immediately
obvious how to quantify and tell when to do something about it.
So how much water makes it so slippery or, you know, is it the
snow and ice on the sidewalk? It's slippery or, you know, is it
snow melt or calcium chloride that we're putting outside and
tracking? And that makes it slippery. So there's so many
different environmental factors that can come in that can give
you this low traction effect. But then there's this underlying
thing of what's our perception of slippery? Your perception is
going to be different than mine. You know, a perception of
someone at a younger age, a toddler. Their perception is that
we're going to be way different than someone who is probably a
little bit older. So where [00:18:00] they may walk fast, someone
may walk slower. So perception is kind of this undefined thing
when it comes to slips trips and falls and how to figure out what
it's not slippery and what is slippery.


Peter Koch: [00:18:12] And I think that's a
really good point. And it's perception is one of those things
that you really it's hard to control outside of yourself. Like
one of the first things that people do to help prevent slip and
fall injuries are to put signs up. We're going to put a sign up
and help make people aware. You've all seen the yellow wet floor
signs or maintenance in progress or something sign. And they're
fairly ubiquitous. I can't tell you. Well, before all the travel
restrictions happens, you know, you walk through the airport and
guaranteed if you're walking through early in the morning, you're
going to see a number of those along the walkways. And after a
while, you don't even see him anymore. So, like, they're not even
they don't even create additional perception. [00:19:00] You just
see them as part of the background. You might not even process
it. So that's one of the challenges with perception. But the
other challenge, too, is like it's all it's different. You said
what might be slippery to you or hazardous to you and your
perception is going to be different for me, my perception of what
the hazard is and then it changes what you do with it for sure.


Patrick Dooley: [00:19:20] Right? I mean, we all
have unique gates. Our strides are all different. Our footwear
choices are all different. Now, the type of shoe that you wear
that we have an on our footwear all adds into what can be
slippery and what isn't slippery because you and I could be
wearing the same shoe. But your shoe could be six months older
than mine. But I'm sticking to the floor and know you're falling
on your behind. It's very different.


Peter Koch: [00:19:47] So and if I'm taken if
I'm taking a six or eight inch longer stride than you are in our
legs or the same length. So there's a different amount of force
placed on the heel and the sole to generate [00:20:00] friction
when it lands. So. It's a there's so many different things that
go into that to drive perception, and they're all a lot of them
are habits. I mean, we're many of us don't put on shoes in the
morning in order to prevent a slip and fall unless, of course,
you're going out into a hazardous environment. And then you might
put, you know, ice cleats on or micro spikes or something. That
is going to be a traction enhancer for a pair of shoes that
you're going to have. But typically, when you get up in the
morning, go to work, you put on the shoes that either match the
outfit or they're going to be comfortable for what you're going
to do or required for what you're going to do that day.


Patrick Dooley: [00:20:40] Right. And I think
that from an employee standpoint, because you're in the same
workspace day in and day out, you recognize those areas that can
be slippery or not slippery. And so you can adjust the footwear
that you're going to wear or you're recommended the footwear. So
[00:21:00] if I'm a line cook in a restaurant, I know that it's
going to be slippery back there. So I'm going to wear footwear
that translates to that environment, similar to the fact that if
I'm outside shoveling in the middle of winter in ice and snow,
I'm going to wear footwear to that effect. But if I'm shopping
inside of a store, for the most part, it's fair game. You don't
know what people are going to wear and come in and come out from.
So from a general liability standpoint, we can't anticipate what
their perception is going to be of a floor and whatnot. We can
coach our employees. We can do certain things to lower the risk,
but the general public is open to us so they can come in and
they're at the risk of the environment that they're in. Right.


Peter Koch: [00:21:46] Flip flops to steel toes,
really, I'm sure you've seen it all come through the door.


Patrick Dooley: [00:21:52] Absolutely.


Peter Koch: [00:21:53] So perception exacerbates
the problem of low friction. If you have a flooring or a surface,
whether [00:22:00] it be inside or outside, that could be
generally slippery. But your perception and how you see that
surface can change how you interact with it. What other factors
play into reducing the traction on a floor.


Patrick Dooley: [00:22:17] So let's think about
the kind of the five biggest things that you see for a slip trip
and fall events. Right. It's slip resistance on walking surfaces.
So we've talked a little bit about that. The walking surface
conditions, visibility is another one poor condition of either
handrails or guardrails that are in the area. And the
accessibility can be a major factor, too. So is it too crowded?
There's too many things going on for us to be like fixtures?
Let's think about having fixtures in aisles and you're offering
up an area where people are aware of their surroundings and can
slip trip or fall or something. So [00:23:00] I think those are
probably the five biggest things that we would look at in order
to kind of reduce the risk of a slip trip fall.


Peter Koch: [00:23:09] And when we start to look
at those different factors, a lot of it's going to come down to
what the flooring is at its base. Like what material, what's the
composition of that particular floor that you're on? And then
what? What are you going to do with it? And that's the fixtures.
That's the maintenance. That's the way it's going to be used. The
number of people that are going to be on it. All of those things
contribute to it. But there's a base slip, resistance or traction
that flooring is going to have when it comes from the
manufacturer. So if we start there, because again, let's start at
the base and let's really get down to the nitty gritty of this
whole thing. How do you know how slippery a floor actually is
even before [00:24:00] you start putting things on top of it and
people on top of it?


Patrick Dooley: [00:24:03] Right. So
fortunately, we're lucky enough, right. There's there is some
sort of scientific method that we can apply to looking at the
coefficient of friction, which is objective. Now, the standards
on coefficient of friction are all over the place for flooring,
but there is a threshold that people can use or benchmark against
that says that is your floor more slippery or less slippery. So
OSHA doesn't define it. The National Flooring Institute, they
have their own standard, but you can benchmark it. So when you're
buying something off the shelf from, let's say, Home Depot and
you're buying tile and you're putting in your bathroom, there is
a COF coefficient of friction label on it that says this meets
blah blah blah. From our standpoint, we would bring in someone
like MEMIC to sample the floor. So we do try Bomaderry. Right. So
basically it is science of measuring friction. So we're going to
use [00:25:00] a device. And in this particular one, we're using
a binary tribometer or output tribometer that measures the
coefficient of friction, the floor sideways, frontwards,
backwards, wet, dry. And he gives us an idea of where we're at
and what risk measures do we need to take to lower the risk of a
slip and fall inside the workplace? Or is the flooring in to
match the environment we're putting it in? So obviously, if we're
putting flooring in Freeport, Maine may be different than what we
put in Virginia. Virginia is not going to have snow and they're
going to have snow melt. They're not going to have, I should say,
that could knock on wood after this year. Anything can happen.
But, you know, generally speaking, they're floor conditions. They
look different than what we're going to have in Freeport. So
let's define that and let's come to a conclusion of what's
happening to the environment, basically is what it is.


Peter Koch: [00:25:56] Yeah. So how do you
understand first understanding of the environment [00:26:00] and
then getting some information about the floor and how those two
things would match up and compare to each other? Because
certainly, you know, like you talked about like in a food service
standpoint, a hard, hard core tile with a real polished surface
isn't going to be great if you're going to get grease on it from
your fryolator. Not a great combination. And that same
combination wouldn't be great to have, say, in Freeport, where
you're going to have outside, where you're going to have snow and
sand because it's going to wear really poorly and wet shoes. Wet
slick shoes on that surface is going to be crazy slippery.


Patrick Dooley: [00:26:43] Absolutely. And also,
what is the location? What do you where you're at? So it's easy
for us because it's our campus. It's our store. But outside of
Freeport, you know, we're leasing spaces inside of malls. And,
you know, we may be just a pass through. [00:27:00] Into the
mall. So, you know that the parking is convenient. So people are
walking in and out. So what happens is that they're dragging
stuff in and out of the store. So we need now what we didn't know
then is to match the flooring to the traffic that's going to
happen inside of the store,


Peter Koch: [00:27:19] Traffic patterns and
volume are especially for your situation it was pretty critical
as you started to look at what do we use when we start when we
get into that refurbishment project? I also think that that's a
pretty important thing to think about, no matter where you are. I
mean, traffic patterns, whether you're in a doctor's office,
hospitality situation, manufacturing, I don't think it really
matters. Even a grocery store traffic patterns are a big deal
because depending on where they're coming from, like you said,
you think about a grocery store, if you're coming from the
butcher area or you're coming from the back of the house space
where we're [00:28:00] storing things or you're coming from front
of the house as people are walking in through the entryway, how
much what's the possibility of having a contaminant on the bottom
of your shoe that you're dragging in? And how do you treat for
that? How do you plan for that? How do you manage that? And
there's some definitely some strategies there. Sure.


Patrick Dooley: [00:28:19] Right. And then the
interrogation of the surface. So obviously the middle of your
walkways inside of a store or a building or what have you are
going to have less traffic than your main entrances. So do you
have a specific plan for now resurfacing those?


Peter Koch: [00:28:37] So I guess this is a good
time to sort of jump into the refurbishment project as you
started to look at your facilities. It was time to replace some
flooring and to refurbish some of those facilities that needed to
have needed it. So when you started to do that, I know we had
talked about before that you had used tribometry to learn
[00:29:00] what the coefficient of friction was about some of
those surfaces. Talk to me a little bit about the refurbishment
project that you did and then what part sampling the surfaces,
either before or after played to you making decisions about
flooring.


Patrick Dooley: [00:29:16] So when we kicked
this off, let's say, three years ago, the question came up from
our store operations, the facilities, teams that we hate. We're
thinking about getting rid of all this different floor textures
and going with a singular floor texture inside of our stores.
What impact would that have on not only the general public, but
on our employees? And that posed a great question for us. How do
we gauge that? How do we figure that out? Luckily enough for us,
at the time we had this great big expansive space that was
getting ready to be refurbished that allowed us to take some
concrete and [00:30:00] create sample areas. So the goal was to
come up with a concrete surface for the store the goal on top of
that was to have our floor care and maintenance program. The cost
reduce it would look clean it would be singular. But in order to
get to that point, how do we know it's not just safe? Because I
don't think safe's a good word to use. But I mean, is it
slippery? Does it work? Can we drag fixtures across of it? Does
it need to be mopped? Do we need to use a machine so we are able
to create this space and use four different textures? And we
partner with MEMIC and said, hey, bring your tribometer here, to
L.L. Bean, let's do some testing. We're going to wear it on the
floor. We're going to make it where we're going to make it dirty.


Patrick Dooley: [00:30:53] So that way it's not
like you're getting a fresh floor when you come in and it gives
us a little bit of wear patterns and such. Take the readings and
then [00:31:00] from the readings, we will determine what would
be the best option to replace in the flooring that we currently
have in our stores. And with that, we came to the conclusion,
let's use a flooring that has some texture in it, has a urethane
finish. It'll look nice. It’ll look uniform and has a high
coefficient of friction. Little did we know that the environment
dictated kind of what would happen in the future for one of our
stores. But for the most part, it was the right decision. And if
you look at major retailers right now, you look at your Wal-Mart,
you look at your Hannaford's, you look at Shaws, and they're all
going to this rough surfaced concrete slab. And really, it's
because your floor care and maintenance programs are really less
than what they would have to be if you had tile. The agent
deterioration factors kind of go down. You don't have to have as
much floor care repairs than you have now. And aesthetically, it
actually looks good, removed four textures from the floor.
[00:32:00] You know, for us, you go from a wood floor to a carpet
to a court floor to a carpet in our demographics for our
customers. Unfortunately, that created more of a hazard than
anything else.


Peter Koch: [00:32:16] Let's take a quick break.
Safe for S.A.F.E is an acronym for many different things. But
when talking about slip and fall events, Safe represents the four
areas that you can focus on at your facility to prevent slips and
falls, surface awareness, footwear and environment. Look at the
surface as it relates to its composition, condition, changes and
contamination. Evaluate how your facility layout and pace of work
may affect the awareness of your staff to slip and trip hazards.
What is your footwear policy and how is that compatible with the
type of work and the surfaces at your facility? And last, how
[00:33:00] does the lighting and weather in and around the work
environment compound or create slip and trip hazards? If you're
interested in learning more about how to prevent slip and fall
events at your workplace, check out the resources at
www.MEMIC.com/workplace safety. Or if you're a policy holder with
MEMIC, you can sign into the MEMIC safety director and find more
resources there. Now let's get back to today's episode.


Yeah, that kind of ticks into that whole perception and
visibility, too, like if I'm on one type of surface and it has a
lot of traction to it and I'm not really understanding what the
next surface is going to bring, I might know that it's not there
or it's going to be different, like going from carpet to cork
because it's fairly easy to see that difference. But you have no
idea how it's going to react under foot. So they might continue
their gait the same way and [00:34:00] their feet might still be
wet from tracking in from the outside. And all of a sudden it's a
slightly different coefficient of friction and down they go at
end. Lighting must play some difference in that to being able to
see changes in elevation, changes in surface texture that might
cause someone with a low gait, more of a shuffling gait to maybe
even trip on some of those higher traction surfaces or maybe
uneven like cobbled surfaces.


Patrick Dooley: [00:34:28] So the majority of
our refreshes, not only do we look at the flooring, but all the
lighting was changed and all of our fixtures were changed. So we
eliminated not only a lot of heavy fixtures, but also our stores
were a lot more adequately lit than they were in the past. I
can't tell you what the foot candles were, but I can tell you
that it made the product look a lot better.


Peter Koch: [00:34:57] It's kind of amazing how
something small like that, you know, [00:35:00] you might even
change something for a product, get the product to look better,
increase the lighting so you can see better. But visibility makes
a huge difference and slips and falls. When you can see the
surface. It helps you with your perception. It helps you with
understanding the exposure, especially in those crowded areas.
Some of the things that we talk to our clients about, too, is as
you go through your facility, some of the areas that you should
pay a lot of attention to are those low-lit areas where your
employees are going to be like your trash handling spaces, the
back of the house spaces that typically aren't as well-lit as
some of the front of the house spaces. Those are always areas. If
you go back and look at what your trends are or your injury or
your near miss trends, you're going to find that they're going to
happen in those spaces just because you can't really see what's
on the floor.


Patrick Dooley: [00:35:51] And those are the
areas that we tend to lose focus on, right? They're not selling
areas for us. So Backhouse is a good [00:36:00] example. Your
employee entrance. No employees enter from the front door, right?
It's always the back door. The back door has one little light,
usually on top of it. You know, lighting is a is a big factor in
what we do.


Peter Koch: [00:36:12] Yeah, yeah. And you have
some complex needs because you are you're not only trying to
develop flooring that's going to help you reduce the overall
maintenance and replacement costs. But it had to look good. It
had to match, I guess, the branding, you could say, for L.L. Bean
and had had to draw people into the space and make them feel
comfortable. And it needed to be functional not only for traffic
walking, but also for moving your fixtures over the floor, too.
And I think it's something that we forget. And when you're
talking about moving a fixture, what do you, I think I understand
what you're talking about. You're moving racks and carts and
things across the floor. What else would be considered a fixture
[00:37:00] that you might have to plan for


Patrick Dooley: [00:37:02] Going from back of
the house to the front of house or using dollies are used in
pallet jacks or, you know, you're moving over stuff, Xerox,
anything that would be product movement. And not just that.
There's stuff that we sell that, you know, you have one person
that needs that kind of move it along in a customer needs to pick
it up or do it. So how can we make it easier for them? One is it
is the flooring work for them? Is it going to damage the product
as they’re dragging it across? Is it going to damage the texture
as they're dragging it across? So is it going to be agent
deterioration factor on that? So I think there's a lot of
different things to think about. And you could probably go way
down a rabbit hole on that. But, you know, in general, what's
going to work best for that environment and how do you how do you
figure it out? And I think we've only done a really good spot,
because if I look at my employee injuries that have occurred over
the last ten years, you [00:38:00] know, there was a significant
push pull was a big one.


Patrick Dooley: [00:38:05] You know, they're
moving fixtures around. We did floor set changes monthly, which
is crazy, right? I mean, did you force that change? It's massive.
So now we've gone to quarterly and that has made a significant
difference in how we handle product, how we move product, you
know, tag product change, all of it. It just has a little
trickledown effect. Our store injuries have. Gone from pretty
significant to pretty insignificant over the last. So if we look
at I did 13 years, my 14 years over the last three, we've seen a
dramatic dip in retail store injuries. And a lot of it has come
from our process changes our front of house changes, flooring,
fixtures, lighting mannequins, handling mannequins, you know,
bringing them upstairs, downstairs, dragging them across floors,
[00:39:00] all that stuff. So it's had a huge impact. So people
think I'm making a floor change or I'm making a fixture change.
It may seem very insignificant, but if you look in the long,
broader lens to it, it really does have a huge impact. It has a
huge impact on how people play with the landscape of what their
store looks like or what their environment is.


Peter Koch: [00:39:23] And those changes prevent
exposures. But it also allows you to do more like when you when
you have good flooring, good lighting, good changes, good
processes in place. It allows you from a retail perspective to
have your associates interacting with your guests, which is going
to be a huge part of the experience when they come to L.L. Bean
or they come to any retail establishment like you don't want your
staff always focused on how am I moving all this stuff around and
what's going to happen if it's a complex process or a big deal.
You want them interacting and then when they're not interacting,
then they can start to move different things. It's just part
[00:40:00] of that. So some of these changes can, like you said,
have far, far reaching effects. But there is a lot that goes into
it. Did you have a team of people that worked together to make
these floor changes or decide on the floor changes? Or was it
kind of just you and your notebook?


Patrick Dooley: [00:40:18] No, absolutely no. We
had we had to definitely have a team. So in the past, it was more
of a facility planning and operations lens on what the store is
going to look like and how we're going to interact. And
aesthetically, was the approach right. Let's make the store
beautiful and have that environment. When you walk in, you're
like, oh, wow, this is L.L. Bean. Now, 20 years later, like no we
want it to be shoppable. We want it to be yes, we do want it to
look nice, but we want our customers to interact. We want our
employees to be able to interact. We want to do in a safe manner.
And, you know, is it functional? Is it flooring? [00:41:00] Does
the fixtures, is it all meet what we're trying to do here and is
it on Brand? And I think we have achieved that. And I will say,
you know, we're having a store opening here in May and it's
probably going to be one of the probably one of the nicest stores
that I've seen. And it's going to have all these different
components that we're talking about today wrapped up into it,
which is going to be great to see.


Peter Koch: [00:41:23] Yeah, that's really cool
to kind of see it all happen in one particular space and then
start from scratch and see how they kind of move going forward.
That's pretty cool. So when you when you were making these
changes going through and I know it's a process of understanding,
installing, observing, making some more changes. Was there
anything unexpected that you found when you were when you were
testing flooring or after you installed some flooring that you
hadn't expected?


Patrick Dooley: [00:41:59] Yeah, [00:42:00] I
think, you know, there are unknowns. I mean, you try to do as
best you can to replicate situations and environments when you do
sample areas inside of what we tried to do. But then when you get
it into the actual environment, they're going to be putting it
in. There are certain unknowns. They're going to happen. There's
obviously external environmental factors that are out of control.
A good example is, you know, one of our stores in upstate New
York, they're using a different type of snowmelt. So we typically
use salt and sand mixtures. They were using a calcium chloride
based product that was being trapped in through the store. And
this store was a pass through into a mall. So, you know, a lot of
our traffic isn't even shopping. They're going into the mall.
They're dragging the calcium chloride in. So the further and
further they're bringing it in to more slip trips and falls that
we were having from not only customers, but from employees.
Because now remember, back to the perception thing, employees
[00:43:00] already knew where the hot spots were. Right. But as
these as this calcium chloride is being tracked to the store,
those hotspots changed. And so this particular store, which
usually only has a handful of slips trips and falls a year, we
had upwards of 50 within two months. And it was something that we
didn't plan for. Now, we had the same flooring in some in two
other stores earlier in the year, but. You know, winter came and
we found out that maybe this flooring wasn't the best, so we had
to go back and kind of think about, all right, why is this
happening? Do we know what some of the root causes are of it? And
what do we do to kind of fix it? And luckily for us, within a
short time frame, we're able to come to a lot of big conclusions
and pivot to, [00:44:00] you know, getting a new floor care and
maintenance program in place because we knew that the machine
that was there wasn't working properly.


Patrick Dooley: [00:44:07] We knew that the
landlord was using a different product on the sidewalks that was
being tracked into the store. So, you know, we worked with the
landlord to change that product. So that way the calcium chloride
was, you know, the problem with calcium chloride that sticks to
these surfaces. And it's a it's a real pain to clean. And
actually, it broke the machine that was supposed to clean the
floor. So we asked the landlord to go to a different product for
the store. We also found our floor mats are terrible in this
particular store. So a water hog mat, which is something that we
sell, is wonderful from a household standpoint. But from a
commercial standpoint, maybe not the best product to use in a
store that has a very large traffic volume. So we changed out our
floor mats. This particular store, you would walk in and you
would see the yellow floor. What signs up and down the aisles.
[00:45:00] Now you walk in the store and you don't see them
anymore because we did make those changes.


Patrick Dooley: [00:45:04] The floor care
maintenance program is way more robust. The matting program is
now included in that floor maintenance program, which it wasn't
in the past. The changes were made to the salting and sanding and
calcium chloride outside the stratification inside of the
vestibule was turned up. So that way and you're getting it was
drying as you're walking in instead of staying white all the
time. So those are things that you don't really necessarily think
about when you're sitting inside of a box sampling flooring.
Right. You have all these wonderful ideas of what you want that's
going to be and how you're going to work with it. But then, you
know, you don't know what someone's bringing in. You don't know
if, you know, that site had recently been paved. So if it had
been recently paved and it's wet, you're dragging all those oils
into the store, which would cause a similar effect to what
calcium chloride had done. So while it may be temporary, you're
still going to scratch your head and figure out why am I having
all these trips [00:46:00] and falls? So there's a lot of
unknowns that happen with this. You can only focus on the things
that you can focus on when you're trying to make a decision like
this. But, you know, I think is always going to be that little
level of uncertainty that you have to have. And that's the risk
that you need to be either willing to accept or not accept.


Peter Koch: [00:46:25] Yeah, I don't think
there's any perfect solution for slips, trips and falls, except,
you know, maybe carting people everywhere they go, pushing them
around. But that, you know, creates other hazards, other places
that you bring up some interesting problems that you wouldn't
find unless you're doing one or two things, one, paying attention
to your injury trends or near miss trends. Right. So what are
people reporting? What's going on? And are you seeing clustering
happening in a particular location, whether you have one
[00:47:00] facility or multiple facilities? And then the other
part would be paying attention to the surface in the maintenance
process itself? Because, you know, how did you find out that the
floor care machine was gummed up and not working as well? How
long had it been there in that condition or how long had someone
been using it in that condition thinking that they were cleaning
the floor when it really wasn't working as well as it should
have? Well, it starts smoking on you and blows up in one spot.
They're typically gradual, like they're going to work really
well. And then over time, it's going to be a reduction in the
quality that for the surface that the machine leaves afterwards.
And unless you're really paying attention, you're not going to
see it. So I think there's a value in checklists and like, what
are you paying attention to locally? And then your position kind
of globally, overseeing safety for multiple areas is checking in
on those spaces and seeing what's really happening [00:48:00] on
the ground. And those are always going to be great indications
that something's either working or something might not be working
for you.


Patrick Dooley: [00:48:08] Yeah, the biggest
thing is really, you know, from an employer standpoint is to
really encourage employees to report stuff. So the earlier that
you report something, you know, the more data you're going to
have. So we talk about what leading and lagging indicators,
right. So lagging indicator. Someone's already fallen. Someone's
gotten hurt. But the leading indicator as well, someone slipped
there yesterday, but they got hurt today, but it wasn't reported
yesterday, so we couldn't we didn't have the opportunity to take
a look at that and fix it, you know, or what's the trend look
like inside of a different store or stores that have similar
flooring, similar fixtures. You know, what's the trend look like?
How can we match those apples and apples and apples to oranges
and figure out, you know, do [00:49:00] we need to pivot and make
a change in how each fixture or the flooring in a different
store? So, yeah, I think data is just absolutely necessary. Stuff
doesn't get lost in data. If you're tracking the right things,
you're going to be able to get ahead of a lot of different risks
then you would have if you've didn’t, because you I think we've
all heard it and especially with some of your policyholders and
I've seen it in some of our buildings. Well, that spots been
slippery for 10, 15 years. Right. Well, why don't you tell me for
10, 15 years ago, I would have fixed it and want to be slippery
anymore. But yet over those 10, 15 years, how many different
people have crossed that spot and had a little bit of a slip
without a fall?  But all it takes is that one person to have
a catastrophic incident. And everyone says, well, I knew about it
15 years ago so.


Peter Koch: [00:49:57] And then you scratch your
head and why didn’t you tell me, why don't you tell [00:50:00]
me? And I think that's a whole other podcast. Like, why don't
people say something? That's a whole other topic. But it's really
important. And that culture of employees being able to have a
conversation with the safety guy or gal or the supervisor or the
manager about some of those things is really important. Like you
said, it's critical and then not forgoing that information, like
following up on that information, because I would expect that
this is my experience, because I've had that same thing happen to
me where you go to someplace, you're investigating a big slip
trip and fall injury that happened and you talk to the employees
and they say the same thing. Oh, yeah, it's been like that
forever. Well, how come you didn't say anything?


Patrick Dooley: [00:50:45] Absolutely. And the
thing is, like as a safety professional, I think one of the
biggest misconceptions that people have, especially if you look
at people from an employee perspective, a safety professional
isn't just a [00:51:00] pocket protector and a clipboard. You
know, we're there to really help and do things and have the
conversations and learn about your job. And we're excited to
learn about your job. Right. So if there's challenges in
flooring, if there's challenges in your how you do your work,
well, we just want to know about that so that it's not nothing
that's negative. It's all positive. And that's kind of the
environment we live in now. But 10, 15 years ago, I don't think
the safety professionals kind of looked like they were clipboards
and pocket protector people and telling people no, whereas now
we're like, no, but the risk of doing it is this. And the risk of
not doing it is that. So there's a nice conversation that
happens. And that's kind of how we landed on, you know, some of
the different things that we've done inside of our store reverbs.
It was a conversation that just didn't happen. So now those
conversations do happen. And I think we all land [00:52:00] in a
great spot and we have less things to do. And in the end run,


Peter Koch: [00:52:03] That's pretty cool. So
we're coming towards the end of the podcast here. Do you have any
recommendations for companies or maybe a safety person at a
company that's looking to do some refurbishment, that's looking
to do some floor replacement or maybe even creating their own
floor care and maintenance plan? Any recommendations?


Patrick Dooley: [00:52:26] Yeah, I have a few. I
mean, if we're looking at specifically with flooring, so know
your environment. Right. So select flooring materials that that
match that environment. So when you build and expand remodel
facilities, make sure this little resistance meets that
environment, know what the out of box stuff is. So if you're
purchasing something at a Home Depot, it may not be the best
thing you may have to really look at the literature that comes
along with it specifications and say, is this the best flooring?
Make sure your floor care and maintenance programs are up to
speed. Make sure whatever you're using matches [00:53:00] the
flooring material that is laid. So even mopping is great, but
some flooring and says don't mop with detergents and cleaning
products. It could just be water and rinse off and or people
think floor care machinery you're cleaning, it's meant to clean.
It doesn't need that. Machinery does not need to be cleaned.
Right. So there is a preventative maintenance program for that
piece of machinery. So make sure that's up to speed. Yeah. You
use a dirty old mop, you put in dirty old water back on the dirty
old floor, right?


Peter Koch: [00:53:35] And you know, that's a
topic we didn't even get into today and which has its own
nuances. The cleaning the floor itself. And you alluded to a
little bit with the calcium chloride, but the product that you
choose, how you apply the product, how it interacts with the
floor, there are some subtleties there that not everybody knows.
And, you know that old rule of thumb, that more is better is not
always where [00:54:00] you want to go when you're trying to
clean your floor.


Patrick Dooley: [00:54:02] Yeah, right. I mean,
a bottle of old English is not going to work on a tile floor,
right?


Peter Koch: [00:54:06] No, not at all.


Patrick Dooley: [00:54:08] I mean, you really
have to match the cleaning product to the flooring and what's
coming in. So, you know, the calcium chloride. It's a tough thing
to clean. So you want to make sure you're matching the cleaning
product to what the environment is, as long as it matches, as
long as the manufacturer's recommendations are match as well. The
other couple of things would be like make sure your MAP program
is part of your floor care maintenance program. So that would
include like any of your runners. And I would also expand even
further to like if you have rugs in the facility, you take a look
at your rugs. Is the age of deterioration of certain areas of
your rugs pretty sorry? So do they need to be replaced? Do they
need to be repaired? Those are things to think about. And maybe
is that the right product for that type of area when you go to
replace it? And then, you know, I think we just touched upon it
regularly [00:55:00] review your incident reports, you know, what
is happening, what are the trends? Are there things that are
happening that you can't anticipate? Encourage near miss
reporting? Get that leading indicator in there. Make your
employees report those near misses. It may seem laborious at
first because I think what ends up happening is we encourage all
this leading indicator stuff and you get a ton of reports. But
they're significant. They're significant to the person reporting
it. So let's pay attention to it and chart it and map it and put
the data to it. And then finally, from a floor care maintenance
program and an employee thing, make sure folks are trained in
just cleaning up spills like a from our standpoint, we have a
retail store. We don't have a janitorial staff on site all the
time. So they're trained in how to clean up spills, make sure
that if you do have [00:56:00] a custodial staff that they're
trained and respond to spills appropriately. I think those
probably would hit the big beats.


Peter Koch: [00:56:09] Yeah, I think so, too.
And that last point is very interesting. You know, you would
think that cleaning up a spill is a skill set that everyone
should have. I mean, all of us here. And if you're not raising
your hand, you're lying. All of us here have spilled something.
Doesn't matter if it's a glass of milk, glass of water, whatever,
that something has spilled and you've cleaned it up at home.
Great. But in the workplace, you might not be dealing with it.
Like how many of us have actually spilled something, maybe off
the stove that's a little greasy and you're using an off the
shelf cleaner to clean that up? And how many of us have gone back
to that spot? And it's still a little greasy. It's not as clean
as it should be because we might not have used the right cleaner.
We hadn't had the skill set or the training. [00:57:00] So making
sure that your staff, who aren't your custodial staff, have some
understanding of what they should be using to clean up the
potential things that they're going to encounter when they're in
their workplace. And then your custodial staff needs to have
another whole level of training so that they can deal with
anything that comes in and understanding the products and
understanding the process, understanding the potential risks of
using this the wrong way. Understanding limitations, I think is
huge.


Patrick Dooley: [00:57:28] Right. And use and
use things like the yellow, floors wet signs everywhere. Right.
But if they're not used appropriately, it can actually create a
hazard. Right. Because now you have people that are anticipating
perceive a slip, trip or fall and there isn't. So they've changed
their gait, they change their stride and now they're actually
tripping. Because they're their perception is changed. So, you
know, making sure that things that you do [00:58:00] are in line
with the environment, what they need to be doing it use them
appropriately. And I guess that's the key.


Peter Koch: [00:58:07] One last thing I kind of
want to end on here, and you said it as the second to last thing
of the recommendations, reporting those near misses and
especially for slips and falls. That's huge. So, you know, you've
got the ability to map things. Everyone has it. If you're working
in a space, you have a facility. And even if you can't draw, you
can still draw a box with a couple of places where things are in
your facility, so you think about all that data that you have,
sorry, do you encourage people to talk about their near misses?
And in a month, out of the 10 employees that you have, you have
50 near misses, one that should tell you that there's a problem
inherent there. But two, what are you going to do with all that
data? Well, you might not have to respond to everyone
individually at first, but maybe take that data and at least put
those near misses on the map and then see where they cluster. And
that can open your eyes [00:59:00] to, hey, maybe we need to look
more in that area, because out of those fifty twenty-seven of
those reports were in this particular area. So then you can look
at what's your floor care process there? What's the flooring
there, what does it look like, what's the condition, what's the
kind, what are the changes all of those parts for then you as the
owner of the business, if you're a small company or if you have a
safety person, maybe they can be the person that goes to do a
little more investigating so that that mapping process as a
hugely powerful tool with those lagging indicators and in even
the leading indicators. So you flip it around and start looking
at the hazards that are out there in your facilities, inspection
and mapping those.


Patrick Dooley: [00:59:41] And just
communicating back to the person that did report it. So you have
to because you want to make sure that you encourage the effort to
put that in and you want them to do it again. Even if it's
insignificant. But that's just a data point that you have and you
could utilize [01:00:00] in the future. And, you know, I tell
folks all the time, I encourage them to report anything. You
know, I'd rather see my email flooded. Then no have one email at
all.


Peter Koch: [01:00:13] Because, you know, if you
get one email, it's going to be that email.


Patrick Dooley: [01:00:18] Right. And, you know,
and if someone took the time to report it, it's an important it's
important enough to them that I should respond and make sure that
they know that we're going to work on we're going to take a look
at it, that it's not just a data point. That is something that we
encourage. And, you know, it leads into other things in the long
run.


Peter Koch: [01:00:39] Yeah, encouraging that
communication,


Patrick Dooley: [01:00:42] Leading indicators
are just huge. And I think, you know, majority of safety
professionals and in the environments we work in that we don't
see enough of them. They're hard to judge. They're hard to go by.
But they play a huge role in how you determine how [01:01:00] we
lower risk in certain different areas and different areas of our
business. So, yeah,


Peter Koch: [01:01:05] And it's that one cool
thing. You know, if you think about all the rest of the
measurements that we have in business and most of the
measurements we have in business are lagging indicators. It's the
measurement of your income versus outflow for the monetary side
of your business. How many employees do you have this month
versus last month? Most of those are lagging because you're
looking at a report of something that happened historically where
the leading indicators are its information right now. It's that
dashboard of real time information that it's enormously helpful
from a safety standpoint because there's a human factor about it.
Like to be able to respond in kind in time with something that's
coming from another person is huge for your culture.


Patrick Dooley: [01:01:56] Yeah. I mean,
literally, the lagging indicators are the last thing that a
safety person [01:02:00] wants to talk about. The Debbie Downer
of a meeting. Right. I mean, you're going into a meeting and
you're talking about things that have already happened, the cost
to the company. You know, the things that happened to me, G.L
standpoint, comp standpoint. I don't want to talk about it. I
want to talk about. No, here's the things that we've done that we
reported ahead of time. And these are the things that we fixed.
So that way we're not injuring someone or we're not having an
incident with a vehicle or PPT like this is what's happening
because we're able to have these leading indicators. And I'm not
standing here and talking about, you know, someone being injured
because someone didn’t, you know, take the grease off the floor.


Peter Koch: [01:02:37] So that's cool. And all
about kind of understanding the surface. I mean, that's what we
started with today is, you know, talking about slips and falls.
And there's lots of things that go into the puzzle of preventing
slip and fall events. But really, where to start is understanding
your service, how people interact with it, what goes on it, how
it's cleaned, your maintenance program, all that stuff.
Understanding the surface really gives you the best [01:03:00]
idea of how to manage the other things that go towards preventing
slips and falls. So that's pretty cool. And really, we've now hit
the end of the podcast here today. And I really appreciate you
spending some time with us, Patrick, and sharing your expertise
and your experience with us. So thank you for that.


Patrick Dooley: [01:03:19] I thank you for
having me. And this has been great. And now I look forward to
working with MEMIC and some of your policyholder's in the future.


Peter Koch: [01:03:28] Yeah, I hope so. That'll
be great. We will have you on again, and there's you know, like
we talked about at the beginning, L.L. Bean is multifaceted when
it comes to the different industries or the different safety
aspects that are involved with L.L. Bean. So I'm sure we'll have
you on again. Maybe we can talk fall protection or we can talk
personal protective equipment or something else would be kind of
cool to have a chat about.


Patrick Dooley: [01:03:50] Awesome. I look
forward to it, Peter.


Peter Koch: [01:03:52] Very good. Well, thanks
again for joining us. And to all of our listeners out there,
appreciate your listening today. Today on the MEMIC Safety
Experts podcast, [01:04:00] we've been speaking about slip and
fall prevention with Patrick Dooley, CSP and senior environmental
health and safety specialist with L.L. Bean. If you have any
questions or I'd like to hear more about a particular topic on
our podcast, e-mail me at podcast@MEMIC.com. Also, check out our
show notes at MEMIC.com/podcast, where you can find additional
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good but using what you learned here is even better.