Safety Tailgate
As a member of the Marine Corps In- fantry, a motto we followed was “Sem- per Salus,” which translated from Latin means “always safe.” During training, a set of rules was drilled into me to keep my teammates and me safe in unsafe scenarios. I became accustomed to tak- ing calculated risks to support those internalized rules. Semper Salus By Patrick Morgan
Tree care is dangerous work, and our decisions hold the weight of life and death, along with the potential for the destruction of personal property.
Patrick Morgan, Academy Trained. All photos courtesy of the author.
fect, we created our own rules, much like the field of fire rule in the Marine Corps, to keep us out of the pathway of falling debris, ropes and car traffic. A culture of safety is oen miscon- strued as something that impedes our ability to carry out tasks. I used to think this was true. As I have aged and gained experience, my perspective has changed. I have learned that just because we have rules intended to keep everyone safe, that doesn't mean we won't make mistakes. Establishing a workplace culture of safety is an attitude and thought pro- cess that provides us with protections
As a civilian working for my first tree company in Calistoga, CA, my Ma- rine Corps training made me feel at home in the tree world. It was danger- ous work, and our decisions held the weight of life and death, along with the potential for the destruction of personal property. The situations and hardships we shared fostered camara- derie with each other. The rule of thumb when climbing was that we only wore hard hats while remov- ing trees or conducting rigging opera- tions. We did not see the danger of taking off our hard hats outside of removals and rigging because we had become desen- sitized by our day-to-day activities. In ef-
For context, at Camp Pendleton, there is a tire house used for live-fire train- ing that simulates clearing buildings. Specific parameters dictated that we never point a loaded weapon at anoth- er individual or target unless it was our intended target and in our field of fire. Our field of fire was set accord- ing to where we were placed in the "stack," and it determined the area we were responsible for defending. Regardless of our position, there was an invisible plane that we were not meant to cross with the barrel of our weapons for any reason.
42 | ArborTIMES Summer 2023
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