District provides hands-on equipment training with focus on safety

Photo By Sara Goodeyon | Tulsa District USACE Red River Area staff receive training on heavy equipment as part of the district Safety and Occupational health program.  

DENNISON, OK, UNITED STATES

10.13.2022

Story by Sara Goodeyon 

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tulsa District

DENNISON, Texas — More than 160,00 thousand acres of land and water resources are managed by the Tulsa District at the 33 multipurpose projects it oversees across Oklahoma and parts of Kansas and Texas. The district is responsible to maintain the lands and infrastructure at these projects and this falls to the lake staff.

Often this work requires operating heavy equipment for tasks such as excavating and repairing pipelines, moving heavy materials or even preparing food plots for environmental purposes. It is imperative that this work be done in a way that keeps the equipment operator and others safe.

Recently the District Safety and Occupational Health Management System (CE-SOHMS) Red River Area planning and delivery team provided 25 employees real world training on tractors, excavators, bulldozers, backhoes, and skid steers at Lake Texoma.

“We’re not trying to have them become proficient with this equipment today,” said training instructor Dusty Pollard a district civil engineering technician. “We want them to be able to operate the equipment safely without harming themselves or someone else.”

Pollard gave the trainees a comprehensive safety briefing before they went to the nearby sites where the equipment was staged for the trainees to perform various tasks. At the outdoor training sites Pollard and the other instructors, Russell Bowers and Chad Rainwater, demonstrated how to do a pre-operation safety inspection of the equipment.

“We had the employees train on each type of equipment and learn the safety aspects of it that they need to know,” said Waurika Lake manager Luke Prichard. “They went over all of the different parts of the equipment and doing things such as checking the oil and making sure they have all of the proper protective gear and that everything is in place.”

Prichard is the leader for the Red River CE-SOHMS team. He said the equipment training is a part of their efforts to regularly educate the workforce about safety. The Red River Area includes Waurika, Truscott, Texoma, Hugo, Pat Mayse, Broken Bow, Sardis, and Pine Creek Lakes. Tulsa District is responsible for preserving natural resources by overseeing activities designed to manage, conserve, protect, and restore land, water, and wildlife resources. The district is also responsible for providing recreation at its projects.

“At the project we use the tractor for food plots, and we use skid steers to unload trailers for projects we are working on,” said Waurika Lake Park Ranger Destany Rochell. “At Truscott we use the excavator, the backhoe and even the tractor when we have to repair breaks in the pipeline that carries chloride contamination from the Red River to the lake.”
Many of the trainees already had some experience in operating heavy equipment but welcomed the opportunity to receive the safety instruction from the experienced trainers and to actually get in the vehicle and operate it.

The district CE-SOHMS is part of the overall U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Safety and Occupational Health program. It is described by USACE as a methodology required by regulation and supported by USACE leadership to fully integrate safety and occupational health functions into all USACE business operations, to ensure risk is managed properly at the correct level resulting in reduced injuries and illnesses of employees and contractors, while delivering the USACE missions on-time, within budget and at a quality expected by its customers.

• Date Taken: 10.13.2022
• Date Posted: 10.13.2022 14:45
• Story ID: 431236
• Location: DENNISON, OK, US