Morning, I don't think we have anybody joining us yet. So you guys, thank you for being here. It's an early morning to get here. I'm familiar with being at the conference, professional development conferences and getting to the morning session seems like it's an accomplishment in and of itself. My name is Nate Spencer. I work with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm the Chief Safety and Health Officer for them. I'm excited to be with you today. Just wanted to give you a little bit of my history and a little bit of who I am. So I graduated with an industrial hygiene bachelor's degree from Utah State University. After that, I've graduated from Montana Tech with also a degree in industrial hygiene. And so when I tell people, I've worked for the church now for 21 years, almost 22 years. People will ask me, what do you do? And I say, oh, I'm an industrial hygienist with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And you see this puzzled look on their face. And I get this question, your pastors must have unusually large teeth. That's usually the kind of question that I get. And I say, well, you know, there's a lot going on with the church and industrial hygiene is not dental hygiene. And so anyway, it usually launches into a pretty fun discussion after that. But today, my intention is to talk to you a little bit about what we do in the church and some of the strategies that we utilize to try to take care of and control some of the hazards that we see. We're a very large and complicated organization. And hopefully, I can make sure to make those points that will hopefully be helpful for you. So I wanted to talk about our mission. I wanted to talk about protecting people, protecting places, and just some final remarks. So as far as our mission, this is the stated, this is a standard slide that we use in the church. This is what we do in the church. We follow the Savior's example in word and deed. We help all of God's children feel his love, and we share light and truth. This is a very different mission statement than you would see in many corporations. But this is one that we try to tie our values to, our vision statement to. And you'll see that we're a large organization. Let me talk a little bit about who we are and the complications associated with trying to make sure that people are safe. So we're nearly 17 million members worldwide. Most of us reside outside of the United States. We have a large global presence. Many of the people, when they become familiar with who we are in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they're familiar with us because of our missionary force. We have these young men and young women that are out and about worldwide. We've got approximately 55,000 of them right now walking the streets of just about anywhere you can imagine in the world. These are missionaries that are not paid for their service, but rather that they pay for being there. They pay to be there, but we do have, through our ecclesiastical channels, supervision over the work that they're doing. We have 35,000 senior missionaries. These are people that retire. After retirement, generally speaking, they'll go out and help out in a number of capacities. We have 31,000 local gathering units across the world and a variety of supporting departments and functions. So this is out of our safety, health, and environmental manual. I just wanted to tie this. So we do have written programs for safety, safety programs for the church. The church does intend to help protect people. They want to make sure that people are safe in the work that they're performing. And we have a lot of different types of people. When we think about the people that we're protecting, I've talked a little bit about them. We have, of course, members of our faith, people that are regularly participating as part of their worship. We have missionaries. We have employees, volunteers, and friends. So I'm going to talk about each of these populations and talk about some of the hazards that we see in each of these populations and that we're trying to control and give you an idea of some of the strategies that we're utilizing there. So first of all, for members, we have, and this is an open website. Anybody can go to it. There's a website. We call it safety.churchofjesuschrist.org. And on this site, our membership can go here and find all sorts of tools to help them be safe. As we think about our membership, many of you are probably thinking, as many do, what is so unsafe about being a member of a faith? You go Sunday to a worship, and that can't be that unsafe. And that's true. We do have to provide safe facilities for our people to worship in. The 31,000 units that I talked about earlier each will have a facility that we want to make sure is safe. But we're also very active. We have a lot of activity within our membership. And this is not dissimilar to what you would see in many other religions as well, many other organizations like ours. We have youth that are participating in activities, and they want to try to have sometimes the most exciting activity. Well, that means there's some hazards that are associated with those. We have ward activities or unit activities. We have all of these things that we're doing. And so we want to make sure to help them. So we have this website. And on this website, you're going to see a number of – first of all, we have written statements. This time of year, actually, within the next week, we should be seeing a First Presidency letter. The First Presidency is the ecclesiastical leadership of our church. There are three members of that group. And they come out every year, and they send out a letter that says, hey, summer is coming. In North – or in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is coming. We know that you're going to be out doing a lot of activities. We want you to be safe. Here's some things to think about. So we have that leadership engagement, which is very helpful. In addition to that, we have a number of resources that help with that. We have a lot of videos. I wanted to show you one of the videos today. One of the things that we do regularly – and this is something that many, many folks do in organizations like ours – is they want their youth to be engaged. And so we send the youth out to do all sorts of things. And a lot of times, they're going out into the wilderness, and they're doing campouts, and they're being involved in all sorts of activities there. But they're also – we have had incidents where we've had some significant injuries that have occurred because of lightning. So I wanted to show you a resource that we use. It's called – this is called SAM Cloud. This is a SAM Cloud video. This is – you'll see a section of this. This was an award-winning video, actually. We've had it out now, I think, to our membership for about five or six years. It kind of gives you an idea of some of the training that we provide to our membership. Or people will say, oh, no, get into an open field. Well, guess what? All I have to do is get close, especially if they stand with their feet apart. You know, it goes up one leg, down the other. So, you know, the further their feet are apart, the stronger the jolt. The biggest surprise, though, comes when people are lying on the ground. They think they're safe down there, but it's just like a pretty easy target. Like, there you are. But, you know, if they stand with their feet close together, they stand more of a chance. And, you know, you win some and you lose some. You know, once I was working up in this big storm over the Targhees. You know, and there's these campers down off to the side. And the girl was doing the classic thing of, you know, counting. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. But, you know, guess what? I was ten miles away, and I still got them. Slam dunk. You know, that is, well, they were in a car, so they were they were fine. But it's still a story. You know, you're going to be telling your grand clouds that story. Sometimes people make it a lot easier for me to hit them. I mean, they'll go stand next to like a power pole or a tree or metal. I mean, come on, people. Metal? It's conductive. They'll get next to water, a swimming pool or like a pond and like stick their fishing pole in. It's like, hello, cherry on top. My grandpa, actually, he he got this one guy. He had a key attached to a kite. It's like, you know, my grandpa still tells that story. But that guy was asking for it sometimes. So that gives you just a flavor of some of the some of the training that we have. We have to make it engaging. The videos are generally short. Again, I will tell you, these are available on the open Web, so these can be used for anybody in any kind of circumstances. But we have subject matter experts that are helping us with some of these videos. Our staff helps with some of them. So so as we think about our membership, you'll see that we try to. That's one of the things we look at. And a lot of times we're identifying the hazards through past incidents. A lot of times near misses help us understand that as we have those near misses reported to us. But as we do that, we want to try to cover some of, you know, talk about and provide training for and then ways to control those hazards. Let me talk quickly about missionaries. We do have a lot of missionaries that are serving and our missionaries represent a significant risk population for for the church. Fifty five thousand of them out there globally. These are 18 and 19 year olds, 20 year olds. They're young men and young women. This is not the best population for risk mitigating, for internal risk mitigating when they're out there and about. Sometimes this is the group that's most at risk, as many of you know. But let me talk a little bit about some of the potential hazards that they see. And these are some of the the things that have caused incidents, serious injuries and fatalities in our missionary force. So vehicles, assault, electricity, carbon monoxide poisoning. So these are some of the things that we worry about and our safety and risk management team and try to figure out what we can do to prevent these types of hazards from from having an effect on our missionaries. What we what some of what we've done is we've provided a lot of safety videos and training, just like any onboarding. When when we know somebody is coming on board in a workplace, we're going to provide them an orientation or an onboarding program that will help them understand what the hazards are. When you take somebody from Missouri, the middle of Missouri, they've lived there their whole lives and you tell them they're going to be called to Ghana. There are some things that they're not aware of that they will need to be aware of before they arrive there. So one of the things that we have as part of this onboarding program is we have what we call the safety zone videos. There is a variety of safety zone videos that provide training for all types of things. And as part of them beginning a full time mission, our missionaries are asked to go through these. You can see some of the things that we talk about. I wanted to show you just a portion of what the safety zone videos look like. Wait, do you really think that? Yeah, I do. Oh, my goodness. We just give you a flavor of this. It's been years since that happened. Oh, are you OK? Yeah. Whoa. You sure? This particular one, everybody talks about pedestrian safety. I need you clear. No, no, but seriously, no, you're good. You're good. Five, four, three. Go ahead and play EBS. From around the corner and across the globe. Welcome to the safety zone. Now, your hosts, Spencer, Vivian and Jerem. Welcome to the safety zone. Welcome to the safety zone, everyone, the only show dedicated to keeping our missionaries safe, healthy and secure through video replay and analysis. I'm Jerem. That's Spencer. And the graceful one sitting to my left is Vivian. Thank you, Spencer. You're welcome. Today, we're going to cover pedestrian safety. Pedestrian safety. Timely. So let's kick things off with something we call security camcorder. Sounded really nice. All right. Regularly. Sounded really nice. All right. Regular crosswalk. Nope. Oh, moped central. Look out. Big angry dog. I've never done that. I went in hot. Slow down. Whoa. Look out. Companion of the year nominee. That was really close. Pretty scary stuff, right? Oh, yeah. But our ability to tap into security cameras, is that even legal? Good question. Our missionaries on foot are very vulnerable. There are cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles. Glass doors. And distraction makes things even more dangerous. People talk about distracted driving, of course. But what about distracted walking? Yeah, Vivian. What about distracted walking? Let's watch this clip. And cue distracted walking. The baptism of Robert and Natalia. We just baptized them yesterday. Oh, so that gives you just a flavor of some of the safety zone videos. They're very engaging. We've had good feedback and it's been very helpful, we think, to prevent incidents in the future. Every section or every video that addresses some of the hazards out there for our missionaries like this one, pedestrian safety, has a section called Let's Get Real. And the Let's Get Real portion, they talk about real life losses that have occurred as a result of, in this case, pedestrian safety. At the end of this particular vignette, there's a young man that's talking about how on his mission, they interview both he and his companion, who was his missionary companion at the time, talk about how he stepped out in front of a bus as a pedestrian, was hit and then went through months of surgery and had a severe brain injury. How it's changed his life and how he wishes he would have looked before he crossed. So it's some very simple things that we're talking about. We try to make sure that people understand that the risk is real, that they're not, as a 19-year-old, I felt invincible. We try to do all we can to help these young men and young women see that. I talked about assault. This is something some of you may have seen this in the news. This was not that long ago. We had 70 missionaries that were with a mission president and his wife. They were in a meeting at a church house. There were two individuals in Mexico that came and you can almost say took them hostage. They came in, were armed, had everybody get down on the ground. They stole all their valuables, the possessions that they had. They actually assaulted some of our missionaries and the mission president and his wife physically assaulted them. So there are people then, as we see these things happening and thinking about the world and changing how the world is changing, we start to think about how can we prevent this from happening. So we have a number of organizations that are working on this right now and looking in parts of the world and making sure that we understand where are our missionaries least safe. One of the things they're looking at here, some of you may have seen this, we use this for loan workers, but there are apps on your cell phone that are for loan workers where you can have a panic, imagine a panic button. You press a button, it will automatically send notifications to people that you've chosen to alert them that there's an emergency happening. So we're looking at panic button alarms. Some of them actually you shake, there's a signature shake that you can shake your phone. You don't even have to touch it and it will send out that alarm so we can at least get notified of these types of events prior to hearing about it afterwards. So those are some of the things that we think about and worry about. Our biggest loss, when we think about our major categories of loss for the church actually, it relates to vehicles for vehicle accidents, automobile property damage, automobile liability from vehicle accidents and we have a lot of injuries that occur. So a long time ago now, it's been 10 years ago, the president of our church got up in one of our general conferences and he made a significant announcement. It used to be years ago that to serve a mission as a young man, you had to wait until the age of 19. He made an announcement and it said that to let people know that they were going to start allowing young men to serve at age 19 or excuse me, at age 18 and young women to start their mission service at age 19. Prior to this, it was age 21 for them. Everybody was very excited about that and there were people that were, you know, there were cheers, everybody's very excited, people were talking about it for days. In the risk management group, we were not as excited for that because of this graph right here. Many of you are familiar with age-related incidents and here you can see, when we go from age 8, 19, excuse me, to age 18, and we're placing these young men and young women in cars, our risk goes up. So immediately, we know what our losses are within this category, and we know that they're going to be more. So we had some things that we needed to figure out. How can we prevent accidents with our young drivers? And what the answer was for us is we went to a telematic systems. Many of you are probably familiar with telematic systems. These are systems that you would see utilized with commercial fleets. We actually have a commercial fleet that utilizes these as well. But we had a group of folks here, our fleet management team, that worked with vendors to try to see if we could help. A telematic system is, imagine a little black box. You probably heard about this through your insurance. Many of your vehicle insurance companies will invite you to do this. But you put this black box, it has an accelerometer in it, and it will tell you how safe a driver you are. It will talk to you about, I say, it will record hard stops. It will record, it keeps, there's usually a GPS tracker in it. It is aware of what the speed limit is and what your speed is. So you can imagine us placing these in vehicles. I will tell you that we placed them in the vehicles when we started piloting this and started recording what we were hoping to do is record background levels without the missionaries knowing that the black boxes were there, that these, we call them TWEs, were in the car. And we were going to record, use some months to kind of record background information. And then we were going to activate what is called the in-cab coaching. So imagine driving down the road. You take a hard right and you'll hear a voice over your car's audio system that will say that was a hard right, please slow down before your next turn. So when we started recording these before turning on the in-cab coaching, we found that we had a bigger problem than what we had previously understood. And we turned the in-cab coaching on a lot quicker than we thought we were going to need to. And so now we have this in-cab coaching. So I want you to imagine this is a very good solution for us because it provides, when a missionary is speeding in an area, because we know speed relates to the severity of an incident, if they're speeding in an area, they're going to get a number of warnings. You're speeding, please decrease the speed. You're speeding, please decrease the speed. I should mention too that they have access, each driver has to card in, they have a way to notify the system of who they are that they can't start the car until after they scan their card. So anyway, if they don't slow down and they're speeding, there's a message that's going to be sent to our fleet coordinator of that particular mission. And then we have this way to categorize drivers as green, yellow, and red. If you've got a lot of messages coming into that system, you're going to go from green to yellow and possibly to red. And if you go to red, you're no longer driving, your driving privileges are revoked. So this is something that we're doing. We've been doing this for a long time. We've noticed a significant difference. We've noticed that we've been able to control what is an inherent, we believe, hazard of young people driving vehicles. We've been able to control that so that they're safer. I will tell you, if you ever talk to missionaries that are serving here in the United States or even abroad, if they're driving a car and ask them about their TEEWI, you're not going to get very happy responses to it. They're not, they don't love them, but we've noticed a great reason to have them there. We've actually now are piloting these same systems that provide in-cab coaching, but they also provide video feed. I wanted to show you an example of what this, this was just from a pilot that we did just recently. We're in the middle of this one. But I want to show you how this helps us understand the behaviors because it's, there's an outward facing camera and an inward facing camera. I'm just going to show you the outward facing camera in this case, because in this case it helps us demonstrate what really caused the incident. This was a snow event in North Carolina, January of this year. So here are, our missionaries are driving the vehicle. You'll see the second headlights coming this way. You'll see what happens here. And we can see just how good our drivers are. Were our drivers okay? So we can see that our drivers did okay. We can see their speed up here. We can see how fast they were going. It was a 45 mile an hour speeding area. There was a little snow on the ground. They were going about 25. So you can see that this is something that when we get this information, it helps us understand how our drivers are doing. I'm going to move on now to protecting our employees. So something that many people don't, are not aware about the church is, is we have a lot of employees. We have a lot of different moving parts. And I'm just going to talk to you about a few of those parts. So first of all, here, close by here, and actually we have five locations worldwide, we have apparel manufacturing. Those of you that, I know that many of you who are in occupational environmental medicine, we used to see, you know, as I think about the safety, the triangle waste fire back in the day. When we think about industrial, United States industrial areas, we think about apparel manufacturing. Apparel manufacturing is mostly gone from the United States. We think that beehive clothing, where we do manufacturing, we have about 600 sewers between a location here in Salt Lake and about 20 minutes south here. We think this might be one of the largest sewing organizations west of the Mississippi. We're one of just a few that are still here in the United States. We have a lot of sewing. We have a lot of sewing types of exposures, ergonomics programs. This is something that is really fun to work with our occupational medicine folks here, our OCDocs that are here in the valley and talk about what we can do to minimize some of the injuries that we see. Also something very interesting about our apparel manufacturing plant is that the majority of our workers are women, which is very interesting to be in a manufacturing location where almost everybody there is women. We have men that are sewers, but generally speaking, the ones that are getting the jobs that are skilled with sewing are women. So it's a very interesting population. We have a printing division. Some of you may be going. There's a tour that I think tomorrow will be happening. We have a large printing facility with very large industrial printing machines that are printing products that are going out worldwide for distribution of all sorts of printed products. We have food canneries. We have a food production and food canneries. So we're very interested in helping people be safe. A very interesting thing that we do is – I'll talk a little bit about this, but our canneries and food production areas, we produce a lot of food that we use internally for those in need, meaning internal to our faith, but we also – many of the food banks that you see across in North America anyway are going to have many of the products that we're producing. So we have a whole food production – we have farming groups and we have canneries and we have food production plants that we utilize. We have a – this is kind of an interesting one. We have a mattress manufacturing plant. We make mattresses. We make bedroom furniture. And this is used not only for our missionaries that are sent out globally, but we also send out mattresses to refugee camps. We send out a lot of this equipment that goes out to refugee camps across the world. We have a very interesting philosophy. In many of our plants, what we do is we are bringing people in to work in these locations, like our desert manufacturing location, which is where they build the beds and the mattresses. We bring in people that are – who are having a hard time finding employment. This may be refugees themselves who have come here and they come here and are helped through our programs, but they – it's very interesting when we talk about hazard identification and helping a population be safe. When you bring in – we bring in a lot of refugees from the African peninsula and we – here in Utah, for example, and they go into – we help train them so that they can be placed in a more permanent employment later on. But many things – we have to teach them many things, or we have English classes that we're teaching them in conjunction with some of the programs from the government. But we're also helping them understand things as simple as, you know, restrooms look very different here than they did where they came from, and how – what's the appropriate way to use that restroom and clean that restroom. We talk about food preparation. The food here is very different than it is where they came from. So we have these kind of programs that are not only employing people, but helping them with some life skills that should be – that they can utilize as they go on. But helping them understand hazards has been a particular – it's been difficult, but we're finding some great solutions there. I talked about our farms. We have a lot of farms that are producing all sorts of produce, food-wise, to help people within and food banks to go out everywhere. We have a lot of people that take care of our facilities. We have a lot of facilities. I mentioned our meeting houses earlier. We have larger – that are highly valued properties. We call them temples, where we worship as well. And we have people that are maintaining those. And we have some very ornate – you can imagine what – as I walk into this, this room that we're in today, in the Grand America, there's some great, beautiful – some of our chandeliers. And you think about these chandeliers and think about how is it that somebody's getting up there to dust these chandeliers. There's a worker that needs to do that. Do we have a hoist that's bringing that down so it's easier to get to? How are we doing that? So some of these things we have to be thinking about for those that are maintaining our facilities. I wanted to share with you a particular interesting – what I hope is interesting to you – problem that we saw at our Polynesian Cultural Center. The Polynesian Cultural Center, it's the biggest draw for a – for tourism in Oahu. Some of you may have been there. This is – it's actually – when you look at the NAICS, the industrial classification of this particular location, it is considered a living museum. When you go there, you're going to learn about the different cultures of the Pacific Islanders. You're going to see some traditional dances, some traditional mills. It's really a fun place to go. We have over 1,000 people that work there, employees that work there. And they're doing very interesting things, like showing how people harvest coconuts by climbing a coconut tree. That gives us – that makes us in risk management sweat a little bit because people die from falling from coconut trees. So there are some specific issues that we're working with there. But I wanted to share one with you, share this video of firewalking. In Samoa, there's this traditional dance they call firewalking. I'll have somebody explain it here, I think, hopefully. I want you to think about the hazards that you see here. If you go back to history, firewalking became that test of bravery and fun is what we're involved in today. Because when you're walking on fire, with a flame coming up onto your head and you're playing with it, it is the most exciting thing. Firewalking here. So, almost every night of the week, there are thousands of people that will show up to watch this show. And I think it's a great way for people to get to know each other, to get to know each other. And I think it's a great way for people to get to know each other, to get to know each other. And I think it's a great way for people to get to know each other, to get to know each other. And I think it's a great way for people to get to know each other, to get to know each other. And I think it's a great way for people to get to know each other, to get to know each other. There are thousands of people that will show up to watch this show. And one of the highlights of the show is this firewalking. It's a traditional Samoan dance. It's something they love doing. The audience loves seeing it. But we have these burns, as you can imagine. Skin will burn, right? And so, we haven't had a lot of these burns. They just show up occasionally. We want to prevent this from happening. In any workplace, we have safety systems to help identify hazards and see if we can control those hazards. In this particular group, we have a safety missionary. It's a safety professional that has been retired. And now, he wants to go and serve. So, he's paying. He and his wife are paying to be here and help provide a safe location for people to work at. In addition to that, we have a professional safety individual there. We have a leadership team here at the Polynesian Cultural Center that is very engaged in safety. We said, we don't think we should be burning these young men as a result of doing this activity. What can we do to help? So, they got together and they started thinking about it. Let's see. They came up with a solution through their safety organization, looking at their safety organization, their operational folks. They met with them. And they, of course, we had the leadership engagement. They said, one of the operations people said, you know what? The banana leaves that we use on those, it seems like we used to get longer banana leaves. And somebody said, oh yeah, we had to change suppliers. And those banana leaves that we get now are shorter. Well, let's go back to the longer banana leaves. Well, that was a great idea. And then, the other person mentioned, hey, you know what? What if we got newer, greener ones? Because sometimes, we're getting burned from the banana leaves themselves starting on fire, as you saw. They start on fire and they burn us. The green ones won't burn as much. So, we said, yeah, let's do that. You saw, you can see that they were tossing back and forth. What they do is they take kind of a kerosene and they have a pad inside of a wooden structure that that's where they burn. Somebody mentioned, do we have to have such a large area of the burn? Can we make that a little smaller? So, they went from like a 15-inch square piece to a 12-inch square piece. That helps a little bit as well. We, with this group, we also had somebody say, you know, we had this one burn and they weren't able to get it cooled off quick enough. So, somebody said, well, let's have some, they have water cans outside of, just outside of the stage. So, if anybody feels the slightest burn, they actually jump into the water cans. They're done with their performance at that point. They just kind of hang out there so that it removes the burn from their skin or helps them to cool that down faster. So, at the end of this very, what I thought was a very engaging process and is typical of what we see in our workplaces, what we strive for, is policy. They said, you know what, let's make it policy. Since this went into place, the new policy to change all of these things, we haven't had any burns. Well, we had one minor burn. Somebody was brushing off an ember and had a tiny spot where they burned themselves. And that's been months and months ago. But it just, I think, highlights how we work together in a workplace. And many of you could be the seed, the beginning of that conversation. If you see something come into a clinic or if you see something that you become familiar with that somebody should be looking at a little closer, it just takes sometimes, all you have to do is ask the question, what can we do to make this better? Who can I talk to to see if we can prevent this in the future? The result in this case was a very happy group at the Polynesian Cultural Center. We're very happy to say that nobody is coming out of their performance with minor burns or significant burns. So it's very exciting. So let me talk a little bit, lastly, about our volunteers and friends. This group is very hard. This is probably one of our most difficult groups to make sure that we're doing all we can. There's a lot to be done relating to helping them understand and identify and control hazards that they see. I wanted to show you this video of some of the things that our volunteers and friends, these are people that are members of our faith and people that are not, that are just friends of our faith that get involved in these types of events. I woke up at 3.40 something in the morning with three inches of water in the apartment. I was nine months pregnant at the time and I started packing a bag so we have some belongings of ours since I knew we were probably losing everything. It was devastating. You saw that people had lost everything and then when you saw where the watermark was and where we were standing organizing efforts would have been five to seven feet underwater just days before. Within a short amount of time it was not just our stake but a multi-stake effort. We had 250 volunteers on Saturday and another 200 volunteers on Sunday. This is what Christ did when he was on the earth so all I did was serve since we love Christ and we want to help and serve his children that's the way we showed it. So when we think about we have what we call helping hand events with the disasters we're seeing more and more weather related disasters and many times people in the community after they've had that kind of a devastating occurrence when they have the weather come through and cause floods or tornadoes or cyclones or whatever it may be in the world they need help and our our folks want to help and so we've got a good way to organize people and we organize people to go out and help but you can imagine the types of hazards that they're seeing when they're getting out there. Typically we don't have people on the ground helping within the first week after a major devastating weather related event like we saw here but typically after the water recedes the mold is there we've got a lot of issues that we're still worried about that's when our people will show up and start to get organized and help out. Sometimes they're using chainsaws this has been a particular tough thing for us to try to control people with chainsaws. I've been at many of these events and people will bring chainsaws they volunteer to help and that we say in our in risk management sometimes our worst enemy are the biggest of hearts because people want to help. For example they'll bring their chainsaw and these are chainsaws that they haven't used in years but they see this opportunity to use them and they think that they can use them to cut down trees and we say don't use your chainsaw if you're not certified to use them but they just want to help. They see that hole in the roof that was caused by those high winds they want to get up there and help that person and we've had people get up on high sloped roofs and they get up there and they fall and they have serious injuries. So these are some of the things that we we worry about in risk management. I wanted to share with you more specifically Hurricane Harvey. Because of its waterways Houston Texas is known as the Bayou City. Yet residents couldn't have fathomed the 27 trillion gallons of water that Hurricane Harvey would unleash in late August across Texas and Louisiana. Destruction began in South Texas with 130 mile per hour wind and then a record rainfall event for the United States ripped the greater Houston area with an unprecedented 52 inches of rain. But then the spirit of Texas set in and local church members were first responders. At one Houston area meeting house turned into a command center volunteers rescued more than 850 people from the rapidly rising waters. In anticipation of the storm the church sent supplies and the trucks loaded with water, food, clothing, cleaning and hygiene kits and other supplies just kept coming. As quickly as the water rose and began to recede an army of volunteers, Mormon helping hands, came by the thousands upon thousands from fellow Texans and neighboring states canvassing the region to assist their neighbors in need one by one. So I had the responsibility of doing a safety health and environmental audit on our activities there. We had over 50,000 people that volunteered over the course of two to three weekends in this event of helping people clean up and I wanted to talk a bit about how it is that we can control hazards and what we've done to help control the hazards that they may see. First of all we used to just send them out into neighborhoods, you saw them walking through the neighborhoods, we used to just say all right yellow shirts everybody get out there and go talk to people and see what they need help with. We found out very quickly that people needed help with sometimes some things that we couldn't help them out with. We shouldn't be involved in helping solve somebody's electrical problems in their house. We may even have some electricians that may be able to help on our team but we can't say that we will always have them so we're not going to do that. What we do now have is what was called kind of a permitting system. You can see this work order at the bottom. When people after a situation like this where you see a lot of weather related events, they can call a number. What we do is we canvass the area and say do any of you need help and if you need help call this number. We have a call center where people are starting to receive, volunteers are receiving phone calls and saying what do you need help with and they'll fill out a work order. That work order gives us an opportunity to filter out what we may not be comfortable doing. We're no longer going to be going out there and doing a lot of, I mentioned our saws, we're not going to do a lot of those types of things. We're not going to get up on roofs that are high-pitched slopes. Generally we're not getting up on roofs anymore. We have an opportunity to control the type of work that we're doing. After that we have an area where we provide the gear that's needed. So we found out very quickly with Hurricane Sandy actually I think is where we came, we realized that the best way to muck out a home, so a lot of these homes that have flooding, what we do is we go in and we help cut out the drywall and usually it's that first four feet or if you need to go higher than that, we'll cut it out and then you have to take all that debris and get it out of homes. Well it's hard to get that out of homes. You can't, you know, if you have somebody carrying that, it's a mess. A lot of times it's goopy and you don't get much out in hands. You can't really use wheelbarrows to go in and out of homes. They're usually a little too big. So we found that sleds work very well. So we have sleds that people will put stuff in and then they can pull those upstairs or push them out windows. But we provide that equipment. We provide the shovels for them. We provide the personal protective equipment that's needed to perform those types of events and including N95 respirators if we're in an area. We give them very specific rules of, you know, how to make sure that we're safe in that area. If they walk into a home, I remember I was at Hurricane Isaac, we walked into some homes that nobody had opened for two weeks after the flooding event. They opened that home up and they wanted us to help them with it. The walls and ceilings are covered in mold and we said, I'm sorry, this is something we can't help with. So we provide some guidance to our folks so they know you're going to be relatively safe here, but if it's this bad, we don't want you going into those spaces. And then teams will show up. People will show up to volunteer and these include members of our faith, as I've said, and many others, just friends that show up and want to help out. And we make a team lead. Somebody is a team lead and then they are the ones that are responsible to keep their team safe. We have people that are dropping off water throughout the day. So those are some of the things that we do to try to control hazards. I wanted to show you this video. This is a video that was taken. Yes. Oh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I'm just walking around a house. This is a one-level house. This is in the Houston area. There's the sled I was talking about. Just regular people. These are not construction specialists. We just have regular people out doing some really incredible things. Uh-huh. The people that they're helping out, I should mention, are not, they don't, they're not members. Most of the folks that we're helping out are just members of the community. These are our neighbors. That need some help. Uh-huh. As you can imagine, a team of about 20 people in this particular house will spend sometimes a day and a half at locations like this. Sometimes it's as little as a half a day, depending on what's needed. I saw that back there. I didn't even know it was there. That's big. So that just gives you an idea of some of the work that we're doing to help protect people. I want to just mention very quickly, I would be amiss if I didn't mention this to you, especially those of you that are here in the area. We do all we can to protect our places as well. We have a lot of places that are important to us. We want to keep people safe in those places. I just want to highlight, one of the things we're doing right now is the Salt Lake Temple renovation. If you want to see something very interesting, walk a few blocks. Actually, from here, those of you that are here in the area, you can hop on tracks. You probably have heard this. Our light rail is free for you within the inner Salt Lake area. So you can just hop on it, go a few blocks down the road, and you can see what's happening to our Salt Lake Temple. This was a temple that was completed in 1890. It's going through a major renovation to make it earthquake-safe, amongst other things. Back in the day, they quarried a nearby granite out of a nearby canyon to bring in and create, to build the temple. The temple stays together so that the structure stays together because of the weight of the blocks on each other. There's nothing that keeps those blocks together other than the weight. And so they've realized, actually, we had a recent earthquake, as many of you may know, just a couple of years ago. But they've realized they've needed to do some things to help shore this up for future earthquakes. They're going to be doing a base-isolating system on it. This is a structural engineer's dream come true. If you want to see this in the process, I would invite you to go take a look at it. It's very interesting to see some of the work that's being done. It's a lot of activity. They probably have somewhere in the realm of 200 people a day on site. There's actually nine work projects, including one of them is the historic temple that they're trying to preserve and keep in place as they buoy it up. This is what it will look like when it's all completed. So it should be completed within the next two to three years, maybe a little longer. So with that said, I hope that's helpful. I hope it's been helpful for you. Are there any additional questions or any other comments that you would like to make? Go ahead, please. So you have reported that you get people that are injured when they're volunteering. Yeah, thanks. Hi. John Jacobson from St. Louis area. You mentioned you have people that are injured when they're either volunteering or participating in missionary activities or in their local unit activities. When their volunteers are injured, does the church have any responsibility, like a work comp situation that we get talked about here a lot in this setting? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, great question. So when we think about volunteers, it's interesting because all of you know this. Here in the United States, it's so different. When we're outside of the United States, most of our injuries are going to be taken care of through health care, nationally given health care. But here in the United States, we do have a number of ways that we're helping to ensure that. Of course, if an incident happens, so I'm going to give you an example of, imagine, I can't remember, there was a tornado that came through the Midwest. We had some friends that were helping us. Somebody sawed down a tree, and that tree fell the wrong way, and it actually struck an individual that wasn't expecting that to hit him. And as a result of that, there were significant medical costs. So when we see an incident that's happening, that incident gets reported through our incident reporting system. The church will reach out. We do, I should tell you, first and foremost, we anticipate that that person will go through their own insurance to take care of that. But if we recognize that there's some things that we can help out with, the church will also reach out and help. But we're limited in that help. As a side note, there are some interesting things happening internationally when we talk about the workers' comp system. And we're starting our manual. I mentioned earlier our safety, health, and environmental manual. We no longer call our employees. We no longer have rules for employees and missionaries and volunteers. We just call them workers. Because a lot of international laws now are looking at if I have somebody, regardless of whether they're paid or not, from this organization, if that organization is the one that's controlling or managing or supervising that work, they look at it just like they would anything else. So there's some expectations that they would have there in other countries that we have here for our workers' comp system, which is kind of interesting. But we do primarily count on an individual to have their own insurance. But if there's something else that's needed, we recognize the liability to the church there, and we do help. So on this individual that the tree fell on him, the church came in and helped out. And we're able to pay, I believe, the co-pays and the out-of-pocket for that individual. Great question. Within the risk management group, we have a case management team. We are a church, and so we try to be very generous with what we're doing there. And there are always going to be people that are trying to take advantage of that system, and that's why we have a team of attorneys as well that's helping to make sure that we get the right balance there. Good question. Any other questions? Thank you very much for your early morning participation. Have a good day. Thank you.

Nate Spencer

Chief Safety and Health Officer

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

protecting people and places

mission

safety resources

missionaries

employee safety

volunteers