March 5 2008

Minutes to Rotary meeting of March 5, 2008

Today’s guest speaker was Dr. Jeff Warren (PhD) who is the President and CEO of The Warren Group which located in Irmo. The Warren Group provides forensic engineering services to a variety of industrial clients, attorneys, and the insurance industry. Basically the company conducts accident investigations in order to help determine liability. The company has investigated over 1700 accidents since its inception. With a staff of 20 engineers (electrical, mechanical, and industrial engineers) plus support staff, The Warren Group has been engaged to investigate accidents, including product liability claims throughout the Southeast. The company is on-call 24/7.

Dr. Warren began his power point presentation with a picture (circa 1950’s) of a small boy standing beside an old gasoline powered reel lawn mower. He explained that the father allowed his son to help push the mower on occasion. Once while momentarily being distracted the father did not see his son attempt to dislodge a small rock that had been stuck between the cutter blade and the reel. The small boy attempted to remove the rock as he had seen his father do on previous occasions. The result was that the son lost his index finger. Dr. Warren said that this type of accident was preventable if 1) the father had not allowed his small son to operate the machinery, particularly unsupervised even if it was only momentarily. Secondly, the reel lawn mower lacked any type of safety guards preventing someone from sticking their hands near the blade when the motor is still running.

“Safety through Design” is a term that The Warren Group has copy written and is based on the premise that workplace injuries are preventable. Dr. Warren explained the investigatory techniques his team of highly trained engineers used to determine the root causes of these accidents (the term used by the industry is “incidents”) of which many have resulted in deaths. They attempt to gather the forensic evidence at the scene, interview witnesses, and to reconstruct the accident. Dr. Warren explained that it is very important not to jump to conclusions as he showed pictures of an industrial accident which involved a forklift and a scissors lift in which a person was killed after being knocked from the top of the scissors lift. He pointed out that the logical conclusion was that the accident was clearly the fault of the forklift operator who hit the scissor lift. However, the final investigation revealed that a certain electrical component on the scissors lift had not been properly repaired which had caused it to protrude beyond the normal “footprint”. This was a “contributing” cause of the deadly accident and therefore may have been preventable in the first place had the equipment been repaired properly in the first place. Dr. Warren explained that the purposes of their investigations are to determine “who else owns this loss”. As shown by this particular “incident” investigation blame can be assigned to more than one party.

Dr. Warren concluded his remarks by revealing the he was the little boy in the picture who had lost his index figure. This resulting injury motivated him to study engineering in college and ultimately start his own company with the mission that The Warren Group’s forensic investigations may result in the implantation of safety through design changes.

Submitted by Chip Lyerly