 Doing things the right way is really no harder than doing things the wrong way. Once you get into the habit of it. All too often we think about safety when it's too late. Community isn't just houses and buildings. Community is people. And, you know, some of those people work here. What I found out about supervising over the years is that it's more than just a job. Because you not only have to think about what you need to deal with day to day, but you need to treat each individual that works for you as an individual. And if you treat them that way, you'll find that you get the best out of those folks. It's easy to do the things by the numbers. It's when things all fall apart and that supervisor is still functioning and doing things the right way. That's what makes the difference between a supervisor and a fellow that's just never going to make it as one. When I first got the phone call, about 4.30 in the morning I got a phone call. Woke up, answered the phone, I was still half asleep. Night or fort, voice, say to me, Joe, we just had an ignition at the mine. We're evacuating people. We think there's people missing. As soon as I got the call, I jumped into my clothes, got in the truck, headed towards the mine. On the way there, what I was thinking about was that we had just finished training the guys on self-contained self-rescuers. I was hoping that the training took with those guys and that they were able to get those rescuers on and get out of the mine safely. Back then, taking chances was part of how you got things done. I didn't really think you could get things done, get the production you needed without taking those chances. The unimaginable had just happened. Now, how do you walk into a room with 28 family members and tell them that? That their father, their brother, their husband got killed in an explosion at a mine where I had some responsibility for it. Two of those family members were people that I had worked with at another mine. One of them, he was my do-it-all guy. If there's one thing that stands out in my mind, it's as that those family members were falling into the room. He stopped and looked at me. And I could see in his eyes, he was saying to me, Joe, tell me my boy's alright. And I had to walk into that room and tell him that his son did not survive big mission. At the time of the accident, my job was foreman. I was doing that job about a year. I got the foreman job when we had the previous foreman leave and I worked my way up through different jobs in the quarry, up to utility, then up to foreman. Being a manager in my company, maybe think about things that I never thought I'd have to deal with or think about. Paul came here, he was here a couple years, came here from a company, he worked a long time and they closed their doors and needed a place to retire at. He was in his early 50s. He was just a great guy, a wonderful personality. He was never in a bad mood. He would do anything for anybody. We were in the maintenance shop talking with a few guys when a call came over the radio that Paul was in an accident. I got my truck and took off down the hill and our electrician went and called other people. When I got down to the loader by the pile, the loader operator was just walking around the loader. He did see part of the accident happen and he just couldn't deal with it. So I sent him up my truck just to go to the lunch room. And I remember we did send most everyone else to the lunch room, but at that time I quick out on the loader and had to move some of the pile to get to Paul. And it felt like the loader could move fast enough to move the pile and I could see Paul laying there partially under the truck. Finally I got the pile moved and there were other people, the mechanics came down. We used the loader and chained to the frame of the truck, lifted the front of the truck and got Paul out. And by that time the EMT that we have on staff was there and the ambulance got here within minutes and Paul was on his way. At that time Paul was still alive and we had no reason to believe anything worse would happen. We thought we did our best and we thought we'd be okay. He's an experienced guy, you could depend on Paul to get a job done. He had done a couple different jobs here, he wasn't just doing one thing he could do many different things. That's why at the time of the accident it was so surprising it was Paul. He didn't take chances, he wouldn't take shortcuts. One of the hardest things I never thought I'd ever have to do or never thought how hard it would be was taking Paul's truck home realizing I was the last time and then meeting the family and talking to them. And I just remember it was just so hard to it just brought so personally. You know families, you see each other at picnics and parties but to go home and realize the man was working for you and died was just a completely different thing to go home and talk to the family. It's a lot easier to manage equipment and tools and crushing but it's all together different trying to work with personalities and attitudes of people. For that you need a personal connection. I don't mean you have to go home with these guys and be with their families but they have to mean a lot more to you than some time card you fill out and you check every week. You do have to show them they're important to you and hopefully that will be back and forth that they will respect you. You need to get to know them and show them that you care though at work. I had been in the industry for 25 years and the opportunity came along to take this position with the quarry division. At the time of John's accident my title was division manager and I was in that position for past six months prior to the accident. John's accident made us realize how connected we are to our employees and that's a good thing. I was sound asleep when I got that dreaded phone call at three o'clock in the morning that no supervisor wants to hear. The message was that there was an employee possibly trapped underneath one of our sandpiles. I was thinking the best as I was driving to the quarry. I was sure everything would be okay when I got there. Never do you think something like that is going to happen to one of your employees. The first thing I did when I got to the quarry went over to where everybody was gathered around. Some were working. Loader was working. Other people were kind of standing around. When I saw Russ walking toward me and the look on his face my heart sank. I knew it was not good and I said Russ what's going on? He said we just located him and I could not get a pulse. I continued to walk toward where the accident happened and as I got closer I could just see the back of his head because that's all he had uncovered. His hard hat and his head and face down in the sand. I can't describe how sick I felt at that point. There's no way to prepare for the conversations we had to have with our employees who were about to arrive. So we began thinking how we need to do that in spite of the emotions that were going on within ourselves we still needed to comfort our employees when they arrived and got this news. You can have an unlimited budget for safety. All the money in the world isn't going to bring John back. It's all about preventing it, not letting it happen in the first place and that's our responsibility, all of us. I can leave you with one thing. I would say it's important to be responsible but even more so to be accountable. Look out for your fellow employees. Look out for yourself. Don't let this happen to you. Following the accident obviously I felt guilt. Some others did but we had to look forward and the key is for all of us as a team to think safety. We need to communicate safety on a daily basis. We need to prevent. All of us have a responsibility from the top to whoever needs to prevent. Do what they can to not ever, ever let this happen again. It's sad that it takes an accident to sometimes get us to work better together and to realize how important safety is but it definitely caused us to work as a team much more and to get everybody, even people that didn't buy into safety then it made a huge difference in how they look at it now. When something like this happens I think the first thing you do is you start second guessing yourself. You start thinking what should I have done? Who should I have talked to? What should I have said? How could I have changed what happened here? What I found was that when I changed I was able to get other people to change.