Cutting down on casualties.

WHEN a Soldier dies or is seriously injured in an accident, acting Army Secretary R. L. Brownlee has the sad task of writing a letter of condolence to the family.

It's a very painful task, he said, so much so that he recently called a summit to launch a new Army safety awareness campaign.

In line with Defense Department safety goals, Brownlee created a task force to develop a strategy to decrease the number of accidental deaths in the Army by 50 percent by fiscal year 2005, said John Manley, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon.

The job certainly won't be easy, but it's doable, said BG Joseph A. Smith, director of Army safety at the U.S. Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala. "Over the past 30 years the Army's aviation accident rate has been cut in half three times."

Historically, more deaths occur in armies from accidents, disease and nonbattle injuries than from hostile fire, said USASC deputy director COL John Frketic. "We're getting better at changing that."

For about 30 years, in fact, the Army has experienced a downward trend in its accident rate, said Safety Center research analyst MAJ Dixon Dykman.

That changed in 2001, when the number of accidents gradually began to increase. That can be attributed, in part, to the fact that hundreds of thousands of Soldiers are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Manley said.

"But an Army at war really isn't the issue," Manley said. The Iraq theater of operations has been one of the "safest" in history in terms of accidental deaths. About 36 percent of Soldier deaths in Iraq in fiscal year 2003 were accident-related. In other wars, 50 to 60 percent resulted from accidents.

The number of accidents in Iraq also "does not represent a higher percentage than anywhere else in the Army," Frketic said, considering that some 340,000 Soldiers are deployed in the U.S. Central Command area of operations.

But America's Army is fighting a war, said Smith. So the accidents people hear about are those that occur in the theaters of operation.

Army accidents in FY 2003, and so far in 2004, actually follow a decade-long pattern, Frketic said. While fewer privately owned vehicle accidents are being reported--because thousands of deployed Soldiers aren't driving their POVs--60 to 70 percent of the accidents involve military vehicles.

About 40 percent of those involve vehicle rollovers, usually caused by driving at excessive speed. Deaths result from a combination of high speed and failure to wear seatbelts, Frketic said.

In aviation accidents related to Operation Iraqi Freedom the culprit is most often "brown out," the loss of visibility that results when a low-flying or hovering helicopter's rotor blades create a dust cloud that then engulfs the aircraft, Frketic said.

Other common accidents in combat zones include "fratricide," or friendly fire, and "negligent discharge," when weapons fire unexpectedly. [See "Accidents and Causes" on page 13.]

"If we can simply get Soldiers to reduce their driving speeds, wear seatbelts and reduce the number of accidents from negligent discharge, we'd meet our 50-percent reduction goal," Frketic said.

Initiatives to Save Lives

Safety Center officials will spearhead a number of initiatives as part of the new Army safety campaign to save lives.

Among those will be utilizing good-news stories to help reduce accidents. By publicizing "pockets of excellence," spreading good-news stories about what units did right during convoy operations, for example, other units will be able to conduct similar operations more safely, Frketic said.

These stories will be available to Army leaders online, through secure-access sites, Frketic said.

Part of the recently approved Army safety campaign, which kicked off in February, calls for commanders to focus their risk-management attention on areas where near misses have occurred.

Looking at Near Misses

"We must begin looking hard at our near misses if we are to get our arms around all risk sources," Smith said.

In a letter to commanders, Smith encouraged them and their subordinates to share their near-miss stories by sending them to the Safety Center at [e-mail]. "If doing so saves just one life, it will be the most valuable five minutes you have ever spent," Smith wrote in a message to the field.

Officials of the civilian Ocean Safety and Rescue Team at Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, used the "near-miss" strategy to develop a way to reduce the number of drownings at the world-renowned snorkeling destination.

Located on Oahu, about 30 minutes from Honolulu, Hanauma Bay draws thousands of visitors daily, Smith said. The bay's strong undertow killed 12 swimmers in 2002.

With help from officials of the Hawaii-based U.S. Army Pacific Command, the civilian safety officials implemented the Army's Five-Step Risk-Management Model (see "Risk-Management Process") to identify the bay's hazards, study accidents and find ways to prevent new accidents.

A breakthrough came when the team went beyond analyzing the accidents and started looking at the near misses, Smith said. As they looked at the locations where swimmers were rescued from drowning, they saw a pattern. Most rescues--with no fatalities--were made in the middle of the bay, in an area called the "slot."

Lifeguards had focused their attention on the slot but, in doing so, they overlooked other potentially dangerous areas of the bay, Smith said.

"I believe many military units approach risk management the same way," Smith said. "In large convoy operations in Iraq, for example, commanders identified risks in detail and implemented control measures. They provided multiple briefings and conducted rehearsals, with leaders always present." They provided less attention to the smaller, four-vehicle convoys that would be traveling short distances, Smith said.

He questioned whether Soldiers in the small convoy were being briefed at all, or perhaps merely received instructions over the radio because they were embarking on a supposedly "simple mission."

Because the Army has identified large convoys as high-risk, "we're not losing many Soldiers to accidents in large convoys," Smith added. "However, we're losing Soldiers in small convoys on 'simple missions.'"

The bottom line, he said, is that you shouldn't just focus on an area where you anticipate accidents. "You have to focus on the periphery, keeping your eyes on the right and left, too," Smith said.

safe \ adj. a. not likely to take risks : CAUTIOUS b. TRUSTWORTY, RELIABLE.

safety \ vt : to protect against failure, breakage, or accident.

risk \ n 1 : possibility of loss or injury 2 : someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard

RELATED ARTICLE: Accidents and causes.

ac-ci-dent \ n an unforeseen or unfortunate event resulting esp. from carelessness or ignorance ...

THE Army reported 282 Class A aviation and ground accidents in fiscal year 2003, up from 214 in FY 2002 and 173 in FY 2001. [See "Class A-C Accident" chart.]

In FY 2003, Class A accidents--the most serious type--claimed the lives of 255 Soldiers, 221 of them as a result of ground accidents, both on and off duty.

Safety Center researcher MAJ Dixon Dykman said 103 Soldiers died in FY 2003 in 104 Class A privately owned vehicle accidents. That number is down from the previous year's totals for POV accidents and POV accident-related deaths. There were 109 POV accidents in FY 2002 with 106 deaths.

With an Army at war, it's important to keep numbers in perspective, Dykman said. Phillip Meengs, deputy product manager for light tactical vehicles at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich., said 12 percent of the Army's wheeled vehicles, including trailers, are now operating in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The mileage a HEMMT vehicle accrues over a one-year period in the OIF theater of operations would take 10 years to accrue outside that theater. For a Humvee, the ratio is roughly six to one, Meengs said.

Thirty-four Soldiers died in aviation-related accidents in FY 2003, 33 of them in in-flight accidents, 31 of which occurred in the OIF theater of operations, said Dykman.

There were 128 Class A-C aviation accidents in FY 2003, he said. Damages and injury-related costs for those accidents totaled $251.3 million.

"There are many ways to present the accident statistics," said Dykman. While even one accident is too many, the total number of "ground" accidents in all categories--1,784 in FY 2003--appears overwhelming on paper, he said. Thankfully, however, 1,439 of those were Class C and D accidents, which are considered minor accidents involving minimal damage to property. They include things like tripping, falling from a ladder and cutting a finger.

Ground accidents involve Army tactical and nontactical vehicles, and POVs. They also include such things as being hit by a drunk driver, boating accidents and other accidents that happen on land--from being hit by a tree limb to falling from a roof.

Additionally, included in ground-accident statistics for FY 2003 the Safety Center reported 16 deaths due to weapon-related accidents, the leading cause of which were "negligent discharges." And during the four-month period from October 2003 to January 2004, weapon accidents claimed the lives of six Soldiers.

Over the same four-month period, aircraft and ground-vehicle accidents numbered 77, with 67 deaths, bringing the percentage in that accident category up 42.6 percent from the same period between October 2002 and January 2003. Additionally, 26 Soldiers died as a result of off-duty POV accidents.--Heike Hasenauer

Accident
 Class

           Damage costs of $1,000,000 or more and/or
  A        destruction of an army aircraft, missile or
           spacecraft and/or fatality or permanent total
           disability

           Damage costs of $200,000 or more, but less than
  B        $1,000,000 and/or permanent partial disability
           and/or three or more people are hospitalized as
           inpatients

           Damage costs of $20,000 or more, but less than
  C        $200,000, and/or non-fatal injury resuling in loss
           of time from work beyond day/shift when injury
           occurred and/or non-fatal illness/disability causes
           loss of time from work.

(U.S Army Safety Center)

RELATED ARTICLE: The Risk-Management Process.

THE Army uses the Five-Step Risk-Management Process to reduce accidents. It begins with leaders' identification of potential hazards based on their first-hand experience of previous missions or events intuition and historical data from after-action reviews,

Hazards are any real or potential conditions that can cause injury, illness, mission degradation and damage to, or loss of, equipment or property.

Once Leaders nave identified the hazards, they can determine the possible impact of each. The Safety Center's Web site provides a risk-assessment matrix that categorizes risks based on their probability and severity.

The other steps in the risk-management process include:

Developing controls to reduce the probability and seventy of a hazard, such as scheduling a road march when temperatures will not be extreme

Implementing controls through regulations, standard-operating procedures briefings, training and rehearsals, among other means.

Enforcing implemented controls--Heike Hasenauer

The Five-Step Risk-Management Process and other safety information can be viewed at http://safety.army.mil