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Show December 16 Set For Safety Meet of Rail Employes Seeking to maintain the record of safety which in the past 14 years has given it the Harriman memorial and the National Safety council awards more often than all the rest of the railroads in the country, the Union Pacific railroad has 200 major employe safety-meetings safety-meetings scheduled throughout its 10 divisions during this latter half of 1937, according to S. H. Osborne, Os-borne, assistant to the vice president presi-dent in charge of operations and in charge of safety. December 16 is the date scheduled for the Milford meeting. In addition, 500 subsidiary meetings will be held. Several classes of employes, including in-cluding operating, mechanical, maintenance of way, and "store" groups, will participate, and the highest ranking railroad officials available or speakers from within and outside the organization will outline accident prevention methods. meth-ods. "The modern trend toward safety safe-ty education and practices in railroad rail-road work has reduced the hazard to passengers to the minimum and has eliminated a substantial percentage per-centage of the accidents to employes", em-ployes", Mr. Osborne stated. A chart of accidents since 1921 reveals that 611 lives of the Union Pacific employes have been saved and 32,959 accidents serious enough to cause a man to lose three days of working time have been prevented pre-vented through safety efforts during dur-ing the past 16 years, ha declared. The statement is based on comparison com-parison of the accidents during the period with the actual fatality and accident ratio during 1920. "If accidents had continued from 1921 to 1936, inclusive, at the 1920 ratio per million work-hours, 932 lives of employes would have ibeen lost and 41,331 'reportable' accidents acci-dents would have occurred. However, How-ever, due to the impetus of safety work, fatalities and injuries were reduced to 321 and 8,372, respectively, respec-tively, for the 16-year period," Mr. Osborne pointed out. Railroads began recognizing the need for safety work in 1911, but for the 10 years that followed they devoted themselves principally to the correction of mechanical faults and hazards, including the double-tracking double-tracking of main lines, installation of automatic block signals, etc., he said. Then, officials realized that in in most cases accidents were due to the negligence or carelessness of individual employes, and they set about to correct that condition by the employment of safety agents and conducting comprehen- I sive safety campaigns. j The Union Pacific entered the j field in an intensive manner and in j 1931 reached an all-time low mark of 1.86 "reportable injuries" per j each 1,000,000 work hours, as com-; com-; pared with a ratio of 24.49 in 1920. i Mr. Osborne said. The ratio has gone up some in the three succeed-i succeed-i ing years, due to the large increase of man power of the railroad and because these new employes are not familiar with safety practices, he said. Nevertheless, the Union Pacific Railroad company led the i field in 1935, winning the Harri-' Harri-' man medal, and again was high in i 1936 although ineligible to receive 1 1 the medal a second consecutive year. In 1936 the Union Pacific also won the National ' Safety 1 1 Council award tov the lowest percentage per-centage of employe accidents. |