Jill Heinerth, FRCGS D. Lit., h.c. is a fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame and serves as the first explorer in residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She has performed over 8,000 dives in her career, often in hazardous environments that nobody has been to before.
Driven by curiosity and passion, she has explored the most dangerous deep underwater caves, and inside shipwrecks, icebergs and lava tubes. She emphasized the crucial role safety plays on every project.
Heinerth shared her perspective on how important safety culture is for teams that explore the world’s riskiest underwater settings. She drew clear parallels between the dangers of cave diving and working in high-risk construction environments. Both demand ongoing training, preparation, experience, communication and risk management to ensure that safety is never an afterthought.
Train, Refresh, Repeat
Heinerth warned against the complacency that can creep in from repetition when performing high-risk work. “Complacency also, beyond the loss of awareness, can lead to bad decisions and erosion of skills,” she said.
A culture of training and continuous improvement can guard against this. Even with thousands of dives under her belt, she always heads back to the swimming pool to refresh her skills. This helps her prepare for new situations, test new equipment and ensure she is ready to meet the next objective.
Double-Check the Checklist
Heinerth worked on a large project where they planned dives to use a new device that made the world’s first accurate three-dimensional map of subterranean spaces. A study revealed that “90 per cent of the fatalities and accidents in diving could be linked to a root cause or something that happened before the person got wet. So it was a safety choice or lapse in protocols that caused the accident,” she said.
Even if you have the best equipment, Heinerth said, “the biggest risk comes down to decision-making.” The human factors of mindset and discipline are crucial.
Each project includes a series of checklists, procedures and protocols, with double and triple-checks on key components. She advised that checklists are “not overly burdensome” and kept up to date. Verification by a second person ensures that nothing is overlooked or missed due to distractions in the moment.
Heinerth highlighted a key safety message that “Checklists are cool. We don’t find dead guys with checklists. Checklists have been incredibly important for increasing our safety in diving.”
Keep a Zero-Incident Mindset
In cave diving, as in construction, the ultimate goal is to come home safely every time. Both have financial and time pressures that can impact safety. Heinerth advocates for speaking up and revising objectives when necessary.
“You have to be willing to get within a hair’s breadth of what you perceive as success and say, not today,” Heinerth said. “And whether it’s financial or operational challenges that are pushing you to complete something on a Friday afternoon, also remember – for us it’s the last dive of a project that tends to be the most dangerous, when people feel like they need to tick off those final boxes. And I’m sure it’s the same on a construction site.”
Knowing when to call it quits, being aware of your limits and stopping work when things don’t feel safe is more important than pushing through. Put systems in place where incident-free completion of tasks is the baseline expectation and a shared responsibility among team members, with visible support from leadership.
Prioritize Communication
The best team members aren’t always those with the most technical skill. When assembling her teams, Heinerth made the shift over time to prioritize those who can keep an open mind, learn the necessary skills and communicate effectively.
She chooses to work with people who have the same viewpoint on safety because “one careless choice, one poor choice can cause an accident or have very deadly consequences.”
By pairing younger divers with those who have more experience, she also encourages mentorship and accountability. This helps to reinforce checklists, personal responsibility and a culture where everyone has the authority to call off a dive for safety reasons.
Harness Fear as a Safety Tool
Before each dive, Heinerth rehearses possible emergencies. She plans for the unexpected by asking “what could kill me today,” then visualizes a response to each scenario.
She doesn’t claim to be fearless. Instead, she says, “We’re all afraid. You should be afraid at work. I should be afraid when I’m planning a dive because it means that I care about risks. It means that I recognize that what I’m doing is dangerous and that I need to take very careful, thoughtful steps before I approach this challenge.”
Heinerth shared a near miss where her diving partner became entangled in multiple guidelines within a narrow cave and panicked. The situation escalated as kicked-up silt clouded their vision and a broken guideline disrupted their escape orientation. Heinerth also had to manage a failing breathing regulator. They both made it out safely, but it was a sobering experience.
Throughout her career, more than 100 colleagues have died in diving accidents. Heinerth makes sure her teams have frank conversations about death and how accidents affect the people on site, families and the larger community.
While they learn how to do things more safely from accident analysis, she recognizes “I could never look someone in the eye and say it couldn’t happen to me.”
Key Takeaways
- Ongoing training ensures workers remain skilled, adaptable and prepared for unique challenges in high-risk environments
- Up-to-date checklists reduce human error, reinforce accountability and ensure hazards are addressed before work begins
- A vigilant mindset cultivates a safety-first approach to prevent incidents
- Open and honest dialogue empowers all team members to voice concerns and support each other
- Fear is a natural safety tool that prompts awareness, preparation and cautious decision-making
Conclusion
Apply these practices to your company policies, daily routines and leadership communication to foster the same resilient and proactive safety culture that drives Jill Heinerth’s success in the world’s most unforgiving environments.
Jill Heinerth is the bestselling author of Into the Planet and the subject of a recent documentary called Diving into the Darkness.
The SCSA promotes safety within construction environments and leads the development of safety culture through education, consultancy and building awareness towards safer communities.