Cape Safety, Inc. - New Blood: Danger Dogs Series, #7

The best way to get past doubt and inexperience is simply action.

—Robert Herjavec, Canadian Businessman

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Engineers Code of Conduct

Engineers shall conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.

Cover - Above historic black & white photos taken in 1910 by Lewis Hine turn of the century child labor photographer. Hine took photographs for the National Child Labor Committee from 1906 to 1918, documenting the large numbers of young people in the labor force and the harsh conditions under which they worked. His pictures attracted national attention and assisted in the passage of child labor laws. Textile industry child labor in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Ronald Webb, 12-year old doffer boy and Frank Robinson, 7-year old, who helps sweep and doff, Roanoke (Va.) Cotton Mills.

Below, color photos, present day child exploitation in Indian cigarette packaging, Central African Congo mining, and Bangladesh textile trades.

PREFACE

There were 5,190 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2021, an 8.9% increase from 4,764 in 2020. The fatal work injury rate was 3.6 fatalities per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, up from 3.4% per 100,000 FTE in 2020.

Workplace injuries and illnesses cost the U.S. an estimated at least $250 billion each year. There are about 2.8 million nonfatal workplace accidents and injuries in United States private industry alone, each year. We must do better.

The novel you are about to read, the seventh in the Cape Safety, Inc. series, fictionalizes a small company dedicated to altering those statistics.

Most of the stories these characters find themselves in are based on actual incidents and events. Should the headlines seem familiar, that is no coincidence. My characters are woven around real safety heroes who deserve to live longer in our thoughts than a single daily news article. By reminding you of these news items that may have skipped your attention while hurrying through your daily lives, I hope to pay tribute to the real victims of these tragedies and to those who truly did their best to prevent them.

Although Cape Safety, Inc. and their west coast counterpart Cliff Safety, Inc. live only in our imaginations, the spirit and dedication of these consultants is personified for real by hard working safety professionals throughout the world. To those actual people I have woven into the fabric of this novel, I thank you for being an integral part of my fantasy.

As these characters are proud to call you their friends, I trust that you, too, would like to have the likes of Mike, Lars, Heidi, Claus, William, Candace, Sandra, Snake, Sue, Maggie, Jeremy, Megan, and Sam on your Christmas card list.

Likewise you'd appreciate a welcome bark or purr from Tickets, Runnels or Oarlock. Enjoy the tales, and please stay in touch. You can find me right here in tiny Waquoit writing up more adventures. Send me all your thoughts at: [email protected]  —  Richard Hughes

Chapter 1

2023

In the reading of history many men and women who we've come to consider as great, and for a variety of reasons, come from privileged backgrounds. Or at least backgrounds from where their future accomplishments could have been reasonably forecast. Legacy heroes born from good stock as the saying goes, whose parents’ accomplishments in life would logically rub off or have a major influence on their offspring.

Be it environmental, in the genes, by example, osmosis, linear brainpower, or some another indeterminable force, their eventual success took nobody by total surprise.

Cape Safety, Inc. had a couple of those folks on their staff.

If their lives had turned out another way, that would have been a surprise to a lot of people.

Mike Rocco, one of the principals of CSI, was one of those gifted people. Both parents had been technocrats, with his mother graduating, not just entering, R. P. I. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY) at the age of 22; and his dad graduating M. I. T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) with a double major in Mathematics and Mechanical Technology.

No one was surprised with Mike's quick success.

Claus also came from talent. too, but a far different pathway.

He came from black parents in post-war Germany who struggled past all manner of racism to help build a successful shoe factory in Ulm, Germany; while working closely with American Marshal Planners and international manufacturing quality experts like Philip Crosby and Thomas Peters. This was the background of Claus's success; coming to America on a Princeton Scholarship where he then moved on to Yale grad to become one of the country's leading thinkers in combinatorics, discrete geometry, probability, and statistical mechanics.

But humanitarian influences ruled his soul more than number manipulations and he jumped at the opportunity to work with C.S.I. on their many worthy missions.

Lars, the other principal of Cape Safety, Inc. and more of a hawsepiper[1]; knew that diamonds like Mike and Claus were in very short supply and no company could be built on those kind of legendary employees alone.

Their other consultants, not so well credentialed at birth, ran the gamut in backgrounds and educations. The firm had inherited them all as highly experienced consultants by the time Lars and Mike bought the firm from founders Bob and Gene.

Now Mike and Lars were in need of more staff, aka, new blood.

Raiding other firms for talent wasn't their style.

In a world needing more new safety people in the business, adding to CSI by subtracting from another fine consultancy was considered by Lars and Mike to be a zero sum endeavor. Plus, by simply raiding other firms for talent they'd likely start a free agent-like spiral. They'd also end up bringing aboard too many bad practices consultants may have acquired from other places.

No, typically the companies and people CSI assisted every day didn't need egghead interventions as much as resourcefulness and a deep down concern for solving their environmental, health, and safety problems.

If Lars needed the super brainiacs, and he sometimes did, he always had Mike and Claus.

Hence, Lars's new commitment was to turn regular college grads, without illustrious beginnings and from all kinds of backgrounds—possibly even a former dweeb as smart kids were once labeled—into the same type of skilled and dedicated S, H, & E consultants that Mike, Claus and all the experienced CSI consultants had become.

Safety, health and environmental assistance in the years and decades ahead couldn't be allowed to be for elite customers only. Maybe Hollywood celebrities and professional sports players could price themselves beyond the reach of middle class customers, but movies and ballgames were meaningless compared to dangerous circumstances, unidentified hazards, unsafe planning, and complex systems without necessary safety redundancies. Those lapses came with life or death consequences for lots of innocent people.

Necessary S, H, & E expertise couldn't be allowed to get exclusive. Lives and limbs were in the balance.

2009

Jeremy Tacklebox was the boy who other kids called a dweeb.

The dictionary, a book Jeremy frequently quoted, gave a conflicting definition. It said that a dweeb was, an unattractive, insignificant, or inept person and that if one was called a dweeb, it was a rather unkind way of saying that the person was stupid and weak.

Jeremy had other thoughts.

The unattractive part was possibly true, thought Jeremy.

Jeremy was born without a pinky finger on his left hand. All the kids noticed it and had teased him about it constantly ever since his kindergarten days. But it really didn't bother him at all. He grabbed stuff as well as his classmates, seemed to do anything they could do, and since he never had that finger had no real sense of loss over it.

But the teasing was no fun.

The only problem it ever gave him was maneuvering his baseball glove as well as the other kids, but he was working on that. When you were eight years old, mastering your own baseball mitt was important, and during the past spring Jeremy had mastered the dependable two hand catch as a solid compensation technique.

But he couldn't argue that his ungloved four-fingered left hand wasn't as attractive as his five-fingered right one. How could he, since the other kids reminded him of the fact daily.

The insignificant word he had to look up again in his dictionary. When he did it was hard to dispute that so far his existence on earth hadn't had made much of a difference. So that word, he had to admit, fit also.

Inept was the third word in the definition and, there too, he had little evidence to the contrary.

He had only learned to ride his bike a few months ago. A bike that until then had training wheels attached. For Jeremy it seemed like the training wheels were on his bike forever. It wasn't that long, really, but his Dad always seemed to have something else to do whenever Jeremy had asked him to take them off. One week had led to another, and then another, while all that time the other kids had mastered their, now, two-wheeled bikes and were riding mockery rings around him.

Jeremy wasn't great at most other things either. He could only rope climb up to the tree fort halfway, when most of the other kids by now could climb all the way up. The rule was if you couldn't climb all the way you couldn't play in the fort so Jeremy still hadn't been up there. Most of the kids could play up there all the time.

In school he was no better than most of the kids in spelling words, arithmetic, kick ball, naming the states, or reading stuff about Dick, Jane, and Sally, three characters he didn't care much for.

His only true unique talent was an ability to laugh milk out his nose, a trick the other kids called on him to repeat often. But twice his teachers had caught him doing it, earning him a spot on the principal's bench. The punishment was well worth the prestige it gained for him with the other kids. So inept, he thought, may have been true, too.

But, one of the other two words to describe a dweeb, he disputed.

O.K., sure.

Compared to Danny McGee and Ramsey call me Rascal, you dweeb Sabatini, he might be weak.

They could both climb to the tree house with ease and once Rascal actually punched Ponytail Patsy who was an entire year older than all of them. Somehow, Rascal actually lived through that mistake when Patsy had pushed Rascal's face deep into the grass turning his chin all green. Jeremy would never punch someone, particularly a girl, and he guessed that made him weak. He’d find out later in life that it actually made him strong.

Compared to the other kids, though, Jeremy didn't think he had less strength. He could throw a ball as far as most kids, run as fast, and do as many chin-ups.

But stupid? That he felt didn't describe him at all.

He always got 10's and 9's on his papers, the teachers always called on him to read aloud because he didn't stumble like most of the other kids including Danny and Rascal, plus he was almost always the first one to finish his math classwork including the tricky fractions that they were learning now. And Jeremy led the class in book reports.

No, he wasn't stupid and they were stupid if they thought he was stupid.

So there.

Or so, he told himself.

Sometimes he had noticed the other kids were calling him names like dweeb for just the opposite reason. Not because he was stupid but because he had the right answers they didn't have.

So their calling him stupid, because he was smart, was stupid—making his point.

Even at this age logic was Jeremy's long suit.

With survival being the smarter end of valor, defending himself against the name calling would only result in another head noogie, or get him tripped carrying a full lunch tray in the cafeteria, or even worse, it might encourage someone to put a very foreign object into his lunch. So Jeremy was smart enough to not overly defend himself.

Diplomacy trumping truth. It was easier that way, it was safer that way, and it was smarter that way— for now.

He'd pretend to agree with them that he was a dweeb even when down deep he knew he was a lot more than that.

The other thing that hurt Jeremy Tacklebox's cause was his name. That, even he agreed, truly was stupid.

No, he didn't descend from a long fishing line of men named Tacklebox

No, his family wasn't a bunch of smelly fishermen

No, he wasn't hooked on his last name

No, his family didn't lure people over for dinner

Whenever Jeremy had asked his Mom about the name she just shrugged and giggled a bit. His Dad simply said it was your grandfather's name and left it at that. Neither was a very helpful answer. Whatever. Jeremy's life was a routine of:

Waking up (Ugh!)

Breakfast (Good)

School bus (Horrible)

School (Acceptable)

After school stuff he had to do (All right)

Dinner (Good)

Homework) (Acceptable)

Sleep (Ugh!)

Effectively, even for an eight-year-old, he felt like he was in a rut.

2011

Two years later the tide began to change in Jeremy's life. The time he had spent at the town library after school while Danny, Rascal and most of his other schoolmates were hanging around the mall, the tree house, and even going to secret spots where they shared a beer or a cigarette stolen from one of their parents, was beginning to pay off.

His grades stayed high, the librarians liked him and saved him special books, and he was learning all kinds of neat things about people, science, and how they needed to work together to solve problems.

Jeremy even considered science to be one of his favorite subjects especially environmental stuff that he now knew meant science that kept people, plants, animals, all kinds of stuff, alive.

At ten years of age he was allowed to have his own library card and on that tenth birthday, Jeremy was at the library ten minutes before it opened to get it. It was one of his proudest possessions with his name embossed on it and a magnetic strip that somehow knew it was his personal card.

Now a year later, it held the scars of heavy use, but still he was the only kid in Mrs. Spellright's class to have one. Why so many of his contemporaries spent their time instead on bad television and dumb electronic games had him perplexed and disappointed, a perspective on his contemporaries he'd carry his entire life.

Games and VR stuff were kind of cool and all, thought Jeremy, but when you finished with them you weren't any smarter.

But books filled you up with all sorts of ideas from people who learned all kinds of things already, then wrote them down so other people like him could know those things too. He thought that was a pretty nice thing for these people to do and he hoped that they'd keep on doing it.

He wondered if when they finished writing their books these authors each came down to the library and put them on the right shelf for the librarians and readers like him to find them. Someday he'd ask Mrs. Longread, the head librarian, how that all worked but he could tell that she was too busy now to be answering questions. Checking books out for a whole line of people quickly was important so that they could hurry home and start reading them like he always did.

Sometimes Mrs. Longread had called Jeremy's mother to ask her if he was mature enough, whatever that meant—he’d need to check his dictionary—for a certain book and always his mother had answered, yes.

He figured yes probably meant his mom thought he was mature enough to read stuff that really wasn't as much fun as other stuff.

One book was, The Jungle, about an old-timey meat packaging plant where nobody was treated very nicely and another was Silent Spring, by a lady who thought the birds would stop singing if we didn't stop throwing rubbish and other gunk everywhere.

Jeremy could see why Mrs. Longread asked his mom about those two books because they made him think a lot more than many other books he had read. He guessed his friends wouldn't care at all for these books because those books had no gun fights or car chases.

Mrs. Longread had also told him that some of the bad things in those two books were still happening in some places. That really got him thinking.

Jeremy also noticed that the kids had been calling him dweeb a lot less and sometimes even asked him a hard question that he almost always could answer.

2014

By the time Jeremy Tacklebox was thirteen, he had been voted class lieutenant two years in a row and was being called an egghead more than a dweeb, he thought maybe a step up. Now in junior high school, what a lot of people called middle school, he was being recognized by boys and girls alike as not the handsomest and coolest kid but maybe one of the brightest ones.

That was O.K. to him.

Danny McGee and Ramsey Sabatini had nearly fallen off Jeremy's radar as a threat to his mental and physical health.

Young McGee had been kept back in fifth grade and reportedly didn't earn many gold stars the second time around either.

Rascal had been caught setting fires in the woods and now his mother picked him up every day right after school and took him straight home.

The main thing to Jeremy was that their mutual paths rarely crossed.

Jeremy was also beginning to learn about what really interested him and what didn't. He surprised himself by changing those interests and goals a lot. He even asked his parents if that were normal. They reminded him that when he was younger he changed goals even more, often going from a