Lessons in Leadership
Gene Kranz, whose leadership under pressure helped save the
lives of three astronauts and became the basis for a hit film, re-
counted the ordeal for which he became famous at the Opening
General Session on Monday, May 16. Kranz was Flight Director
for NASA Mission Control during the flight of Apollo 13 in
1970, the United States’ third manned mission to the moon. Two
days into the mission, an explo-
sion in one of the spacecraft’s
oxygen tanks put the lives of
Apollo 13’s three astronauts in
jeopardy. Kranz’s address de-
scribed the series of engineering
and other problems that con-
fronted the astronauts and Mis-
sion Control as they struggled
to bring the crippled spacecraft
safely back to Earth.
The Flight Director, Kranz
said, “has a one-line job de-
scription: [he] may take any ac-
tions necessary for crew safety
and mission success.” With this
mandate, Kranz made a number
of crucial decisions that ultimately saved the astronauts’ lives.
The most controversial of these was Kranz’s choice to use the
moon’s gravity to propel Apollo 13 back to Earth, a trip that
would take four days, although the craft had only enough oxygen to support two men for two days. In explaining why he
chose this route instead of a direct mission abort—which would
have required turning the craft around immediately, an option
that had risks of its own—Kranz said he simply followed his
“gut instinct.” He acknowledged that many of the people in
mission control thought he had made a mistake.
That decision set his team
of mostly twenty-something
engineers scrambling to solve
a number of exceedingly
complex problems. The craft’s
course had to be corrected
multiple times so that it
would enter Earth’s atmosphere at the proper angle;
these corrections required
pencil-and-paper calculations.
To save power, the team and
the astronauts had to power
down the craft so that it was
operating on only 100 watts,
about enough to power a
small fan. In what Kranz referred to as “one of the finest
examples of teamwork I’ve ever known,” Mission Control programmed the spacecraft to spin slowly along its axis so that the
sun would heat it evenly and keep part of it from freezing.
“Absolute trust between the teams on the ground and in space
was key to the mission’s success,” Kranz said. “Without that
trust, we would have never made it.”
Gene Kranz
AIHce 2011: The Beat Goes On | FEATURE
Root Causes
Before joining the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry at the
University of California, Michael P. Wilson, PhD, MPH, spent
time as an emergency responder in a low-income neighborhood
on the east side of Salinas, Calif. He responded to incidents
caused by youth and gang violence, domestic violence, and alcohol and drug abuse. He saw many elderly with untreated
chronic diseases, pesticides applied by helicopter to areas immediately adjacent to
agricultural fields, and emergency rooms jammed with people waiting for basic health
services.
“Like occupational disease,
urban poverty can be a lens
into societal priorities,” Wilson
told AIHce attendees during his
General Session address on
Tuesday, May 17. His motivation to change those priorities
is evident in his current work
at the Berkeley Center, an institute dedicated to establishing
green chemistry as a pillar of
sustainable development.
Declaring that nearly every
case of occupational disease in
the U.S. is preventable, Wilson outlined the key role industrial
hygienists can play in solving this problem. First, he said, they
must identify the root causes of occupational injuries and diseases; second, they must join forces with others who have similar goals.
The current movement to reform the 1976 Toxic Substances
Control Act (TSCA), Wilson said, offers industrial hygienists an
“unprecedented opportunity that won’t come around again for
many decades.” Reformers hold that a root cause of occupational disease is that TSCA created a market driven by the function and price of chemicals, not their safety. “For industrial
hygienists, TSCA is the primary reason you don’t have the exposure information you need to identify, prioritize and take action on chemicals,” Wilson said.
The momentum behind TSCA reform is gathering, and Wilson challenged AIHA® and the industrial hygiene community to
support the movement. The prospects for reform, Wilson said,
have never been brighter. Compliance with Europe’s REACH
regulation (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) has softened U.S. chemical companies’ resistance to TSCA reform, and several American states have passed
chemical safety regulations with strong bipartisan support.
“As a profession, this community has both an opportunity
and deep interest in engaging in TSCA reform for the simple
fact that the problem of chemicals will never be resolved unless companies” are incentivized to use safer chemicals, Wilson told attendees. “Until TSCA is reformed, any effort to
address chemical safety will be in competition with other
business costs and will be roundly jettisoned at the first sign
of economic distress.”
Michael P. Wilson
