Safety is Practiced, Not Automatically Perfected
You don’t forget the sound of mortar fire. Brett Burkard hasn’t. Before he was CEO of Titan Environmental, he was the guy making sure water tanks got built in warzones. The kind with flak jackets. The kind where one wrong move didn’t mean a failed inspection, it meant casualties.
And while most of us won’t be laying pipe on a base in Iraq, the lesson he learned out there still applies to every job site back home:
“You can’t fake awareness. Either you’ve drilled it into your thinking, or you haven’t.”
Danger Doesn’t Always Show up in Camo
Sometimes it looks like:
- A 4,000 lb roll of plastic swinging overhead.
- A dull utility knife slicing toward someone’s leg.
- A crew that’s tired, cutting corners, and one second away from a forever mistake.
That’s the day-to-day battlefield. The front line of construction, logistics, industrial work. And that’s why Brett doubled down on daily safety meetings, even when the old-school crowd grumbled. They rolled their eyes. Called it a time-waster. “Safety theatre,” some said. Until something shifted. Weeks went by. Then months. No incidents.
“They grumbled,” he said, “And then they realized, ‘We haven’t had a safety issue in weeks.’ It wasn’t a checklist anymore. It was awareness.”
What’s Scarier Than Chaos? Complacency.
The danger in high-risk industries isn’t always a dramatic explosion. Sometimes it’s the slow fade into “good enough.” Robin Postnikoff has seen that play out too many times. He runs MI Safety, where his focus is on turning training from lecture into lived experience.
Because in his words? “You can explain how to drive a car all day long. But until you’re behind the wheel, on an icy road, with traffic swerving, it doesn’t mean a thing.”
He’s built a system that blends online theory with hands-on validation. Why? Because he’s seen what happens when theory isn’t tested. And he refuses to send unprepared workers into unpredictable environments.
Real Training Doesn’t Just Prepare people. It Protects Them.
Respect the reality. Whether it’s military zones or municipal job sites, the truth is the same: The people who survive are the ones who saw it coming. Because they practiced. They planned. They repeated the boring stuff until it became instinct.
So if you’re the kind of person who:
- Thinks “close call” stories matter more than policies
- Believes in training for the worst day, not just the best case
- Wants a crew that’s situationally aware, not just certified…
Then you’re in the right fight.
Ask yourself, Would your team see it coming? Would they know what to do? If the answer’s “maybe,” then it’s time to drill again. Real work isn’t a drill!
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