STORYTIME!

It’s been a minute, so we figured it was time for a new blog post. We’ve been learning the secret of the duck here at AmberTrax: calm on the surface, paddling like hell underwater!

It’s really the way of any business – it might not look like much is happening from the outside, but all the moving parts are coming together and making something great. So while we paddle like hell – lets tell you a story; the story of how our company began (there’s some of it on the website under the page ‘Why we do what we do’, but that’s the condensed version). Everybody comfy? Then lets begin:

We start with a small boy, in love with all things heavy industry – diggers, loaders, backhoes, trucks. But as he grows up on his family farm and enjoys indulging himself with learning how to operate these adult Tonka toys, he also realises that he’s good at IT, and gets trained in that. After all, one makes a better living fixing other people’s IT faux pas than one does operating a loader, generally speaking.

After running his own IT business, he decided to take a break and return to his first love. Heavy machinery. And love it he did. What he couldn’t love was the seemingly endless rounds of friends being injured because they hadn’t been seen by an unwitting machine operator. Still more unlovable were the deaths: fewer than the injuries, but still too many. Heartbreak, trauma, uncertainty. Grief-stricken families and workplaces under an atmosphere of stress and shock.

There had to be a better way. The inductions and safety briefings, the changes in protocols and procedures, the mandated uniforms of high visibility gear and safety boots and hard hats – none of it seemed to really be working. Add to that the endless and ineffectual bits of paper to sign, and nobody wanted to hear about health and safety, especially not from government departments or anyone else who had never spent a day on a worksite and didn’t have a clue about how a busy heavy industry site really functions.

But how to create a safer site while still maintaining productivity? Without putting so much red tape in the way of operators that they could barely do their jobs?

Sadly, the answer came after another funeral. A friend, a young husband and father, died on the job. What could he do but promise that grieving widow that he would do everything in his power to keep this from happening to anyone else. His friend was gone. Nothing could change that. But what could be changed was who it might happen to next. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to stop this.

With that determination, and with that promise, came about the very earliest beginnings of the AmberTrax proximity safety system. Every day, we try to fulfil that promise: doing everything possible to prevent injury and death in heavy industry. It’s our goal and always will be, that everyone finishes work safe, every day.

That’s storytime over – we’re going back to work! There’s lots to do!