This article is part of a continuing 6 part series on incident investigation.
There are often lots of people to interview following an incident. Some of the potential interviewees are the victim, co-workers, supervisors, engineers, maintenance personnel, and workers performing similar tasks, witnesses, emergency personnel, medical personnel, equipment suppliers and the coroner.
Sometimes you may be able to interview only a few of these people. In other cases, you are able to interview them all. In either case, you need to prioritize the interviews.
Remember the importance, emotional condition and availability of the witnesses when you decide whom to interview. If there were a design engineer for the machine manufacturer at the incident scene and he was going to catch a plane tonight and go back to St. Louis, you would like to talk to him today before he leaves town. If an eyewitness were about to leave the scene, you would like to talk to him before he leaves. On the other hand, the victim, who may be the only eyewitness, may be in the hospital in a serious physical condition or emotional state and you may not be able to talk to him for thirty days, if ever. So you have to prioritize the interviews based on the circumstances.
You want to take the interviews in a comfortable, non-threatening place. When you meet the interviewee, explain who you are and what you are doing. I usually say, “I’m John Doe and I’m a mechanical engineer working for your employer’s workers’ comp. carrier. I need your help. Will you help me?” You have to humbly ask the witness for his help and you need to be sensitive to the witness’s emotional state. I have interviewed injured workers two years after an event and they started shaking when they got within a hundred feet of a machine that cut off their arm. When that occurs, the two of us do not go any closer to that machine than we are right then. I will talk to him at that location and then at a later time go get a closer look at the machine by myself.
A couple of reminders are in order. First, you do not want to gather witness facts by doing a group interview. If any interviewees think the interview is going to become a “finger-pointing” session, they won’t talk. Secondly, don’t ask an individual to write out a statement.
My experience indicates that the average worker cannot write very well. And on top of that, he doesn’t want to be writing what he is being asked to write at the time of the interview. If you ask him to write out a statement, he is going to write the statement out and he will give you about three sentences – the minimum that he thinks is required to satisfy the interviewer and get out of the room.
On the other hand, if you sit down with the interviewee and take your time, in a non-threatening way, you will usually be able to get pages of information. You can write the information down and then ask him to read and sign it, if he agrees with it. If he doesn’t agree with it, change the statement until he does agree with it. Then ask him to sign the statement.
During the interview process, remember that you want to ask the individual what he saw, what he heard, and what he did. Start at the beginning. The beginning usually is the start of the workday in most cases. I usually start with, and “what time did you come to work today?” The most important question to follow is, “and then what happened?”
Remember the mental movie, when possible. Walk through the actions of the individual. In the case of a manlift that tipped over the questioning might go as follows:
Q. “Mr. Painter, what time did you start work?”
A. “Well, I got here at 7:00am.”
Q. “What did you do then?
A. “I unloaded the manlift from my truck.”
Q. “And then what happened? “
A. “Well, I went out there. The boss man said, “Go up there and touch up that little area. I got in the lift; I didn’t take time to put out the outriggers because I thought I could make it and not turn over. I really wasn’t going up that high.”
Q. “And then what happened?”
A. “Well, I started going up?”
Q. “And then what happened?
A. “I started coming down.”
Be sure to take your time. Before long you will have lots of information, especially if the person you are talking to thinks you are shooting straight with him.