The Hidden Sea of Summer Hazards
It might seem counterintuitive, but even off the clock, safety professionals can help protect workers all summer long.
There’s a short parable I think about every summer. It’s from the start of a commencement speech that author David Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College in 2005, and it goes like this:
These two young fish are swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
When the days get longer and campgrounds and beaches begin to fill up, I’m reminded that Wallace’s what-is-water story is a perfect summary of the challenges of summer safety.
Summer’s Hidden Hazards
Every year, when the temperature begins to rise, safety professionals turn their attention to heat-related concerns. And with good reason: the heat can be deadly. In 2023, there were 55 work-related deaths caused by environmental heat, and an additional 5,770 DART cases related to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and other issues related to working in high temperatures. Given these obvious dangers, safety managers spend their time reminding workers about the need for sunscreen, the importance of hydration, and the dangers of prolonged sun exposure.
Those are important steps to keep workers safe. But it always feels a bit to me like we’re so used to swimming in certain waters that we’ve forgotten we’re swimming at all. Because statistically speaking, the big dangers of the summer aren’t found in the workplace. After all, the National Safety Council notes that in 2023, across the United States, there were 294 heat deaths caused by weather events, over 400% more fatalities than those in workplaces alone.
The big dangers of summer aren’t confined to the heat. Every year, over 200,000 children are rushed to an emergency room because of a playground injury. In 2023, almost 4,000 people drowned, with 700 drownings occurring in July alone. And July and August are two of the three worst months for driving fatalities, with over 4,000 people killed by cars each month. These are all major safety concerns that peak in the summer and that occur outside the workplace.
What does this all have to do with fish and water? At its core, the parable is about becoming so familiar with a medium that we stop recognizing it, and we stop recognizing its associated risks, too. Another notable fact about July and August is that those two months see the highest volume of driving, with Americans logging over 580 billion miles behind the wheel in July and August 2023. It makes perfect sense why we drive so much in the summer: the weather’s so nice it would be a shame to spend it indoors, so we take our kids to the park more often. We take the family camping. We fill up a cooler, pack some towels, and drive to the beach. And once we’re on the road for long enough, we start to forget about the hazardous energy involved in operating a vehicle.
Complacency Is the Real Danger
We don’t forget about hazards entirely, which is why many people wear sunblock, pack bug spray, and remind the kids to drink lots of water when they’re out in the sun. But we’re so immersed in some hazards — driving, swimming, the playground — that we forget just how dangerous they can be. We forget that we are, in fact, metaphorically swimming in a sea of hazards.
Complacency with off-the-job risks isn’t a summer-specific problem. Injury Facts found that “in 2023, 96% of deaths and 86% of the medically consulted injuries suffered by workers occurred off the job,” and many of these incidents occur year-round. But off-the-job injuries feel especially pronounced in the warmer months, when our brief vacation days can turn suddenly into tragic injuries with long-term consequences. And I’m always struck by the narrow industry focus on heat illnesses compared to hazards that are most likely to occur. Sometimes it feels like beachgoers who are on the lookout for sharks but have decided to leave their kids’ PFDs at home.
Each summer, the major task for safety professionals is to get workers to recognize the proverbial water they’re swimming in. To recognize the dangers of driving. To be aware of the injury potential in playground equipment. To keep the risks of (literal) drowning at the front of their mind every time they visit the beach. To understand that safety is just as much of a concern off-the-job as it is in the workplace.
Why Off-the-Clock Safety Still Matters
That’s a lot easier said than done. In my experience, a few common obstacles often stand in the way of a good off-the-job safety initiative. The first is convincing senior leadership that at-home safety is actually a workplace problem. It’s not always clear to company decision-makers why they should invest time and resources into preventing injuries when employees aren’t clocked in. These concerns are typically best addressed by pointing out the financial impact of off-the-job incidents.
When someone suffers a notable injury at home, they may have to miss work just the same as if they were hurt on the job. And the impacts — the replacement cost, productivity loss, and other negative effects of losing an experienced employee — are the same regardless of where the incident occurred. The company may not be on the hook for a worker’s compensation claim, but they will still feel the financial effects of the injury for other reasons.
Critically, this is also true if a member of the worker’s family is hurt. I don’t know anyone who is at their best on Monday morning if they had to take their child to the emergency room on Sunday afternoon. It may not always be fully evident, but the employer pays a real cost every time there’s an incident in a worker’s family.
Because of the stakes of summer safety, you’d think it would be easy to attune workers to the everyday hazards that put their families at risk. But the reason there are so many off-the-job incidents in the first place — basically, complacency to the dangers thanks to over-familiarization — is also the reason why it can be challenging to get workers to keep them front of mind. Nobody expects it will be their kid who runs into the water and never comes back alive.
Everyone believes in taking steps to protect their family, so it’s not a question of motivation. Instead, it comes down to how well they understand the dangers of complacency and recognize that the safety of their loved ones may depend on their ability to address human factors at home and on the road. Because a veritable tidal wave of incidents occurs every summer when drivers become frustrated at high volumes of traffic, parents are distracted while their kids are swimming in the pool, and people hurt themselves as they rush through doing work around the house.
Turning Awareness Into Action
Even though most incidents occur at home and on the road, the solution starts in the workplace. A few well-timed interventions can act as a catalyst for keeping people and their families safe off the job (not to mention improving workplace outcomes too). Holding toolbox talks and distributing handouts on summer safety right before a long weekend can offer time-sensitive reminders. And one-on-one conversations with supervisors can make a big difference too, even if they’re just a quick pull-aside to chat about keeping safety top of mind while on vacation.
It may seem counterintuitive to talk about off-the-job safety at work. It may appear to take the focus off workplace hazards. But the statistics speak for themselves. Your company is more likely to be negatively impacted by an incident occurring at home — whether it’s a worker being injured or an incident affecting a worker’s family member — than by someone being hurt on the job. People are just so complacent to the dangers surrounding them that they can’t even recognize hazards for what they are. It’s a safety professional’s job to remind everyone that we are all, in fact, swimming in potentially deadly waters.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.