This reviewer gets it: I liked to call safety management preventive medicine.

Confessions of Female Safety Engineer 5.0 out of 5 stars. A well-written, informative, and sometimes funny memoir on a little-known profession

Wendy S. Delmater tells the story of how, left in a terrible position as a single mother with children, she first discovered her possible calling and then made it her profession: safety engineer.

A safety engineer is a person who watches over all major project sites to ensure that the work is being done properly and safely — which means doing anything from simply ensuring all the right forms and clearances are obtained to stopping work outright if they see a dangerous situation developing. In construction, where the author worked, this is a vastly male-dominated field (and was even more so when she began), and some of the book deals with how she evaded, confronted, or leaped over the pitfalls caused by that.

But the majority of the book simply tells, in smooth prose, about her path to becoming a safety engineer and the various situations — good, bad, and worse — she had to address in this profession. It is also an educational book, telling readers a lot about the kind of work that has to be done in the construction profession as well as the specific work of a safety engineer. Though leavened with a lot of humor, in some ways it’s quite scary to realize how very many ways there are for the apparently-dull field of “building stuff” to go hideously wrong, and not just for workers on the site. Old contaminated asbestos sites, destabilized railway bridges, potential for fire and collapse… this is the kind of thing that a safety engineer has to worry about every day.

On the positive side, Wendy S. Delmater also points out that a good safety engineer *saves lives almost every day*. Sure, you don’t charge into burning buildings to drag people out (one hopes); instead, you save them in the FUTURE. You change a situation that would likely get someone injured or killed into one where everyone goes home safe.

This is a really fun book, a surprisingly quick read, and one that’ll teach you something too! Highly recommended!

(Thank you, sir!)