Safety is Step One

I want to thank everyone for allowing me to be a part of this community. Safety is a huge part of the Heavy Civil Infrastructure category, however it is something that easily goes neglected through micro lapses of judgement in execution or through a missed bullet point in an otherwise great plan.

Construction projects often contain heavy volumes of procedures geared towards minimizing safety incidences. Morally, it's important for companies to care about the well being of their employees. Many construction projects have also suffered financial losses that drown the endeavor due to high incident frequency. Unfortunately, poor safety records are more common than you might think. It leads me to wonder why this is when so much focus goes into safety from a managerial perspective.

The first place to start in this question is with our personal experiences. I've seen field teams pick precast crane loads while one crew member stood beneath the load with one hand on it; all in the sight of the foreman. I've had pick plans presented to me for approval that involved swinging loads over live traffic without provisions for a slow roll or stopping traffic. I've been a part of projects post fatality that only seemed to demonstrate superficial changes. This leads you to ask, is this really safety first behavior or are we just telling ourselves that?

Before that precast load was picked, did the field team take the time to sit down with the superintendent while the field plan was reviewed and interpret the JHA point to stand clear of suspended loads? When a pick plan for swinging a suspended load over traffic was developed, was someone looking at the posted words on safety in the project trailer? When the contract was formed for the project, what expectations and consequences were developed around safety; how well was the contractor's safety plan vetted to ensure that it could be properly enforced?

The answer to these questions involves understanding where safety first really starts: at step one. It starts at the very beginning, in the idea phase of a project. It's easy for everyone involved in a project to mentally offload the responsibility for safety, "That's the EHS guy, not me". No. It's your job when you design the project. It's your job when you create the schedule. It's your job when you develop the contract. It's your job when develop the work plan. It's your job when you execute the work. It's everyone's fault when someone gets hurt or worse.

I'm thankful for all of the strong EHS teams I've worked with and all the people who come up with solutions that help keep our projects safer. My goal is always to execute projects with zero incidents, under budget, ahead of schedule, and perfectly constructed. The key to achieving that is with step one: Safety.