subject: being a safe builder [print this page] General contractors manage a range of considerations as they oversee a building's construction, including budget, materials and schedule. They also must ensure conformance with a large range of regulatory necessities, from environmental standards to legal work practices. One of the most important concerns a general contractor must control, especially in the construction industry, is safety.
clearly, the federal government considers construction safety a significant concern. In 2006, more than 59% of all Fed. inspections performed by the Occupational Safety & Health Administration ( OSHA ) countrywide, 22,891 inspections in all, happened in the construction sector. OSHA conducted a further 27,672 state inspections at construction jobsites.
over the last one or two years, incidents involving vehicles or equipment have been the primary source of construction office injuries in Texas. Fall dangers also account for a high proportion of the accidents that take place. Other dangers that end up in jobsite wounds include electrical shock and caught-betweens and falling objects.
The approach to maintaining a safe jobsite and minimizing the chance from these and plenty of other perils is a three-pronged methodology of planning, training and inspections.
Safety Inspections
moving on the heels of planning and training, the 3rd element of the successful safety program is to self-inspect. Superintendents and safety representatives walk the jobsite one or two times each week, observing work processes, documenting procedural violations and potential risk s, and implementing correcting actions. Frequently these inspections result in procedural changes that are joined into the daily pre-task planning.
during the past couple of years QUOIN spearheaded the development of a programme called DBO2 to dramatically improve the inspection process. With DBO2 superintendents can document their discoveries on a private data assistant ( PDA ) and transmit their results immediately to all levels of the company. This provides the formal documentation of inspections as needed by OSHA, and communicates potential issues to the general contractor's delegates who can address them.
because the DBO2 programme allows immediate, easy record of inspections, the number of findings that may be recorded is far larger than what would occur otherwise. For instance, in 2007 Bob Moore Construction documented 97,000 findings at its assorted jobsites using DBO2, with a 98% safe rate on those discoveries. The remaining two percent of the observations were corrected immediately and without any problems, because the superintendents identified the problems while they were in progress, but before any mishap happened.
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