Prioritizing Safety

5 min. read

Like many of you, I watched the videos of the Kelowna crane collapse looking for clues as to what went so tragically wrong. There were many comments about missing PPE, an indication that a safe work culture was lacking. While it seems self-evident that the proper use of fall arrest or hardhats would not have had any significant effect on the outcomes that day, what we don’t know is if risks were taken that may have had such an effect such as stretching the limits of safe work procedures as set out by the manufacturer. I’m sure most would agree that a brief distraction or a momentary lack of good judgment, in a more perfect world would not cost someone their life. But that was not the reality that day in Kelowna. ?

From the security camera footage, the most telling info we seem to have, in the first frame, we can see the horizontal jib. In the second frame, we see the jib is out of balance, jib high in the air. In the third photo, the jib is not there. It is self-evident that the out-of-balance jib has over-torqued the connections at the mast and the crane then falls between the mast and the building hitting the tieback on the way down to the top of the podium and adjacent building. A mangled mess of horror, leaving five dead.

I want to know what are the fail-safes that are supposed to prevent this from happening? ?There is a safe work procedure, to be sure. But investigations into such matters can take a very long time to produce reliable conclusions.

But I am not writing today to discuss this incident alone.

Fatalities and serious incidents appear to be on the rise. A worker died and another was seriously injured on a demolition site in North Vancouver recently. When it comes to safety we are moving in the wrong direction.

On January 7th, 1981, at the Bentall towers, four workers died after riding a fly deck 36 stories to the ground. This event led to an inquest into not just this incident, but many other safety issues as well as it became apparent that safety was lacking in many areas of construction. Changes came. Such as Engineering field inspections of fly decks prior to pour, as well as changes to the construction of guard rails, and ladders. The inquest led to 60 items in all that needed a safety overhaul. But there was also a recognition that all construction parties, unions, contractors, workers, engineers, and the WCB, were in it together when it came to safety. Prior to this, safety was left to the WCB to police and manage. When it came to safety, the WCB regulations were gospel. The problem was that they were written in blood. Every time someone was killed or injured they would make new rules to try and prevent that accident from recurring. And it was all policed by board officers alone. At the time construction was accepted as being a risky business.

An ominous stat from this time was one death for every 13 floors of high-rise construction in Vancouver. This meant that on the average highrise project, two people would die, and this would have been considered ‘average’.?

Safety issues continued. Another commission into safety started in the 90’s, The model was flipped and by 1998 safety responsibility and accountability was now in the hands of the contractors themselves. Construction VP’s and managers or anyone with responsibility for safety could now, potentially, face jail time if found culpable for accidents. Due diligence became a primary concern in the construction world as we now had to not only provide for a safe work site but be able to prove the measures taken to accomplish this task in the event of a serious accident or fatality. The WCB Act and regulations became the only area of the law where you were effectively guilty until proven innocent. The position of Construction Safety Officer came into existence, so did joint health and safety committees.

By the mid 2000’s we started to see results of this new approach. A drywaller working at the outside edge of the seventh floor of a building with a misplaced foot, stepped off the edge of a work platform. He would have fallen to the ground below if not for his fall safety system. A worker making a connection to a storm manhole 10’ deep was startled by the trench shoring cage he was in shifting over by a cave-in of unstable material at the side of the trench. With the size of the cave in it was clear he would have been buried alive.

That’s when it became clear. A complete reversal of the ominous 1970’s stat. two lives had been saved by safety initiatives on a highrise project. And it has occurred several times since then.?Safety was moving in the right direction.

Hold the phone. Other than a couple of slowdowns construction has been booming in Vancouver for over thirty years. Now it’s off the charts.

According to the VRCA and WorkBC, we are somewhere around 10,000 skilled tradesmen short to fill all vacant positions in construction. And while we have had new people entering the trades for a few years now, we went through a period in the ’90s where construction trades were not promoted as a viable career alternative but rather a dire result of a high school student’s lack of attention to his grades. The effect of this was a decade-long dearth of tradesmen moving through the system, which today represents a shortage of skilled trade mentors for newer workers.

There’s more. A study, done in May of this year by Jack Neale and Argaw Gurmu in the journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, systematically reviewed evidence around production pressures in construction. 37 studies were included. Their findings included, under various headings; Scheduling – Unrealistic time constraints, aggressive and forever changing schedules, and deadlines. Management – Lack of understanding valuing production over safety, intensification of work pressure. Rework – Leading to aggressive scheduling of unanticipated or unforeseen work. Deficiencies - in project management and planning, fatigue, competitive tendering leading to unrealistic costs and durations. While we may have known about these previously, we now have scholarly research to underpin the issues.

It’s the perfect storm. A trifecta of an overheating market, a massive shortage of skilled workers, in an industry at a loss to manage itself through it all. I haven’t even mentioned covid.

Here’s my message and it’s a calling to construction Leadership; If we’re going to continue to attract new people to our industry, and I believe this is key, we will need to lead with integrity, and speak truth to bullshit. We need to acknowledge schedule overruns due to additional scope and stop the insanity of holding a fixed end date in spite of additional works. This approach has become common practice, but the results are becoming potentially catastrophic creating unsafe working conditions akin to Rasmussen’s dynamic safety graph. We need a reality check on the value of safety and how our actions contribute to an unsafe environment for our workers. North Vancouver and Kelowna have provided our wake up call;

We need to put safety first.

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Links;

Production pressures in the building industry sector of the construction industry: a systematic review of literature.

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JEDT-12-2020-0529/full/html

Rasmussen’s Dynamic Safety Graph.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Rasmussens-modified-safety-dynamic-model_fig3_253049064

VRCA -skilled trades worker shortages.

https://www.vrca.ca/blog/2020/02/24/lower-mainland-short-17500-skilled-trades-workers-by-2029/

Construction Industry Training Network’s Construction Sector Consultations report.

https://www.workbc.ca/getmedia/7d3f8b7c-1220-462f-bb7f-07fea54c64c0/Construction-Industry-Training-Network_Engagement-Report_Jan16.pdf.aspx

#Kelowna Crane Collapse #Construction Safety # Construction scheduling # construction scheduling # shortage of skilled tradesmen # Safety First #North Van Demo Fatality