Attention Construction Industry: Avoid Forced Shut Downs
Businesses in the construction industry need to adopt a culture of safety on their work sites in order to avoid the inconvenience and cost of forced shutdowns caused by safety breaches.
One such shutdown occurred in Canberra on 15 November when inspectors found a number of safety breaches on a major construction site.
The biggest safety incident occurred around a concrete pouring procedure which was incorrectly dealt with by employers. Workers were so concerned for their health and safety that they called in the union.
Read this post from Abc.net.au which explains:
WorkSafe ACT yesterday shut down a major construction site in Canberra’s south after inspectors found that safety issues had been inappropriately dealt with by site managers.
A concrete pour at an apartment project in Lyons was halted after workers alerted the construction union to a number of their concerns.
The work ban has since been lifted.
“We’ll have to investigate and see whether there’s stronger enforcement action that needs to be taken,” ork safety commissioner Mark McCabe said.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-15/worksite-temporarily-shut-amid-safety-concerns/4374668
Although many companies see safety as an expense and a time waster, as this incident proves attention to safety could have saved the company from having its site shut down which will prove extremely costly as time goes on.
A site shut down affects a number of people from workers, to employers, to clients and suppliers who all run at a loss because of incidents such as these. This is the second concrete pour in 2 weeks that had to be shut down in the Canberra area which is indicative of a lack of safety around the procedure which needs to be addressed.
Employers should have identified the hazard of the concrete pour and assessed the risk of it harming workers before developing a safe procedure for it to be done on the site. Workers should then have been educated and trained on this procedure before it was undertaken.
The post goes on to state:
“Our first actions are to get the situation put back to right and make sure that safety’s being guaranteed.
“But there will probably be a financial consequence for the company. There was a number of concrete trucks that had to be turned away.”
Mr McCabe says engineers had given approval to a project that was clearly unsafe.
“If there was an emergency, ambulance crews would find it difficult to get up on that deck,” he said.
“The fact that the deck was not ready for the pour to begin, and yet the pour was going to begin if we hadn’t intervened, that was of serious concern to us.”
The shutdown comes less than two weeks after WorkSafe stopped another concrete pour on a construction site in Canberra’s north.
Mr McCabe says there is a growing trend of poor project management in the ACT.
“In terms of significant avoidable risks being passed onto their workers, I find that totally unacceptable,” he said.
Mr McCabe says there are significant consequences for companies that flout the rules.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-15/worksite-temporarily-shut-amid-safety-concerns/4374668