16 Canadian Occupational Safety | www.cos-mag.com
THE
LIFT
BIG
A quirky safety manager, an involved CEO
and a commitment to keeping contractors
focused on safety contributed to the
success of a once-in-a lifetime project
there were a lot of parties involved… It's got all of the red flags you could ever
imagine on a project like this."
As the project followed a well-defined strict timeline, safety had a timeline of
its own, too.
MAY 2010: HIRED SAFETY PETE
Halifax Harbour Bridges, the organization that operates and manages the city's
Macdonald Bridge and A. Murray MacKay bridge, knew it had its work cut out
when it received board approval for the re-decking of the Macdonald Bridge in
2010. The organization had been trying — without expertise — to improve what
it had been doing on the occupational health and safety side, says Jon Eppell,
project manager for the Big Lift.
"We recognized that we needed a safety champion, that delegating safety to
all the various managers and people in the organization wasn't going to get us
where we wanted to be. We wanted to really be better," he says.
The company went in search for a safety manger and hired Peter Hollett,
who had been working in Calgary at the time. Safety Pete, as he is known in the
organization, was hired to shake things up a bit.
"One of the big selling points with us with Peter was not only his experience and
competence in safety but his energy and enthusiasm — and his quirkiness because
we wanted to really drive safety and get the attention of everybody here," says
Eppell. "At that stage, people had been working here for 25 years who were firmly
entrenched in how things should be done and how they had always done them."
F
or just the second time in history, a busy com-
muter bridge has been raised and the road
replaced, without completely closing to the
public. The 1.3-kilometre bridge had 46 deck seg-
ments that were systematically removed during overnight
work and replaced with new ones. The $200-million
project took a total of eight years, from board approval
to completion, and involved about 520 workers.
The Big Lift, as it was known by the locals, took place
on the Angus Macdonald Bridge in Halifax, which sees
about 48,000 crossings daily.
"It was a monstrous project. The term of it and the
fact that it was so incredibly technical and there were so
many dimensions to it made it a world-calibre thing,"
says Joe Treen, occupational health and safety director
for Safety Services Nova Scotia in Dartmouth, N.S. "And
By Amanda Silliker
