Canadian Occupational Safety

18 Canadian Occupational Safety | www.cos-mag.com FEBRUARY 2011: CEO COMMITMENT Having a CEO who placed a high priority on safety was crucial for a project like the Big Lift. One year after Hollett joined Halifax Harbour Bridges, he asked the CEO, Steve Snider, to sign a leadership safety charter to demonstrate his commitment. "You can't drive safety from the bottom up. He had to demonstrate to us, per se, that he was going to walk the talk," says Hollett. Signing the charter not only showed the 35 Halifax Harbour Bridges employees that safety was going to be a top priority throughout the Big Lift, it also set the standard for the contractors on site. According to Hollett, achieving safety excellence requires going beyond the traditional safety focus of engineering and regulations and moving safety "from the head to the heart." "It can't come from the safety manager. I can cham- pion it, I can be the bus driver but without the support from the person who wields the power, so to speak, then you're only going to be so successful," he says. During the Big Lift, Snider was on site many times in full personal protective equipment (PPE), speaking to the workers and reminding them to work safely. "He's a very hands-on kind of guy," says Treen. "He talks to everybody, he knows everybody's fam- ilies, he's a real person." Snider has demonstrated time and time again that he is supportive of his employees when it comes to safety, says Treen. "Every employee there has a strong feeling if they ever need something, if it ever truly was a safety con- cern, that Steve would have their back under any circumstance. It wouldn't make any difference who was calling them out, he would have their back every single time," he says. DECEMBER 2013: TENDER ISSUED As the owner of the project, it was very important for Halifax Harbour Bridges to select a constructor (also known as prime contractor or principle contractor in some jurisdictions) that took safety very seriously. The organization took a seven-step approach as to how it would address safety, regardless of who was awarded the contract, which included: management leadership; worker cooperation and participation; hazard identification and assessment; hazard preven- tion and control; education and training; program evaluation and improvement; and communication and co-ordination. Three contractors were invited to submit tenders and their safety record and practices were scrutinized as part of this process. In the end, American Bridge Canada was chosen. American Bridge had completed the only other similar project of this size on the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in 2000. "They had to meet our expectations when it came to safety. And our expectations were set very, very high," says Hollett. "We weren't going to have them bring people on board and start hurting people. We made that perfectly clear to them." Senior executives from both Halifax Harbour Bridges and American Bridge Canada met to set expectations for the project — and a big part of that conversation was around both worker safety and public safety. While it is the constructor who bears the biggest burden for safety, the project owner still has significant responsibilities, including ensuring the overall health and safety of persons at the workplace, maintaining compliance with the health and safety act at all times and communicating hazards to employers working on the site, says Treen. And if there is a major incident or fatality at the site, the project owner could face signifi- cant fines or jail time. Quite often when employers position themselves as the owner, they mistakenly believe they have a low level of responsibility and can take a hands-off approach, says Treen. "They say, 'Well it's in the contract. They have to comply with the OHS act,' and that's lovely; how- ever, that's not necessarily meeting that due diligence threshold to doing everything reasonable," he says. MARCH 2015: ON-SITE WORK BEGINS In March 2015, contractors began the prelim- inary work on the bridge that was required before the decks themselves were replaced. One of the initial projects that took place was around lead paint. Because the bridge was originally painted with lead-based paint — and then touched up with it over the years — a lead abatement program was needed. Halifax Harbour Bridges asked American Bridge Canada to involve an industrial hygienist in developing the program. A contractor was hired to do controlled and enclosed blast removal of the lead-based paint before workers could drill into the existing steel. Training and equipment was provided to ensure workers were not over-exposed to paint chips or fumes that contained lead. To ensure it was fully aware of what was happening on the bridge at all times, Halifax Harbour Bridges had its own boots-on-the- ground safety advisor. "Although we weren't responsible for enact- ing the safety directly, we were auditing what they were doing and checking up on them and trying to influence a positive safety envi- ronment out there," says Eppell. Halifax Harbour Bridges actively moni- tored the work that American Bridge Canada and its contractors were doing and if an issue was found, it immediately went to American Bridge management to have something done about it, says Treen. It's important to note that as the proj- ect owner, Halifax Harbour Bridges could not legally direct the work. For example, if Hollett saw a worker not wearing a hard hat — whether he be an employee of American Bridge or one of the many contractors — he could not go directly to that worker; he had to communicate with an American Bridge foreman about the issue and let him handle it. "That was our performance protocol: to make sure we were engaged in safety but we had a fine line that we were not allowed to not step across," says Hollett. The Halifax Harbour Bridges safety advi- sor attended all of American Bridge's safety meetings every week and he reviewed its job hazard assessments. "We would review that to make sure all the criti- cal tasks were identified. I mean when you're lifting 130-tonne parts with a 300-tonne crane, these are critical tasks," says Hollett. OCTOBER 2015: FIRST DECK SEGMENT INSTALLED The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about working on a bridge is fall protection. Halifax Harbour Bridges ensured American Bridge had a very robust fall protection program, requiring 100 per cent tie-off. All of the workers on site were required to have well-maintained and properly inspected fall protection equipment at all times. Rescue was a key component of the fall protection program. Halifax Harbour Bridges required Ameri- can Bridge to conduct high-angle rescue drills with its workers. "This is not an environment where the normal public emergency response system will be able to handle these situations. We are well outside of their range of abilities as well. When they're out that high over water, the fire department putting up a ladder just isn't an option," says Treen. Something that was unique about this project was that it involved multiple levels of government. The harbour itself is federal, the bridge is a provincial structure and there is a Department of National Defence naval base below the bridge. A lot of communication was required with these agencies throughout the project. "Any time a ship was coming through and we were doing cutting of a segment and we were flying torches and dropping 30 feet of spark, we couldn't have an oil tanker go under the bridge," Hollett says. At times, work activities had to come to a complete stop so ships could travel under the bridge. This was a bit of a learning curve for the workers on site. "There were a couple of occasions where we didn't get the acknowledgement that we were clear sent back, and so the (captain) is 3 miles out trying to make a decision as to whether he has to hit all-halt or can proceed," says Eppell. "The contractor is saying, 'Well I can't even see the ship, why the heck should I stop my work?'" Due to the Department of National Defence base

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