Extra inspections make safety priority at homebuilding sites
Longer summer days can mean extended work hours for residential construction crews. Work site inspections will now be happening later in the day, as well.
The provincial government has hiked residential construction site inspections by Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) officers as part of Alberta Labour’s Proactive Strategic Programs.
This upswing in visits on weekends and outside regular work hours started June 1 and will end Sept. 30.
“Building a new home is an exciting time. Each summer, work ramps up on residential construction sites as crews take advantage of the good weather and longer daylight hours,” says Minister of Labour Christina Gray.
“OHS officers will be out in force to make sure employers and workers are taking their workplace safety responsibilities seriously.”
The province has done this each summer since 2011.
“I think there’s a lot of value in it,” says Brittany Baltimore, of OHS inspections outside regular hours.
She’s safety co- ordinator for Canadian Home Builders’ Association-Alberta.
“Especially because in residential construction, we do take advantage of the long hours and being able to get digging and doing excavating and things like that,” adds Baltimore.
“It’s great for us and our safety managers to have extra people out there looking at our work sites and making sure people are following the rules that are set out by the prime contractor.”
CHBA-Alberta is committed to worker safety, says its CEO Jim Rivait.
“We are helping companies build certified health and safety programs, developing new training courses for the residential construction industry, testing innovative ways to prevent falls and raising awareness among industry members and high school students,” Rivait says.
“We believe the residential inspection program will reinforce the message that we must all strive to make safety the top priority.”
A builder that has won awards for its commitment to safety, Broadview Homes, is also pleased with the move by the province.
“Ramping up safety efforts sounds good to me,” Broadview’s vice-president Peter-John Woolf writes in an email. “OHS has worked with our front line team and certainly helped us foster a much safer work environment.
“At first, some of our trades felt they were being penalized, implementing so many job site rules and that OHS was just there to write out tickets and issue fines,” he adds.
“The OHS officers we have worked with have proven time and time again they are here to help, and our team recognizes they have a genuine interest in us all getting home safe.”
Fall protection leads the list of areas for concern on work sites in the province, accounting for 52 per cent of orders written by OHS officers between April 1 and March 31 this year. However, the province saw a decrease in falls at work sites last year, dipping to six of these incidents from 20 in 2014.
“That’s a good decrease,” Baltimore says. “In speaking with people who work at occupation health and safety, we’re on track to be at ... a really low number again this year. So, we’re hoping this program is the reason these are going down.”