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In any line of work, you’re going to learn some shortcuts. Pick up a comic book, for instance, and you’ll find that many artists simply trace backgrounds and complicated objects from Google Image search results. Go see a movie and you’ll find that they reuse the same stock footage of explosions, car chases and airplanes taking off from movie to movie. It’s simply easier and cheaper than producing new work from scratch.

Here’s the key difference between the shortcuts that you can afford to take, and the shortcuts that you can’t: With the former, there’s no real risk of anyone getting hurt.

Climbing a ladder with an armful of tools is quicker than hauling them up after you in a bucket, but it’s not safe, and it’s not going to look good on an insurance claim. The truth is that most shortcuts that you could take on a construction site are shortcuts that you absolutely shouldn’t take. Especially these ones:

“I Don’t Need A Crew For This”

You’re touring the job site after hours, maybe doing a little last minute clean up or picking up something you forgot earlier today. You notice that your team left the roof just a few tiles short. Your first instinct might be to take two minutes out of your day and get that finished now instead of having to go up there in the hot afternoon sun the next day. This is a simple task that doesn’t exactly require a three man team, but the crew isn’t just there to get work done, they’re also there to make sure that there’s a trained team to respond should you fall off the roof. You really shouldn’t be working any job site without at least bringing along a friend who can help you out if you get hurt, no matter how simple the task seems to be.

Inadequate Tools and Materials

You’ve probably seen people using the back end of a hatchet as a hammer, or using nails where a screw is needed. Using inadequate tools and materials isn’t only a recipe for disaster, it’s not that good of a shortcut, either. Would you honestly rather take out two dozen old screws with a claw hammer than with a power drill?

Skipping Any Safety Protocols, Period

Maybe you’ve been welding without a mask for years without incident, and maybe you feel that an injury suffered on the job would have turned out the same whether or not you’d been wearing a mask. The problem is that nobody else is going to see it that way when you file your insurance claim. Safety protocol is there not only to protect you, but to make sure everyone is on the same page so that we can rule out negligence.

Source

http://ehstoday.com/blog/safety-shortcuts-longest-distance-between-two-points

Forgetting one hurricane tie before drywalling probably isn’t going to see a house going up in a tornado like in The Wizard of Oz. Some mistakes aren’t that big a deal. Others… well, here are some of the biggest mistakes ever made in construction, engineering and architecture:

The Aon Center

The Aon Center, completed in 1973, was known for its beautiful exterior made of Italian Carrara marble. A fetching addition to the Chicago skyline, it turns out that there’s a reason they don’t use Carrara marble on most buildings. It’s a very thin material. Just one year after the building was completed, pieces started to crack and fall off, one of them smashing through the roof of the nearby Prudential Center. Replacing the exterior with granite cost over $80 million. There’s something to be said for using the right materials the first time.

NASA and Lockheed Martin’s Mars Orbiter

Long story short: in 1999, Lockheed Martin used the English system of measurement on a project with NASA, while NASA used the metric system. The Mars orbiter was then unable to transfer its coordinates to the lab in California. Now there’s a $125 million chunk of useless metal floating around the galaxy. You might not be building a satellite any time soon, but it’s important to get on the same page with your crew and your client when it comes to how many inches are in a meter.

Vdara Hotel & Car Dashboard

The Vdara Hotel & Spa is a classic example of a designer putting form before function. All those reflective surfaces on the windows surrounding the pool looked absolutely stunning, but at mid-day, they created a sort of magnifying-lens-on-an-ant effect, scorching people in the swimming pool and turning the whole area into a car dashboard on a Summer afternoon. One man even claims to have had some hair singed right off his head while going for a swim.

Piper Bravo Oil Rig

The smallest mistakes can have major complications. The Piper Bravo Oil Rig exploded, killing 167 people, simply because safety inspectors forgot to replace a single safety valve after a routine check of the rig. The repairs cost more than $3 billion in 1994 USD. This is something worth thinking about the next time a worker decides that he doesn’t need to wear his goggles if he’s only going to be using the table saw for a couple minutes.

Source

http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-mistakes-in-history-2011-4?op=1

It’s an uncomfortable truth of construction jobs that it’s better to put a start date off for a couple of weeks than it is to move forward with a crew that isn’t quite up for the task at hand. There are some people that you’re just better off not hiring.

Substance Abusers

There’s a big difference between substance use and abuse. There are people who drink at the end of the day, people in Colorado who smoke pot on weekend, and of course, a lot of us in construction can’t live without coffee and cigarettes. The difference between use and abuse is whether or not it’s affecting your daily life. You don’t need someone showing up for work drunk and trying to operate heavy machinery when they can’t even stand up straight. It’s simply not worth the risk.

The Exceptionally Inexperienced

Most people in construction didn’t attend a university to learn how to operate a screwdriver. In this industry, we do most of our learning on the job. Most of your gofers, for instance, are probably working their first professional construction job, or at the very least, they haven’t been paying their rent on construction sites for more than a year or two. What you don’t need, however, is a bunch of employees who have never so much as replaced a doorknob without calling in a professional. Even the lowest ranked new hires on the job should at least know the difference between a Philips and a flathead.

The Totally Disinterested

Having one or two part-timers on staff is fine. Extra hands on deck are never a bad idea. The problem is when you have too many people who are just not that interested in the work up and quitting on you all at once, leaving you short-handed and unable to complete a job on time and under-budget. There are day labor agencies to help you out in these scenarios, but it’s easier when you know the people you’re working with, and you don’t have to leave the house an hour early in the morning to replace the guys who quit yesterday, or worse, just plain stopped showing up one day.

One of the great things about running a construction site is that there’s always work to go around, it’s a great industry for giving opportunities to young people who don’t have advanced degrees or a lot of on-the-job experience. With time it becomes easy to tell the people who appreciate that opportunity apart from the ones that don’t.

So you have some people coming to visit the site, and they have zero experience on construction jobs. How do you make sure that they stay safe while touring the facilities? Here are some tips:

HARD HATS AND GOGGLES

Make sure anyone visiting the site is fitted with hard hats and goggles and that they understand the importance of proper safety gear. These can make the difference between a funny story and a lawsuit that puts your client out of commission.

WHAT TO COVER IN A SAFETY BRIEFING

Different points will vary from site to site, but there are a few basic points that are pretty universal:

-Stay with your guide.
-Don’t touch anything unless it’s a handrail.
-Don’t lean on anything.
-Here’s where we keep the first aid kits.
-Keep long hair, loose clothes and shoelaces tied and tucked.
-The bathroom/portable toilet is right over there.

As long as you’re escorting normal people and not the Three Stooges around a job site, then these points should be enough to cover most work stations.

OFF-LIMITS AREAS

You really don’t want anyone who isn’t working on the job to be around live, exposed wires, walking through confined spaces, or climbing ladders and navigating scaffoldings. Let your visitors know where they shouldn’t be, and plan your tour of the site around these areas, not through them. If they absolutely need to check out one of these areas, there’s always a safe alternative. You can send them photos, or let them look at it from a safe distance.

KEEP IT BRIEF

Construction sites are a high-risk environment. People who work in construction know the risks and have spent their entire career learning to better navigate the dangers of a job site. Your visitors have not. You don’t want to rush people along, but keep the tour going at a brisk pace, have them ask questions after the walk-through, and don’t keep your visitors in the danger-zone any longer than absolutely necessary.

Some construction professionals would rather just not have any visitors at all, under any circumstance, and ideally, that would always be an option. But, sometimes a client wants to see what their new living room is going to look like, or the architect needs to give some notes. It would be safest to have nobody on the job who isn’t working there, but when that’s not an option, make sure your visitors know the basic safety procedures.