Construction Insurance Bulletin

You want to get your money’s worth out of every safety harness, hard hat and pair of goggles, but push these items to their limit and you’re going to wind up with injuries and accidents on the jobsite that cost you a lot more than a few new helmets. Here are a few signs that it may be time to toss that old safety gear in the trash:

The 5 Year Expiration Date

Many safety items come with a five year expiration date. However, a safety harness is not a gallon of milk. The manufacturer has no way of knowing how much use that gas mask or safety harness is going to see. You definitely don’t want to strap yourself to a telephone pole with a six year old harness, but an item that gets a lot of use might not make it to year five. Think of the expiration date as a “definitely-no-later-than” date, not a guarantee of safe usability.

What Can Be Repaired?

Obviously, the strap will wear out on a pair of goggles before the lenses do. It’s a good idea to keep some extra straps around and replace them at the first sign of wear. Likewise, hard hats and gas masks often come with replaceable straps. Generally you don’t want to try and do any DIY mending on parts that can’t be easily replaced.

Signs Of Damage

A crack, a hole or a serious chip in a pair of goggles or a hard hat or in the buckles of a safety harness is a sure sign that it’s time to retire that piece of equipment. Any cuts along the straps of a safety harness, rips and tears in gas masks or other hazmat wear like gloves and safety clothing. It’s not a drinking glass or a desk fan, your life may depend on the integrity of your safety gear.

Signs Of Normal Wear & Tear

You’ll start seeing normal signs of wear and tear the minute you take a new hard hat out of the box. Little scuffs, scrapes and nicks are to be expected. Unlike a trust old wallet that’s been with you through good times and bad, this wear and tear can lead to total failure when you least expect. Once equipment starts feeling flimsy, thin, or you just can’t see through the goggles anymore, it’s time to pack it in.

It really comes down to a simple question: do you trust your equipment? Maybe a hard hat that sees some serious trauma but doesn’t show any obvious signs of damage has another good year in it, but do you want to stake your head on it?

If you work in construction for any length of time, you’re going to wind up dealing with worker’s comp, and if you deal with enough worker’s comp cases, you’re going to have a few that make you go “Hm…”

The good news is that worker’s comp fraud isn’t as common as many would think, and the even better news is that it’s usually pretty easy to spot when it happens. Anyone who’s able to fake their way into a nice steady stream of compensation would probably make more money going into acting. Here are some of the telltale signs that you may want to investigate further:

The Injury is Reported on Monday Morning

This is a clear sign of an injury that may have taken place over the weekend, and an employee who wants to collect some worker’s comp.

Nobody Saw the Accident Take Place

Obviously there are plenty of accidents that happen when nobody’s looking, but most experienced construction workers know better than to do a dangerous job with no backup.

A Long History of Claims

Unless your employee is named Moe, Larry or Curly, a long history of injury claims is usually a sign pointing to fraud.

Refusal of Treatment

If your employee is suffering a real injury actually sustained on the job, then they shouldn’t have an issue with letting a medical professional take a look at it.

Employment Change

If the accident takes place right before an employee suspected that they were going to be fired, or right before a strike takes place, there’s a chance that they may be trying to get it while the getting’s good.

Claimant is Hard to Reach

A claimant who is supposedly disabled but never seems to be at home to answer the phone or shoot an email back at you is quite often, well, not at home.

Any one of these signs is, in and of itself, not a big deal. If a union worker happens to fracture a toe right before he was going to go on strike, it shouldn’t be his tough luck that he’s now injured AND out of work. However, two or more signs in one case do start to look a little suspicious.

Again, worker’s comp fraud isn’t really all that common. We only see the worst-case-scenario in the news, because the fact that most claims are legit simply doesn’t make for a very entertaining read. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be vigilant.

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.

They say you never know when an accident is going to happen. That’s what they say. The truth is that while some accidents can blindside us, there are others that are easy to see coming a mile away. You don’t need a magic ball to know what’s going to happen when someone reaches into the oven without an oven mitt. Here are some telltale signs of a situation about to go awry on a construction site:

The Wrong Kind of Shouting

There’s a lot of shouting going on at any given construction site, but most of it is helpful. Shouting “grab us another two by four” over the sound of the belt sander, for instance. Shouting because you’re mad at someone, on the other hand, is a catalyst for disaster. If you have two workers who aren’t getting along, the tension and distraction of having them arguing on the job can lead to serious injury. Handle conflicts between workers before it becomes a problem, and split them up if it does.

Sloppy Housekeeping

Tools not in use need to be packed up, extension cords need to be tucked neatly into corners when possible. The less stuff there is laying around on the floor for your workers to trip on, the less likely it is that you’re going to have someone out on worker’s comp for a month.

Butterfingers

We all have our “whoopsie” moments. Sometimes it’s a one-off slip, sometimes it’s a sign that we’re not quite on our game right now. If you have a worker who’s been dropping his tools all morning, maybe let him get some coffee in his system before you have him work the jackhammer.

Shortcuts

Passing a drill up and down a scaffolding by dangling it from its extension cord, mounting the top two steps of a ladder, working without safety goggles because we’re only going to be using the bench drill for a few seconds, most of us have been guilty of taking a shortcut like this at some point. Don’t let your team make a habit of it.

End-of-Day Fatigue

The best way to schedule out your work for the day is to save the easy stuff for last. After seven hours of putting up drywall and installing sinks and bathtubs, you’re not going to be in the right state of mind to clear out an old tree stump with a chainsaw and a winch.

A question we’re faced with on construction job-sites on a pretty regular basis: Should we try to handle this ourselves, with the staff we have on hand, or should we hire someone who specializes in this sort of thing? For instance, almost anyone who’s been working in the industry for a little while probably knows how to install a sink without any help from a plumber, but good luck getting a new house hooked up to the sewer without someone on hand with extensive experience. The trick is knowing when a job can be handled by any capable hand on deck, saving money that you would otherwise spend on a specialist, and when it’s going to be a hassle, and perhaps a disaster, to skimp.

Here are instances where you should certainly hire a specialist:

License Required

If a license is required to operate a certain piece of equipment, or if you need a special permit, then maybe you can do the job just fine, but you’ll wish you’d let someone else handle it when the inspector starts asking questions. Better to hire the professional than risk the fines and penalties that come with skimping.

No Hands-on Experience

Electricians, plumbers and other professionals have apprenticeships for a reason: It’s just about impossible to learn on-the-job without an old hand showing you the ropes. Wiring a home isn’t like making a pizza, you can’t just put anyone on the job and expect them to figure it out. When dealing with a new challenge, you’ll save a lot of time and money letting a specialist handle it. Go ahead and peek over their shoulder while they do it, but don’t waste time, money and supplies guessing your way through a tricky task.

High-Risk Tasks

Mess up a piece of drywall? Big deal. Patch it up when you have time later in the week. Mess up the gas line? You might wind up out of a job, if not in jail. You can “figure it out” when you’re trying to do low-risk tasks on the job. You don’t want to trust your intuition when it comes to the tasks that you only get one shot at, or that might have some serious repercussions if you don’t get it right the first time.

An experienced person on a construction site typically has a little bit of knowledge about nearly every aspect of the job, just as a medical assistant knows a little bit about everything at the hospital. But you don’t trust the nurse to perform the heart transplant, and you don’t want your gofer installing the propane heating system.

Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer was trying to get on worker’s comp so that he could stay at home and collect a free check at the end of the month? Funny or not, it’s actually not the attitude most workers have. Injuries are no fun, and the “free money” you receive when staying at home and recovering from an injury can’t make up for the cabin fever and boredom that go with having nothing to do in a day. Though the public perception of an injured worker may be that they’ve won some sort of lottery, if you run construction jobs for long enough you’ll find that the opposite often turns out to be true: Many injured workers can’t wait to get back on the job, and they might be a little too eager to strap on the tool belt and get back to work.

Assessing whether or not a worker needs a little more time to recover before they get back on the schedule isn’t easy. You’re in construction, not medicine or physical therapy. But, there are a few things to keep in mind that may help you to make the right judgement call:

A Little Too Soon Beats A Little Too Late

Studies have shown that the longer a worker is away from the job, the harder a time they’re going to have getting back into it. With that in mind, it’s often better to let a worker return to the job site and take on lower-intensity tasks while they get back into the swing of things than it is to wait an extra week and expect them to give 110% right away.

Keep An Open Line Of Communication

Make sure your worker knows that they can come to you and let you know when they can’t lift a bag of cement just yet. There’s plenty of work that won’t agitate an injury, so let them know that it’s okay if they want to handle the lighter-duties for now.

Nobody Should Be Working Construction On Heavy Medication

They don’t just put that warning about operating heavy machinery on bottles of prescription painkillers in order to avoid lawsuits. If your worker is still experiencing pain and discomfort to such an extent that a couple over-the-counter Aspirins won’t take care of it, then they’re probably not ready to return to work.

Basically: Don’t be afraid to tell a worker to take it easy when they first come back to work. Getting back to work can help the recovery process, but not when the worker is pushing himself beyond what he can safely handle.

We can manage risk with the proper training and by making sure a job site is up to code. We all know that we need safety training, first-aid kits on site, and insurance so that we’re covered if something does happen, but we often overlook safety when making new hires.

Some people are more accident-prone than others. These people might be very talented in any number of ways. They might have a promising future ahead of them working from home or joining a sales team, but construction isn’t for everyone. Here’s what you’re looking for if you’re hoping to avoiding hiring accident-prone employees:

Morning People

Construction is a daytime job. It’s a noisy job, and it’s hard to tile a roof at a quarter past midnight. Some of us love staying out all night, but we can adjust to a morning schedule when the job demands it. Others simply can’t get to sleep at a normal hour, and will wind up coming in to work on no sleep at all, guzzling energy drinks and coffee like water to make it through the day. If you have an employee who never seems to have gotten a decent night’s sleep in the morning, you’ll actually be doing them a favor by letting them go.

Sobriety

We’re not here to judge. Recreational marijuana has actually been legalized in many places and some people function just fine with a little boost in their system (heck what are coffee and cigarettes but drugs, anyways?). Others… not so much. You will need to exercise your own judgement in some cases, but it’s pretty safe to say that anyone coming in to work drunk or so high that they can barely stand up is a risk that you don’t need.

Experience

There’s nothing wrong with giving an opportunity to someone who’s never worked a professional construction job before, but you’re not looking to hire someone who’s never even picked up a hammer, and yes, those people are out there. Don’t take for granted that everyone who puts in an application is going to be able to handle basic tasks. You’d be surprised how many people don’t even know to keep their sleeves out of the way of a tablesaw.

An Interest in the Work

Someone who finds the work boring is going to let their mind wander. Someone who’s letting their mind wander isn’t paying attention.

An Even Temperament

There’s plenty of shouting going on on most construction sites. That goes with the territory. What you don’t want is someone who’s always itching for a fight, bickering with the other employees and complaining about the job.

Basically you’re looking for people who come to work ready to work, professionals who know the job and the dangers involved. You can make a professional out of an amateur, but you can’t make a professional out of someone who doesn’t care.