Construction Insurance Bulletin

The easiest way to create an unsafe workplace: When you see a couple of employees butting heads, just turn a blind eye to it.

You can follow all the safety guidelines, you can wear your hard hat and your goggles and tuck your sleeves when you use the table saw, but if tempers are hot, if you’ve got people who just can’t work together, then it’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. Part of being a leader means knowing how to bring your people together for a common goal without letting personal differences get in the way. Some conflict is normal, but you need your team to be able to handle disagreements in a mature manner. Here are some tips for ensuring that we all can just get along:

Don’t Be Afraid To Talk It Out

It can be tough getting hotheaded team members to sit down and talk it out, but this isn’t exactly marriage counseling. You don’t need to be best buddies with your coworkers, but starting a discussion can make a couple of things clear to everyone involved, the first of which being the root of the problem. Once you figure out why these guys are butting heads, you can do something about it. The second thing being that you can’t allow anyone to jeopardize the project, and they’re going to have to figure it out if they want to keep working here.

Don’t Pull Rank, But Be Clear About What Is And Isn’t Non-Negotiable

You’re not going to fire the other guy because he accidentally borrowed someone’s hammer without asking, but you can work something out. Try and come to an agreement that both parties, and you, can be happy with.

Follow Up On The Resolution

Keep tabs on your team and make sure that they’re still getting along. If they’re playing nice when you’re around but cussing each other out the minute you’re out of earshot, then the conflict hasn’t really been resolved, and if that’s the case, you may need to…

Just Split Them Up

If two guys really just can’t get along, move them around the jobsite so that they’re not going to be in one another’s way.

Should all else fail, there’s always the threat of the walking papers. You don’t want to have to resort to scaring your people into toeing the line, and it usually won’t come to that, but every now and then you’ll hire someone who’s ability on the job doesn’t quite make up for their hardheadedness.

Working construction, you tend to pick up a lot of people who may not speak English as a first language, if they speak much English at all. Getting the proper safety procedures across in this sort of work environment can be a little tricky. It’s easy enough to ask a Spanish-speaking gofer to grab three 2×4’s by pointing at the 2×4’s and holding up three fingers. Teaching them your 911 procedure is a little trickier. Here are some tips to ensure that everyone on staff knows how to stay safe and knows how to handle an emergency.

Keep Some Bilingual People On Your Crew

Keeping at least one or two people on your crew who can speak multiple languages fluently is always a good idea, ensuring that you’ll never be at a loss when you need to get some information across to your people. Tell your translator what your people need to know, and have them pass it on.

Distribute Multi-language Safety Material

You might not be able to explain how to safely use the SAWZALL to a Spanish-speaking worker, but the instructions were probably printed in multiple languages. Any safety material that you have, from signs to manuals to the instructions on the first-aid kit, make sure that you have a copy printed for every language spoken on your work site.

Teach, And Learn, Some Basic Phrases

“Estar atento” or simply “atento” is a Spanish phrase that basically means “Watch out!” It comes in very handy when someone drops a bucket off of a scaffolding. Failing that, there’s always the universal “AAAAAHHH!” when something goes wrong. You don’t need to be able to read Don Quixote in the original Spanish, but learning a few basic phrases may be a tremendous help in safety situations. The good news is that this will tend to happen naturally. It’s not uncommon for a job site to develop its own unique vernacular based on the languages of everyone on staff so that a basic working language is in play.

When hiring a crew for any job, you’re looking for people who are dependable, professional, and experienced. Construction work offers a great opportunity for people who don’t speak English as a first language to make a decent living in an English-speaking country. But,communication is key no matter what line of work.

If an employee is in an auto accident while on the way to or from work, then that’s their insurer’s problem, right? And of course, if they have an accident while they’re driving a company car, then your commercial auto insurance provider is the one that foots the bill. Now here comes the tricky gray area: what if they’re in their own car, but they’re on company time, doing something that you asked them to do?

Here’s the short answer: Usually the driver’s insurance will wind up covering any costs incurred from the accident. But, there are plenty of exceptions.

Livery

“Isn’t that where the horses are stored for the night in the old westerns?” Yes, but also, in insurance terms, it refers to drivers who are transporting other people for a fee. If it’s two employees sharing a car, that doesn’t count. Livery just refers to transporting people who are paying for the ride (and not just “pitching in a couple bucks for gas”).

Delivery

Certain types of delivery services will invalidate the driver’s coverage, depending on their policy. Some providers won’t over pizza delivery men at all, for instance.

General Business Use

Picking up supplies, driving clients around, uprooting tree stumps, this is generally not covered under an employee’s personal insurance policy.

In short, here’s what you can be absolutely certain your employee’s personal insurance will cover: Themselves, their vehicle, and their passengers when driving around, whether that be on lunch breaks, to and from work, picking up another employee from their home, and meeting other basic transportation needs. If they’re on company time, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be held responsible, but if they’re doing paid company work with their vehicle, then that may fall under your business insurance policy.

This is, in part, why it’s very important to ensure that safety procedures are followed off the job site as well as on the job site, and why you really do need to be careful about who you’re putting your trust into when it comes to even the simplest tasks. Turning a blind eye to an employee who has a beer with lunch might not be such a big deal, but you don’t want him picking up building materials for you.

Basic transportation is covered under your employee’s personal insurance policy, but make sure that you have the right provisions on your business insurance before asking a worker to tow the cement mixer back to the lot.

You should always make sure that your team is following safety guidelines as close to the letter as possible. But, if something does go wrong, maybe they’ll go lucky, like these people did:

Reshma Begum

When Reshma Begum was 19 years old, she was working as a seamstress in a building near Dhaka in April of 2013. The factory collapsed right on top of her. Seventeen days later, rescuers had all but given up hope, when they heard a banging sound amid the ruins. Begumhad survived for over two weeks on dried food and what little water she could find.

Howard Ulrich and Son

Howard Ulrich and his eight year old son were out fishing one night in 1958 when, like something out of a disaster movie, they heard a distant rumbling. Looking around they saw a literal wall of water racing towards them, the highest wave in recorded history at 1,720 feet, created by an 8.0 earthquake dislodging a rock face. Ulrich couldn’t get the anchor up in time before the wave hit them dead on, amazingly lifting them atop the wave and dropping them safely back into the bay.

Zahrul Fuadi

Indonesian Zahrul Fuadi has either the worst or best luck in the world, having survived first the Boxing Day tsunami in the Aceh province, and then, moving to Sendai, Japan, the massive tidal wave that hit the country in early 2011. Fuadi tells reporters that he’s still scared that another tsunami might come along to finish the job any day now, and we have to say that we can’t quite blame him for being a bit phobic on the subject.

Peter Skyllberg

Now, there’s a chance that this guy made the story up, we can’t be sure, but some scientists take him at his word: Trapped in his car under a snowdrift for two straight months in 2012, the Swedish man claims to have survived by eating snow. As crazy as that sounds, some experts believe that he may have gone into a hibernation state that kept him alive for 60 days, while taking shelter in the igloo-style insulation that the snow had created around his car. It seems as if Jack Palance should come out at this point and ask that you “Believe it… or not!”

Surviving a disaster unscathed can happen, but if it were the norm, they wouldn’t call them disasters, they’d call them “uh oh’s.” Don’t take this list as a license for carelessness, but as a reminder that people can persevere through the worst of conditions.

We tend to think of it as a problem of the social media age that people only read the headlines, they never look at the actual story. Well, the truth is that we’ve always been this way. In the 80’s and 90’s, we would listen to Johnny Carson and David Letterman riff on news stories and we’d wind up taking their jokes as fact, maybe embellishing it with some assumptions we’d made, and before long, a news story has become an urban legend. Here are three major liability stories that we’ve pretty much all gotten wrong:

McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case

This is perhaps the most famous liability case in recent history. The story we all heard on late night television was that an old lady spilled some coffee on herself and squeezed McDonald’s for millions of dollars. The truth is that McDonald’s had received hundreds of complaints over their scalding hot coffee, the woman had initially only solicited the fast food chain for $800 to cover her skin grafts (yes, she actually suffered serious injury in the incident). When it became a courtroom drama, she tried to settle for $20,000. McDonald’s refused, not wanting to set a precedent that would make them responsible for any future injuries. Finally she wound up taking home just $640,000, minus what she had to pay for her medical bills, of course.

Worker Sues Ladder Company

It was actually 60 Minutes that reported this one: a worker mounted a ladder in frozen manure, and when the manure melted throughout the day, the ladder slipped and he injured himself. That’s a funny story, so that’s the one that spread, not the real one: That the ladder actually broke with the weight of just one adult man on it. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why the manufacturer got sued.

Lady Bankrupts Town Tripping On A Pothole

The story that we heard was that Sally Stewart was shopping in Reeds Spring, MO. Stewart tripped on a pothole in the street and sued the small town, bankrupting the entire village. The reality: The pothole was actually in the sidewalk, not the middle of the street, and it was covered by grass, and Stewart required expensive surgery to repair the injury she sustained. And she didn’t sue the town, she sued the owners of the store where she tripped, and it was the court that decided that the city be held responsible. And the town wouldn’t have had to pay a dime if they’d had insurance. And the mayor at the time of the incident was Joe Dan Dwyer, who’d actually made his own fortune from a personal injury settlement, and who soon left office under investigation for insurance fraud. And the mayor told Stewart “you will probably have to sue us” if she wanted the town to pay for her surgery.

Construction, like any profession, is an ever-evolving trade. We don’t build homes today in the same way that we built homes one hundred years ago anymore than we still go to the dentist and the barber in the same building. Certain techniques and materials fall out of favor while new techniques and materials are developed. Even the layouts of new homes are subject to change over time. Here are some of the biggest ways construction has changed over the last hundred years:

Windows

Windows are one of the biggest changes in housing construction over the last century. Glass has gotten much lighter and much stronger, starting around the turn of the century. Specialty tinting have further allowed windows to insulate a home without the need to be especially thick. Specialty tinting can also help to keep UV light from damaging interior decor.

Efficiency of Space

Homes have gotten more energy efficient in the last couple of decades, but they’ve also gotten much more space-efficient. Many homes today have a kitchen, dining room and living room that all flow together in the same general space. This wasn’t usually the case 100 years ago, when the kitchen was more likely to be closed off in its own space.

Home Size

Incidentally, the era of the “big house” in the 20th Century was fairly short lived. Today, developers are building homes and apartments smaller than they did thirty, forty years ago, but the glory days of the American suburban sprawl were fairly short lived. Row houses were first built in the 1800’s and were shaped a bit like modern trailer and pre-fab homes, stretching only 19 feet across and going back about 30-40 feet. Today it seems that the most fashionable homes tend to be rather small, rather than the sprawling bungalows of the 1940’s set on 60 by 100 feet of land. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that it was taken for granted that each child in a family could have a room of their own.

And then, there are things that stay about the same. We’re still building homes from bricks and wood, as we did 20, 100, 500 years ago. While the techniques, the design, the technology may change over the years, the fundamental basics of construction have generally remained the same. Moving farther into the 21st Century, we’re likely to see more homes being built for solar just as homes are built for electricity and indoor plumbing today, and we’ll likely see more innovative, efficient uses of space.

When you watch primates at the zoo, swinging from vine to vine, they look incredibly graceful, don’t they? You’d never guess, then, that when researchers x-ray older primates, they find a lot of signs of broken bones. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, whether you’re grabbing a vine that wasn’t as securely attached as you thought, or you’re putting the dynamite just a few yards to the left of where it goes. Here’s what can go wrong when the demolition team makes a whoopsy:

“I Barely Nudged It!”

Early in 2015, footage uploaded to Liveleak showed a demolition crew in China attempting to tear down an old seven story building when a small digger accidentally struck a supporting wall, sending the building crumbling down in plumes of dust and debris, and the workers scrambling for cover. The entire building came down in mere seconds. Buildings being torn down are usually in a dillapidated state to begin with, and sometimes the scariest mistakes happen before the explosives have even been planted.

The Leaning Tower of Russia

In late 2014, an illegally built 10 story tower in Sevastopol was set to go down with a controlled explosion. Knowing that people would gather around to see the building destroyed, public safety was top priority, and the demolition crew chose to use a weaker explosive charge than what would usually be recommended for the job. Unfortunately, the blast only knocked out enough of the structure to leave the tower looking a bit like a bendy-straw, tilted just a few degrees off center about half-way up. Footage uploaded to the Daily Mirror shows witnesses laughing as the building fails to come down.

House Survives Tornado… Then Gets Accidentally Destroyed By Wrecking Crew

Sometimes bad luck misses the first time, so it comes back to try again. That’s what happened earlier this year in Texas, when a woman whose home had miraculously been one of the few in her neighborhood to survive tornadoes last December came home to find the entire place torn down by a demolition company who had the wrong address. They were supposed to be tearing down a damaged house about a block away. She’s still waiting on the demolition company to help her out, and would rather not be pushed to pursuing legal action.

Whether we’re talking about misplaced explosives, not enough explosives, clerical errors or just nudging a building in the wrong way, there’s a lot that can go wrong on a demolition site.

Insurance for demolition work almost sounds like an oxymoron: If the plan is to blow the building up, what is there to insure? The irony is that demolition is actually one of the most demanding areas of construction when it comes to comprehensive insurance coverage. What happens when you build a shed in the wrong spot? You have a shed in the wrong spot. But what if you plant the explosives in the wrong spot? Safely destroying a building demands the same knowledge of engineering and architectural structure as building the structure did in the first place, and the bigger the job, the more that can go wrong if you’re not 100% certain of what you’re doing.

The first things that come to mind when you think of demolition insurance are probably the neighboring building, and liability coverage to make sure that you’re protected should a worker or a bystander sustain an injury. The equipment used in a demolition job also needs to be insured. You wouldn’t guess that wrecking balls and concrete pulverizers are delicate instruments, but a lot can go wrong when using a machine that was built solely to smash into brick buildings.

There are also considerations of damages done to municipal property. It’s not unusual for sewer and power structures to be damaged in the process of building demolition. For some, this is the tricky part: Is municipal property covered by its own insurance, or will the demolition team need to take out a policy of their own? In the event of private citizens doing damage to public property, the damages are typically paid for by the person who damaged it, whether that means an individual running over a stop sign, or a demolition crew destroying a public street. There was a story in 2011 in Indiana, for instance, when the state’s Department of Transportation sent invoices to around four thousand drivers who had damaged guard rails, traffic signs and other municipal property. In other words, this is just another area where comprehensive coverage can come in handy.

Demolition insurance can also refer to insurance that covers buildings in the event of severe damages due to factors like storms, flooding and random accidents. Demolition insurance protecting a building against unwanted damages may include debris removal, which is usually the demolition crew’s job when you’re tearing a building down on purpose.

In any field of contract work, you’re going to run into clients who want to save time and money by pushing their freelancers to cut corners. They pit multiple contractors against one another in a bidding war or they get you invested in the project before telling you that their budget is only half of what you need to do the job correctly. Maybe you can pull a job off in less time and for less money than the next guy, maybe you’re just that efficient, but when you try to finish the job in less time and on a smaller budget than you’re comfortable with, you run into a whole host of problems.

• You can’t do your best work. One of the most rewarding parts of the job is driving through town with a friend and saying “See that roof there? My team tiled it.” or “We installed the windows on that drug store across the street.” Good work is a source of pride, and a source of new clients. You don’t want a rushed job to your name.
• An under-budgeted, time-crunch job usually winds up being more expensive and taking way too long because people wind up being injured, tasks need to be redone and everyone has to put in a whole lot of overtime in order to try and get the project finished under unreasonable restrictions. You’re not actually doing your client a favor by agreeing to a job that you know you won’t be able to finish with the time and money allotted.

You do have some bargaining chips in your pocket when a client is asking you to complete a job under unrealistic conditions.

• They might just not realize how extensive a project is and might well be eager for your input. If they do worry that you’re overcharging, ask them to call some of your competitors and compare quotes.
• You can always walk away from a job when you’re not confident that you can complete it safely, under budget, and within the projected timeframe. No matter how badly your crew needs the work, they don’t need the injuries or the stress.
• Talk them down on the scale of the job. Maybe you can’t rebuild the entire kitchen for that price, but you can install a new floor and cabinets.

Even if it means passing on a job, you don’t want to go into a project without the time and resources that you need to do it properly. It’s not just your reputation on the line, it’s the safety of yourself and your crew, as well.

It’s always difficult to let a job go. You don’t want to pass on a decent paycheck, you don’t want to disappoint the client, you don’t want to leave your crew wondering when the next job is starting, but sometimes a project comes along that you really shouldn’t accept. Here are a few examples of jobs where you may want to take a pass:

You’re Not Seeing Eye To Eye With The Client

Maybe they don’t understand what the job really entails, maybe they’re being unreasonable or they’re a poor listener, or maybe you and the client just aren’t a good fit. There are instances where it’s not so much the job as the client that you want to avoid.

Some red flags for difficult clients include the following:

– They don’t like the idea of putting 10% down on the job or they try to argue about your requested payment schedule.

– They schedule you and a competitor for the same interview.

– They keep you waiting on signing the contract.

If a client is being a real pain, it’s best to abandon the job as soon as possible. Don’t try to reason with them, don’t try to make it work, just cut and run before they give you an ulcer.

The Budget Won’t Fit The Project

The quickest ways to squeeze a big project out of a small budget are to cut corners in safety or in craftsmanship. With the former, your crew gets hurt, and with the latter, your reputation takes a hit. If you can’t talk the client up to a bigger budget, you may want to skip the job entirely.

It’s Just Not Your Area Of Expertise

We’ve all done a little bit of work outside of our specialties. If you’re a cabinet maker, for instance, you might fall back on your electrical experience and do a little bit of rewiring here and there in order to make room for the new installation. When you’re looking at, say, extensive plumbing work, on the other hand, and nobody on your team specializes in that, you may want to simply recommend someone else to the client.

Taking on any work where you’re not comfortable with the job, the working conditions, the client or the budget rarely ends well. Challenge yourself, sure, but don’t challenge yourself in ways that could lead to serious harm to yourself, your income, your reputation or your crew.