Site safety plan

Ruth started the safety review with a photograph. It showed a roof edge on one of Tamarack's earlier projects, a low parapet, a roofer kneeling at the edge with no harness, and a superintendent standing ten metres away looking the other way. 'Nobody was hurt that day,' she said. 'That is luck, not management. A safety plan is how we stop relying on luck.' Aaliyah, who led the safety chapter, put the photograph on the first page of her draft.

This lesson covers the ninth deliverable: the site safety plan. It draws on safety leadership for site supervisors (CON-355) and the trade safety foundations taught in TRD-101. A capstone safety plan is not a copy of a company safety manual. It is a project-specific plan that identifies the serious hazards of this building on this site, shows how each will be controlled, and explains how the contractor will manage its own workers, its subtrades, its visitors and the public.

The legal framework

In Nova Scotia, the Occupational Health and Safety Act and its regulations set the duties of employers, contractors, supervisors and workers, and give workers the right to know about hazards, to take part in safety through committees or representatives, and to refuse unsafe work. Specific regulations cover fall protection, scaffolds, excavations, cranes, hazardous materials and first aid. As the general contractor in control of the site, Tamarack must coordinate safety among all the employers working there and make sure the rules are followed. The plan named the specific regulations that applied to each major hazard, so that supervisors knew where the requirements came from.

The legal framework sets the minimum. Tamarack's own rules went further in several places, such as requiring fall protection at lower heights than the law demands for some tasks and banning work alone at heights. The plan made clear which rules were legal requirements and which were company rules, because supervisors need to know both and explain both.

What the plan contains

Aaliyah organized the safety plan into eight sections that any site safety plan should include.

• Safety policy and commitments: the company's policy and the project's specific goals.
• Roles and responsibilities: project manager, superintendent, safety coordinator, foremen, workers, subtrades and visitors.
• Hazard assessment: the serious hazards of this project and how each is controlled.
• Orientation and training: what every person entering the site learns, and what each task requires.
• Planning the work: pre-task hazard assessments, permits for high-risk work and lift plans.
• Inspections and monitoring: who inspects what, how often, and how findings are closed.
• Emergency response: first aid, rescue, fire, evacuation, spills and contact with emergency services.
• Incident reporting and investigation, and subcontractor safety management.

Hazards of this building

The heart of the plan is the project hazard assessment. Aaliyah worked through the schedule activity by activity with Marcel LeBlanc, the superintendent Tamarack proposed for the job, asking for each one what could seriously hurt someone. They focused on hazards that could kill or permanently injure, because those deserve the most planning, and rated each one before and after controls on a simple five-by-five scale of likelihood and severity.

Tomas, who liked to see numbers, wrote a short program that ranked the hazards and flagged any whose score after controls was still above the company's threshold for senior review.

# Rank project hazards by risk score (likelihood x severity, each 1 to 5) before and after controls
hazards = {  # name: (likelihood before, severity before, likelihood after, severity after)
    'Falls from roof edges':       (4, 5, 2, 5),
    'Steel erection falls':        (3, 5, 1, 5),
    'Crane lifts':                 (3, 5, 1, 5),
    'Trench collapse':             (3, 5, 1, 5),
    'Struck by equipment':         (3, 4, 2, 4),
    'Training tower work at height': (3, 4, 1, 4),
    'Overhead door springs':       (2, 4, 1, 4),
    'Silica exposure':             (4, 3, 2, 3),
    'Energized systems':           (2, 5, 1, 5),
}
REVIEW = 8   # residual scores above this need senior review
rows = sorted(hazards.items(), key=lambda kv: -(kv[1][0] * kv[1][1]))
for name, (lb, sb, la, sa) in rows:
    before, after = lb * sb, la * sa
    flag = '  senior review' if after > REVIEW else ''
    print(f'{name:31s} before {before:2d}  after {after:2d}{flag}')

Falls from roof edges           before 20  after 10  senior review
Steel erection falls            before 15  after  5
Crane lifts                     before 15  after  5
Trench collapse                 before 15  after  5
Struck by equipment             before 12  after  8
Training tower work at height   before 12  after  4
Silica exposure                 before 12  after  6
Energized systems               before 10  after  5
Overhead door springs           before  8  after  4

The program showed what the team already suspected. Falls from roof edges stayed above the review threshold even after controls, because roofing and rooftop work last for weeks and severity cannot be reduced: a fall from the bay roof is likely to be fatal whatever else is done. The plan therefore added extra measures for roof work: a written fall protection plan for each roofing area, guardrails installed by the steel erector before the roofer arrived, daily checks by the foreman and a weekly audit by Aaliyah.

Falls: the hazard that kills most construction workers

Falls are among the leading causes of death in construction in both Canada and the United States, and Pembrook had a lot of work at height: the 7.5 m bay roof, the second floor of the wing, the four-storey training tower and the steel frame itself. The plan followed the hierarchy of controls. First, eliminate the need to work at height where possible, for example by assembling rooftop curbs and units on the ground and lifting them as a piece. Next, prevent falls with guardrails and covers. Only where those are impossible, use fall restraint or fall arrest systems, with a rescue plan.

The example shows why fall arrest needs planning rather than just a harness. A lanyard that works in the high bay may let a worker hit the lower roof or the floor in a shorter space, and an anchor at foot level adds the D-ring height to the free fall, which is why anchors at or above the D-ring are preferred. The plan listed approved anchors and the connecting equipment to be used in each area.

Planning each day's work

Most serious incidents happen when the work changes: a new task, a new crew, a change in the weather or a shortcut when something is missing. The plan relied on three daily tools. Every crew completed a field-level hazard assessment before starting a task, reviewed by its foreman. High-risk work, including hot work, confined space entry, critical lifts, excavations deeper than the regulated depth and work on energized equipment, needed a written permit signed by the superintendent. And the superintendent held a short coordination meeting each morning so that crews knew who else would be working nearby, where the crane would be lifting and which areas were closed.

Orientation came before all of this. Every person starting on site, from a labourer to a visiting engineer, would complete a site orientation covering the site's hazards, emergency procedures, rules and personal protective equipment, and would sign that they understood it. Workers whose first language was not English would receive orientation in a language they understood. Workers new to construction would be paired with an experienced worker for their first two weeks.

Managing subtrades

On Pembrook, at most a quarter of the workers on site at any time would be Tamarack's own. The rest worked for subtrades. Their safety performance was therefore Tamarack's most important safety risk. The plan set out how subtrades would be managed: prequalification on safety record, as described in lesson 3; a site-specific safety plan from each major subtrade before mobilization; attendance of each subtrade foreman at a weekly safety meeting; Tamarack's right to stop unsafe work; and a progressive discipline process ending in removal from site for repeated serious violations.

Emergency response

The irony of building a fire station was not lost on the team: until it was finished, the nearest fire and ambulance service was the existing fire hall several kilometres away. The emergency response plan named the nearest hospital and its route, the site address and gate to give to the dispatcher, the location of first aid kits and trained first aiders on every shift, a muster point near the south gate, and the people responsible for meeting emergency vehicles at the gate. It covered rescue from height, which must be possible within minutes after a fall arrest, with the equipment and trained people on site whenever anyone worked in a harness. It also covered spills from equipment and the fuel compound, and severe weather.

Measuring safety

Injury rates tell a company how it did in the past. They are poor guides to what is about to happen on a single project, where a serious injury is rare enough that a good month can hide real danger. The plan therefore tracked leading indicators: the number of inspections done and findings closed on time, attendance at safety meetings, the quality of field-level hazard assessments, near misses reported and the time taken to correct unsafe conditions. Aaliyah reported them monthly with the injury statistics, and the project manager reviewed them with each subtrade.

Your capstone deliverable

• A legal framework section naming the laws and regulations that apply to your project's main hazards.
• A project hazard assessment covering every major phase, with controls and risk scores before and after.
• Specific plans for your highest hazards, such as falls, lifting and excavation, with at least one calculation.
• Orientation, training, daily planning and permit requirements.
• Subcontractor safety management, emergency response and the leading indicators you will report.