Spotting hazards and planning the task

Every lesson in this course deals with a particular hazard: falls, electricity, chemicals, confined spaces. This lesson is about the skill that ties them together: looking at a task before you start it, seeing what could hurt you, and deciding how to stop it from happening. Experienced tradespeople do this almost without thinking. They glance at a ladder's feet, look up before they drill, check where a cord runs and notice that the wind has picked up. New workers have to learn to do it deliberately, and most sites help them with a short written check at the start of each task.

OSHA requires employers to have competent persons make frequent and regular inspections of job sites, materials and equipment, and to instruct workers in recognizing and avoiding hazards. It does not prescribe a form, but most construction employers use a written job hazard analysis (JHA) or pre-task plan before each task or shift. OSHA's own guidance on safety and health programs recommends this kind of hazard identification. Northbridge uses a pre-task plan card that each crew fills out at the start of the day and updates when the work changes.

Hazards, risks and controls

Three words get used loosely on construction sites, but they mean different things. A hazard is anything that could cause harm: an open edge, a live wire, a solvent vapor, a heavy box. Risk combines how likely harm is and how bad it would be. An open edge on the tenth floor is a hazard whether anyone is near it or not; the risk depends on how many people work near it, for how long, and what protection is in place. A control is anything that removes the hazard or reduces the risk: a guardrail, a lockout, a fan, a mechanical lift.

The point of a hazard assessment is not to list every conceivable hazard. It is to find the hazards that matter for this task today, rate them honestly and make sure each one has a control that actually works. A form with fifteen ticked boxes and no thought behind it is worse than useless, because it gives everyone a false sense that the job has been planned.

How to look for hazards

Luis taught Maya a simple way to look at a work area: start with the task steps, then look up, down, around and at yourself. Most hazards fall into a small number of types, and asking a question for each type catches most of them.

Looking at yourself is the step most people skip. Fatigue, rushing, distraction and frustration are not hazards in the usual sense, but they make people miss hazards and take shortcuts. Many sites train workers to notice four states in themselves: rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency. When Maya notices she is rushing to finish before lunch, she slows down for the last joint rather than speeding up.

Rating the risk

Once hazards are listed, the crew decides how serious each one is. Northbridge's card uses a simple matrix: likelihood from 1 (rare) to 4 (likely) multiplied by severity from 1 (first aid) to 4 (fatal or permanent disability). Scores of 9 and above are high and need controls in place before the work starts, with the foreman's sign-off. Any hazard that could kill or permanently disable someone gets a flag, whatever its likelihood, because the controls for those hazards must never be left to chance.

# Northbridge pre-task risk score: likelihood (1-4) x severity (1-4)
tasks = [
    ("Carry pipe past an open floor edge", 2, 4),
    ("Cut and glue PVC with fan running", 2, 2),
    ("Solder copper near wood framing", 2, 3),
    ("Use a step ladder to reach a ceiling hanger", 3, 3),
    ("Sweep up offcuts", 2, 1),
]
for task, likelihood, severity in tasks:
    score = likelihood * severity
    level = "HIGH" if score >= 9 else "MEDIUM" if score >= 4 else "LOW"
    flag = " (serious injury potential)" if severity == 4 else ""
    print(f"{task:46s} {score:2d} {level}{flag}")

Carry pipe past an open floor edge              8 MEDIUM (serious injury potential)
Cut and glue PVC with fan running               4 MEDIUM
Solder copper near wood framing                 6 MEDIUM
Use a step ladder to reach a ceiling hanger     9 HIGH
Sweep up offcuts                                2 LOW

The numbers are only a way of making people think. The open edge scores 8, which is medium on the matrix, but the flag for serious injury potential means the crew treats it as seriously as a high score: the edge must have a guardrail before anyone works near it. The step ladder scores 9 because ladders are used constantly and falls from them are common; the control is to use a platform ladder or rolling scaffold instead.

The hierarchy of controls

Controls are not all equally good. The hierarchy of controls ranks them from most effective to least. The higher a control is on the list, the less it depends on people doing the right thing every time.

Personal protective equipment is at the bottom not because it is unimportant, but because it is the last line of defense. It protects only the person wearing it, only if it fits and is worn correctly, and only if it is in good condition. If a guardrail is missing and a worker relies on a harness, the harness has to be the right type, anchored to the right point, with enough clearance, every single time. If the guardrail is there, nobody has to get anything right. Good planning moves controls up the hierarchy wherever it can, and uses PPE as a backup rather than the main protection.

Press-fit fittings are a good example of substitution that Maya sees every day. Northbridge switched most of its copper water piping to press fittings a few years ago. A press tool crimps the fitting in seconds, with no flame, no flux and no hot pipe. That removes the burn hazard and most of the fire hazard, removes the need for a hot work permit in most areas and speeds up the work. Soldering is still used for some joints, with the controls described in lesson 3.

The pre-task card

Northbridge's card fits on one side of a page. The crew fills it out together at the start of the shift, each member signs it, and it stays at the work area so anyone can see it. When the task, the location or the conditions change, the crew stops and updates it.

The most important part of the card is the link between each hazard and its control. If the crew lists solvent vapor as a hazard, the card must say how they will control it. A hazard with no control is a job that is not ready to start.

When things change

Hazard assessments go stale. The card that was right at 7:30 may be wrong by 10:00 because the drywall crew moved into the next suite, the guardrail at the north edge was taken down to land a load, or it started raining and water is running across the slab. Many serious incidents happen not during the planned work but during a change: a new task added on the fly, an unexpected problem that needs a quick fix, a crew covering for someone who went home sick.

Maya learned to treat any change as a reason to stop and look again. When Dave asked her and Luis to go to the roof after lunch to help another crew run a vent pipe through the roof membrane, they did not just pick up their tools and go. They filled out a new card: roof edge, wind, the hot asphalt kettle the roofers were using, a different ladder access. The roof crew's foreman joined them for two minutes to explain the roof's fall protection plan. It took five minutes and it meant the afternoon started with everybody knowing the same things.

Lifting, carrying and the body

Strains and sprains from lifting, carrying and awkward postures are the most common injuries in construction by number, even though they rarely make the news. Plumbers carry pipe and fittings, kneel under fixtures, reach overhead to hang pipe and twist in tight spaces. Over a career these add up to back injuries, shoulder problems and worn-out knees.

The hierarchy of controls applies here too. The best control is to eliminate the lift altogether: deliver material by hoist to the floor where it is needed, use carts and dollies, store things at waist height. Training in lifting technique is useful, but it is an administrative control, and it cannot make an unreasonably heavy or awkward load safe.