In a split second, one mistake is all it takes, and that one mistake can cost you your life.
Even the smallest simplest of jobs are life threatening.
A job like this, we've worked our whole career to prepare for it.
This job is a monumental project, it's the first of its kind.
This is the most complex job I've been on.
The complexity lies within the amount of steel that's going in it and the time frame that
we're being allowed to put it in.
Any time you try to shrink the time frame of something you have to do, you start taking
shortcuts. Any time you take a shortcut, you're opening yourself up for exposure to greater
hazards and risks. We want to be the leaders of our industry to help set the standards.
The bar is set by OSHA down here. We strive to be up here.
We started with a 100% tile before it was ever mandatory by OSHA.
There is a 100% tile 6 foot off the ground, 100% of the time, no matter what you're doing.
Zero tolerance on tiles.
You want to go home safe, you don't want to get hurt.
You have a legal obligation to give the employees that you're managing a safe work site and
you need to train them so they can be better.
We're always looking for new ways to train our people to make them safer in the job they
do on a day to day task.
Safety becomes more important because of your family and your children and your grandchildren.
So it never stops. Safety never stops.
We want our employees to know when they go to work for us, we care about them and their
family and it goes beyond what OSHA mandates to us.
You always know that you have the resources to train them and to show them how to be safe.
If there's 100 things to do out here during the day, there's 300 ways to get hurt doing
it.
We want to get them to understand our culture so we'll start by coaching them, teaching
them what we're all about, why we're all about it.
The on-workers all have to come in with a 10-hour safety OSHA card to begin with.
Once we get them in, we put them through several different orientations.
We have a 30-day buddy system to where when they first get on site, they're teamed up
with somebody with experience and they are evaluated throughout the 30-day process before
we give them an orange jacket that signifies that they understand all the safety rules
and applications out here and are able to perform work safely.
Everything that we're hearing in the morning in our meetings, everything we're hearing
from everybody throughout the day, they're actually coming up and asking, is everybody
safe as all your tools and your equipment in good condition?
And that's something you don't hear from a lot of companies.
It's instilled in everything that we do. Every task that's performed, safety is the highest
consideration. Every week the management staff will conduct a safety audit where they go
out and walk the job site and look for hazardous activities and correct them as they're found.
We start with doing a crane inspection, things that are relative to the crane, the rigging,
the operator's inspection of the crane, and then we'll dive down into the welding activities,
the general housekeeping of the project, the fall protection of the project, the use of
ladders and vertical transportation. We're spending a lot of time every morning
with our pod meeting, we're talking about the plan for the day, we kick our meeting
off every day with safety. We pull in every foreman, every general foreman, every supervisor,
and then we pull in key individuals out of their groups, where that way everybody's
on the same page, everybody knows what's going on for the day. We preach and we teach safety.
That meeting is supposed to be set up for about a 45 minute to an hour long meeting
in the morning before we kick off our day. And we started at 6 a.m., the job starts
at 7 a.m. When they fill out that pre-test plan, they review it every morning, they talk
about the steps that they're going to do when they're performing their duties, and they
talk about the hazards that are involved in it, and then they talk about the mitigation
plan on how they're going to get rid of the hazards. If you can't mitigate the hazard,
then don't do the job. Communication with my guys is constant throughout
the day. Let these guys be aware that I'm there and I'm watching them and making
sure that they're going to do the job safe so they can go home to their families at night.
Being on night shift right now, it's a different ball game as far as being out here during
the daylight. We identify the hazards and we take this actually 30 minutes to see what
we can do to prevent them. I walk around and I ask the apprentice, I
ask the iron worker, hey, what are you doing today? What are you supposed to be doing?
What is your plan of the day? And the feedback I get from them lets me know if the message
I'm delivering is reaching them. Three owners, Bob Durr, James Isbell and
Brian Isbell, are in safety 100%. That is their main focus. And to have an owner that
believes in safety as much as you do and wants to keep their employees safe is a company
that you want to work for. Safety is so important to Durr-Isbell Construction
because we know that every man on this job or woman on this job has a family. Safety
is our culture, it's every man's culture. Losing a man's life is not worth a job, period.
Safety is the main thing. I mean, if we don't work safe, we never finish this job.
Everybody here that's involved in it is proud to be a part of it. We all have a common goal
and that's to see this thing built properly without injuries.
We can brag about it for the next 30 years. It makes me feel really good. I drive by every
other weekend with my son and we take a look at it.
This is what I do. I'm an Iron Worker.
