Slipping Through the Cracks

An observation of "small project" contractor safety

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“…and then it occurred to me that this is goes on every minute of every day, in every city. They’re endangering their lives and they don’t even know it..”

It was a warm summer Monday in 2018. I stepped out to walk my dog before work as with every morning. My apartment complex in north Tampa was undergoing roof maintenance this particular week. “Oh great”, I thought. “Someone’s going to be hammering the roof while I try to work from my home office”. A few hours go by and I hear the roof contractors working on the building directly across from mine, which I can see outside of my bedroom window. As I take a look outside I was in shock. No hard hats, no fall protection, nothing to secure loose tools on the roof from falling down and hitting a bystander. The IH in me wanted to put a stop-work order in immediately and “school” these people on safety training and PPE. But it was a work day. I was busy. I had clients to call and they weren’t one of them. “What can I do to help and not look like I’m there to get them in trouble?”, I thought. Ah, the never-ending struggle of an EHS professional promoting safety culture. But as the workers moved farther from my building and went about their day, so did I.

In my few years as an IH, I’ve come to understand that these instances and others similar aren’t due to workers purposely and blatantly violating safety rules because they “don’t feel like wearing cumbersome PPE”, but because of a lack of training and lack of understanding in which the root cause comes from management. In an NPR article published in 2019 about workers who cut granite countertop experiencing lung damage from crystalline silica, the lack of engineering controls, medical surveillance, and respiratory protection program was simply due to management “not knowing” what happens when a product high in quartz composition is cut. More often than not, when I am in the field performing IH sampling, curious employees find interest in the subject matter, with the common phrase, “I never thought of that”. This holds true from chemical hazards to the lack of PPE seen with the local contractors. They don’t think of it that way simply because nobody was there to train them. This article was never intended to place blame, point fingers, or cause thousands of dollars in OSHA fines for these small businesses. As a safety professional, it pains me to see examples like the ones above all around me, knowing it occurs everywhere. A lot of smaller or newer businesses such as these local contractors often “slip through the cracks” of OSHA audits. I am not necessarily advocating for OSHA to expand its outreach and use its resources to send a compliance officer out to an apartment complex. I simply wish to bring awareness to this issue in hopes that it gets better and lives are saved – even just one.

“What can I do to help and not look like I’m there to get them in trouble?”, I thought. Ah, the never-ending struggle of an EHS professional promoting safety culture."

Thank you so much for reading my first post. My secondary goal is to present this in detail at an upcoming AIHce. The primary goal of course, is a call to action to those within the industry to eliminate these gray areas that fly under the radar and pose risks to so many hard-working people.

#iamIH