Construction Safety (Safety Month) – BLOG

Construction Safety – When good isn’t good enough.

By Shawn Woosley, CFO

Being the safety director at a 75-year-old construction management firm is like being a parent. You worry about your family day and night. You have the confidence that you’ve taught them well to stay safe, but sometimes unexpected events like bad storms, faulty equipment, or never-before-seen pandemics jump out and try to challenge them. You love and trust them and pray every day is as good as the day before.

At WEHR Constructors, we have a 75-year history of not only getting the job done right, but also ensuring the health and safety of the team and public. While our goal is to have zero recordable OSHA incidents, we are proud to report we barely fell shy of that goal with a single recordable incident in 2019. That type of success doesn’t just happen.

It is actually a mindset passed down from Mr. Berry that our employees are our family and our family’s health always come before making a profit. We can have the most profitable year, but if one of our family members were injured or worse, the year would not be a success.

By being proactive and working with outside teammates, we are able to spot potential safety hazards before they become an accident.  We do this through educating our superintendents who then have daily and weekly meetings with everyone on the jobsite.

WEHR Superintendent David Redfern (a 31-year WEHR veteran) explains his team approach to ensuring 100% participation in reaching safety goals. “I like to call on my carpenters and laborers during our weekly safety meetings to get their opinions and any recommendations they may have on the current topic,” explained Redfern. “I also have a different member of my crew lead the safety meetings for a month and then rotate to someone else.”

We also rely on our outside partners who conduct mock OSHA and safety walk-throughs and interviews looking for potential hazards from an outsider’s perspective so we can correct them before they become a problem.

It would be easy for us to rest on our past safety success, but that has never been the WEHR way. A perfect OSHA year is our goal, and that begins with the safety at every jobsite we are working today.

Stay safe out there friends.