Why is safety important? Let’s look at a few reasons:

• – Accidents are expensive, with the average cost of construction accidents in the United States estimated at close to $5 Billion per year. In 2019, the most costly single incident reported was over $1.7 million dollars, which was mostly in fines.
• – Accidents cause lost time, and to the old adage – “time is money”. When an employee is out of work to recover from an injury, there are not only direct costs to consider but also the lost revenue of a missing employee.

Both of these reasons are some of the major factors as to why well-informed companies enact safety programs. However, allowing unsafe behavior affects people who never even enter the job site. These people are the children and spouses that lose income, quality of life, or worst – someone they love.

When you first step onto your job site as a general contractor, the first thing you should consider is, “how am I going to make sure everyone goes home safe, every night”? A good general contractor considers this before surveys, geological reports or even profit and loss centers.

Safety is the responsibility of every person on the job, but the biggest danger lies in not knowing what you don’t know. The occasional visitor to a construction site doesn’t know that the rat-tat-tap of a nail gun means you should have eye protection on in this area – because ricochets can, and do, happen. The new plumbing hire right out of trade-school might not realize that walking out of the front of the building requires an awareness of the roofers working above – and that they should have a hard hat on. It’s our job to keep these folks and everyone else that walks onto the site safe at all times. Sometimes this means having difficult conversations with onsite personnel and sometimes it means making difficult decisions, like stopping work or sending a worker home. But prioritizing safety is the responsible, respectful and right thing to do. The reader can rest assured that it is much easier to do these things than it is to make a phone call to tell someone that a family member isn’t coming home. We encourage you to follow your safety policies, take a safety course, ask someone if there is something you don’t know to make sure you, and everyone around you, goes home safe tonight!