BAM Nuttalls Approach To A Safer Industry

‘IF WE CAN only sustain what we have learnt here, it would be a much safer industry,’ said Clinton Horn, BAM Nuttall’s health and safety adviser. ‘It’s definitely been a massive shock to the entire industry. What has been achieved on the Olympic Park has been phenomenal.’

With the London 2012 Games now less than a year away, the world’s media is anticipating what will happen between 27 July and 12 August 2012 when the eyes of the world will be on 600 acres of east London. Something is happening right now, however, that will not gain the attention of the world in quite the same manner, though it certainly deserves to.

This is the story of the construction of the Olympic Park and all of its venues, its ‘village’, its infrastructure and the clearance, regeneration and management of its green spaces. This is the story of all of the people involved in this so-called ‘big build’ and their commitment to managing health and safety and the impact their work has on the environment. This is a huge project. The fact that there have been so few reportable incidents and no deaths as a result of the work; that three million man hours passed without a reportable incident; that everyone in the park is engaged in the management of health, safety and the environment is worthy of great praise.

Behind these impressive statistics is the commitment of people who are passionate about making people’s lives safer and healthier. Construction can be a dangerous industry as the recent publication of fatal injury statistics by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) grimly demonstrates. To find out more I visited the Olympic Park in order to speak to some of those people involved in making it such a success.

Since 2009 the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) has held an annual safety, health and environmental awards, which have been adjudicated by the British Safety Council. In 2010 BAM Nuttall won the workforce engagement award for its commitment to involving the workforce in safe working practices and its initiatives that drove near miss reporting; vital information to gain from the workforce that often goes undisclosed.

As well as Clinton, I also arranged to meet with Richard Price, the director of BAM Nuttall’s Olympic projects, and Alan
O’Hagan, a former carpenter for BAM Nuttall and recent recruit to the health and safety team. And seeing as I was on the Olympic Park, I took the opportunity to have a tour of the site, see how the work is progressing and speak to some of the site operatives.

THE VISIT

By the time I arrived at Pudding Mill Lane at 9am, work had been underway on the Olympic Park for two hours. I was met at the pass office by Eilis Nolan, BAM Nuttall’s office manager. Having handed over my passport, had my picture taken and been given my pass we made our way to the security gates. Once I’d made my way through the metal detectors, had been patted down and had my bag checked for explosives, we were ready to go. One of the first sights that greeted me as we made our way from the passenger loading area was a phrase that, if not directly articulated, I came to realise underpinned all of the work that occurred on the site. Written upon a hoarding in three-foot-high letters were the words ‘safety first’.

Arriving at BAM Nuttall’s offices I was shown to a training room just off the canteen. I sat down with a group of new starters for a health, safety and environment induction and a hazard perception workshop delivered by Alan O’Hagan. Alan’s short class was succinct, relevant and engaging. He called attention to the fact that there are two protected waterways running through the Olympic Park and gave consideration to vital topics such as spill kits, waste disposal, ecology (there are protected animal species on the site and Alan encouraged the workers to speak up if they saw any) and invasive plants.

We were then presented with six photographs of different areas of the site and asked to identify any hazards. It was a simple task, not designed to particularly stretch our powers of comprehension, but rather to get us actively thinking about dangers
in the workplace and engender a feeling of openness. ‘It creates another opportunity to engage,’ Clinton later told me. ‘The new workers thoroughly enjoy it. It’s almost like a toolbox talk, but a toolbox talk is often a one-way process; this is very much a two-way process.’ And a two-way process it was: everyone chipped in; everyone had a valuable point to make.

IN THE CLASSROOM

At the ODA 2010 safety, health and environment awards, Alan won worker of the year. His ability to engage workers in health and safety was one of the factors in him winning the award; along with his active involvement in the safety committee. Alan has been working on the Olympic Park with BAM Nuttall for a little over two years, originally as a carpenter on the wetland bridges. It was in this role that he mentored a young apprentice, passing on his skills and enthusiasm. Since winning, he’s changed career and is now assistant health and safety adviser. ‘I will always consider myself to be a carpenter, it’s just that I do a different day job now,’ he told me. Winning the ODA Worker of the Year award was a landmark moment in his career: ‘My kids were pretty proud when I came home with the trophy.’

With the hazard perception and the induction over, it was time for Alan to take me on a tour of BAM Nuttall’s operations on the park. Kitted out in my hard hat, gloves, high visibility vest, steel toecap boots and safety specs we set off. BAM Nuttall has been working on four projects: clearing the park to allow the construction to begin; the construction of bridges and highways; landscaping; and – a recently won package – the screening areas where visitors to the Games will first arrive into the park.

The first area of operation Alan showed me was just off the loop road in the shadow of the Aquatics Centre’s sweeping roof and the temporary spectator stands that make it look like a giant stingray. The Olympic Stadium and Anish Kapoor’s unfinished observation tower, The Orbit, snakes its way into the air behind us. The site was a hive of activity; carpenters were carefully piecing together a cast for concrete; operatives and articulated dumper trucks went to and fro; trenches were cut in the ground with operatives fitting services; a group of specialists were attending to the walls of the River Lea aboard a barge floating in the water.

WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT

Commitment at the very top of the business hierarchy and from the client is of course essential, but the fact that health and safety belongs to all of the workers on the park, that it is an issue they own and take responsibility for, is, I feel, partly why this has been such a successful project. Clinton, Richard and Alan may well introduce initiatives, analyse the near miss reports and facilitate communication, but it is the site operatives who must look out for themselves and one another. ‘To a large extent health and safety has been led by our guys on site,’ Clinton confirmed.
This was further supported by an anecdote Alan shared: ‘Unsafe working conditions are now frowned upon by normal construction workers. There is a construction site next to another of BAM Nuttall’s outside the Olympic Park that has nothing to do with the Olympics or our company. Sometimes our guys look over at that other site and say ‘they’re behind the times, those guys; look at the way they’re working’. ‘Alan went on to tell me a story of a construction site he worked on in the early 90s, serving to highlight how far the industry has come over the course of the last 20 years or so: ‘In 1992 I was working on a big Thames Water treatment facility in Banbury. In one part of the site there were 40 individual excavations in one area, none of which had any edge protection at all. We all just assumed that we had to keep our eyes open. We even had to walk across the site to get to the changing rooms to put on our PPE so we were safe to go onto site. So someone didn’t do their planning. The construction industry has basically had to grow up.’

As we’d bumped into Clinton conducting his visits of the BAM Nuttall sites around the Olympic Park he joined us. We continued to make our way north east along the loop road beneath the overhang of the Aquatics Centre’s temporary stands. Along this stretch BAM Nuttall are still laying the road, and operatives were constructing pavements and laying asphalt as we walked past. Alan had a quick chat with everyone on site to make sure everything was going well; all the workers seemed to know him and they all had a friendly word for him. ‘The guys on site are much more comfortable about talking to me as they know I still consider myself a chippy,’ he told me. We stopped quickly at one of the break-out areas to have a look at some of the health and safety documentation that can be found in each of the areas across the park where staff take a break. Among the many permits to work and PPE signs, a poster displaying a cartoon gravestone with a pneumatic drill propped against it warns of the dangers of buried services. UK Power Networks had lately turned on the low voltage power cables that run around the park, so the potential of hitting live cables was at the forefront of everyone’s minds. We carried on following the road as it snaked off into the distance. ‘How many kilometres of road have you been contracted to lay?’ I ask Clinton and Alan. “It started off as four, but is now somewhere in between five and seven.” Clinton replied.

It is clear from talking to Alan and from the way he talks to others, that safety has great significance to him. I wondered why, and asked him if there had been an incident that caused it to mean so much to him. He told me that working under his old assumptions about health and safety quickly began to change when he arrived on the Olympic Park. ‘From my past experiences I’d had quite a different approach to health and safety than that which was carried out on the Olympic Park. As such I was asked – quite forcibly – if I wanted to deliver the health and safety workshops. I thought I’d have a go and see what it’s all about. I was trained in how to deliver them and took it in turns to deliver it to the 300 site operatives. It had a massive effect on me because I had to stand up in front of the guys I worked with and talk about safety. Those guys had seen me doing all sorts of unsafe things, so now I had to start walking the walk. Otherwise they wouldn’t be shy about pulling me up.’

BEYOND ZERO ACCIDENTS

The health and safety workshops were part of a programme that BAM Nuttall introduced a couple of years ago. It was a scheme, Richard told me that was partly devised by Bob Treadgold, one of the company directors. Health and safety, as we all know, is all about continuous improvement. The day you start resting on your laurels is the day accidents can happen. ‘The challenge now is sustain it for our next jobs. The real challenge is to improve it. The risk and the danger is sitting back and thinking ‘I’ve cracked it’,’ Clinton told me.
So BAM Nuttall began to consider what happens when you’ve reached zero, and going beyond zero was the answer. Beyond Zero is not so much an initiative as a way of thinking. They call it a ‘vision’. And like most visions, it has no goal. Eliminating incidents, ill health and damage to the environment is just the beginning; it is potentially limitless. Its aim is to make BAM Nuttall employees healthier, improve their welfare, improve the environment and it reaches into broader corporate social responsibility concerns. As we continued to follow the loop road to the western side of the park it took us along the edge of the river that forms the park’s western border. Along this stretch of the river there are a number of Victorian bridges. Until lately, this part of east London had been heavily industrialised since the railways arrived in the 1830s. Having weighed up the likely impact on the environment and costs it was decided that some of the bridges would be restored rather than building new ones, helping the area retain some of its heritage in the process. There are also some such bridges that stand astride the River Lea that runs through the heart of the park. Alan told me that the process of restoring the bridges is one that will have to be carefully managed. They are coated in old paint that has a high lead content that can cause significant damage to the environment and human health. ‘Each of the workers removing the paint will have to be closely monitored to ensure they are not exposed to the lead for too long.’ A specialist team contracted by BAM Nuttall was busy assembling a huge and intricate scaffolding structure that would entirely encapsulate one of the bridges, ensuring that none of the lead enters that watercourse below. The task was complicated by the fact that there was still public right of access across the bridge.

THE UNIQUE BENEFITS

While the Olympic Park does offer some unique and challenging obstacles, it has yielded, by its very nature, unprecedented benefits. ‘The Olympics have been unique in allowing people to share best practice. What has been great is the pulling together of all these various contractors. It’s a fantastic knowledge-sharing project, which you wouldn’t normally get. Here you get exposed to so much,’ Richard told me.
‘I have grown personally in the three years I’ve been on this job,’ Clinton added. ‘It sounds great to be able to say ‘I’ve worked on the London 2012 project’ but it’s so much more than that. It’s personal development, even more than professional development.’ Leaving the bridge, we jumped on one of the park’s buses to take us back to the BAM Nuttall site offices. Once back, I handed over all of my PPE, which I’d started to become quite accustomed to, and made my way towards the rear car park to get a lift back to Pudding Mill Lane station. It had been my intention to ‘tweet’ as I made my way around the park, but what with speaking to people, making notes and taking photographs I didn’t really get chance. As

Courtesy of Safety Management Magazine September 2011