Today there is a high focus on safety in the industry. Many companies have recognised that the safety and well being of their workers and fellow human beings deserve the highest priority. Historically, this is a major leap. If one looks at the attitude and many deaths during projects such as the great chinese wall, which is still considered to be the largest construction project to date, the leap is visible.

One ancient Chinese myth states that each stone in the great chinese wall stands for a life lost during the wall's construction. Although no records are available this myth may be closer to fact than we would like to think. Archaeologists have discovered thousands of bodies buried in the foundation of the wall. Bodies were also used to make up the wall's thickness. It has been estimated that millions of workers lost their lives due to accidents, intense physical labor, starvation, and disease. This is in the order of magnitude of a life per metre of wall length!

It is now rare not to find a safety part in mission statements of large companies. It is good to recognise that the behaviour with respect to safety is in fact driven by two elements:

Ethical reasons

Business reasons

In the ideal world ethical and altruistic motivation should be sufficient. In the real world the current situation is that an attitude such as safety management of the chinese wall is not accepted. The costs of unsafe acts or products can be huge and can put companies out of business. Recent claims and settlements in the USA have been well documented, e.g. for the tobacco industry. Companies can no longer afford it not to take care of safety.

Absolute safety does not exist. Safety is often defined as taking acceptable risks. This recognises that in fact every activity, whether it is driving a car, cooking in the kitchen or working on a drilling rig has associated risks. By accepting that there will always be a certain risk involved it is possible to reduce risks, by reducing the chance of an unsafe event and mitigating its effect.

The trends to improve the safety at work can be seen in the chart underneath.

During the industrial revolution little time was spent to ensure that machinery was safe. The increased effort and technological progress associated was the first major step to improve safety at work. Personnel training about safe working methods made the next big improvement. Certainly, the effort of labour organisations to improve the focus on safety, also when this implied a slower or more costly production method, supported this development.

Nowadays the need to execute a project safely is embedded in many laws and organisations. Industrial projects go through their life cycle of design, procurement, construction operation and demolition. Safety applies to all phases. Without trying to be complete we provide a number points that we believe to be essential. They encompass both organisational and behaviour base principles.

We believe that the basis for a safe construction is already laid during the front end loading (FEL) of a project. (FEL encompasses all the work done until completion of the basic engineering). Clear goals, high quality basic designs and solid execution plans include many aspects of early planning for safety. That this has a large impact on the safe execution is supported by correlations. Some of these correlations were made by oganisations such as Independent Project Analysis (IPA). It has been statistically proven that there is a correlation between good FEL and safety performance. Good FEL will ensure for example:

It really adds value to perform safety and constructability reviews. A HSE plan that schedules them well ahead of the reviews is the first step. A somewhat logical groundrule is to mix the designers with the users in the review team - e.g. the designers and construction supervisors and construction contractors personnel in constructability reviews. Also peers from outside the project team, i.e. some 'cold eyes', add a unbiassed element to the reviews.

The best moment to make agreements with construction contractors about the way way that safety aspects will be treated is before contract award. Useful information can be gathered from the yearly safety records, which provides information about the type of incidents and accidents that occured in the past. A good analysis of these and the project to be done will provide lessons learned and the opportunity to pro-actively organise.

Useually, the managing party will have a total construction schedule before the construction contracts are (sub)awarded. This managing party can be the owner, an engineering contractor or a main contractor. Each construction (sub) contractor will issue the schedule for his part of the work in isolation. It takes good construction management to plan and manage concurrent working, avoid congestion of workers, sensible logistics - storage and transport routes.

A Safety Induction program before mobilisation to site for every person that enters the site is highly recommended. It is usual to test the people after the induction. A small card with information such as emergency phone numbers, alarms, escape routes and muster points can be handed out to each person.
The correlation between a good induction training and safety performance is very clear. This is one of the best tools.

Attention with regard to good housekeeping, toolbox meetings and safety meetings is a well known item during construction. It is a good habit to put safety on the agenda as the first point in every meeting. Reports of near misses and unsafe situations provide key indicators for the safety practices of the field labour. These reports need to be clear, factual and correct.
In the real world accident do happen. When they happen it is important to learn about the causes and implement measures with the goal that such an accident does not happen again. For this good tools are available such as the Tripod method.

Historically Owners and contractors have used the Mechanical Completion of a production facility as the main milestone for completion. The real interest of the owner, however, is the product that will be produced with the facility. To close the gap between completing the construction activities and getting product out of the facilities an overview and planning is required. It is important to have commissioning documentation, i.e. for testing the facility and putting it into service, ready well before mechanical completion. Also the organisation structure and working permit will normally change in this period. This needs to be clear to all involved.

It is clear that the operating and maintenance personnel need to be familiar with the design and equipment that they will be working with. Training needs to be organised on time, i.e. well before mechanical completion.

Safety statistics provide useful information for managing safety. They demonstrated that most accidents are a caused by humans. The picture underneath shows the ratios of safety parameters. The parameters shown will normally be logged together with the number of work-hours and also be presented as frequencies, e.g. LTIF, Lost Time Injury Frequency. Most systems use 200 000 work-hours as the reference point. So LTIF = 1 means one LTI per 200 000 work hours (roughly 100 working years).
The conclusion that was drawn from these ratios is generally known as the iceberg theory. It implies that the risk to have a fatality is dramatically reduced if one controls the less severe accidents. It is a good practice to treat small accidents, near misses and observation of unsafe situations with care as this has a risk reducing effect on all classes of incidents.