Safety

At D&V, we truly believe that all accidents can be prevented.  To achieve this level of belief, not only do we follow all the mandated training, but we also wrote our own behavior based program.  People cause accidents; accidents don’t just happen so if we can change our culture through behavior based training all of us can prevent all accidents.

Our program consists of a steering committee, comprised of operators, laborers, foremen, superintendents, a safety director, operations manager and the CEO.  The steering committee meets once every other month to write content and bounce ideas on how to teach and keep the WORK SMART and SAFESTART programs alive.  We are finding that the more active the steering committee is in writing the content for the workbooks and the observation cards, the more they will push the idea of “seeing safety” onto all their fellow employees.

A group of our supervisors, along with the safety director are also responsible for performing formal observations in the field to identify safe and unsafe behaviors.  Those supervisors meet every other month to review the data that has been collected.  In these meetings, we try and identify any unsafe behavior trends that have developed amongst our employees in the field.

In addition, company-wide meetings are held twice a year where employees break off into small groups and are led by employees themselves through workbooks.  Employees are encouraged in discussion to talk about their own experiences with safety.  We have found that employees really find their voice and bring a lot of input to these meetings.

To further increase the longevity of keeping our behavior-based program fresh and up to date we adopted SafeStart in 2018.  D&V rolled out this new adaptation seamlessly tying it into what we have already been teaching, giving us a different perspective on how we identify unsafe behaviors.

Our safety director is a construction health and safety technician (CHST).  He visits jobsites daily and engages employees in safety conversations addressing any safety concerns they may have about the job they are doing.  All foremen and superintendents who have been OSHA 30 trained are appointed safety officers and are the safety officers for the projects they are working to complete.  We empower all of our employees to stop a job if a job becomes unsafe.

The superintendents meet with the operations manager and safety director monthly to review any accidents or near misses for the month and to discuss what topics to train on during our mandatory weekly tailgate training program.

Every morning our pre-job planning process begins with our pre-task planning card (PTPC) that identifies the task risks and mitigation of those risks on a daily job by job basis.  This card is completed by the entire crew prior to starting work each day and all employees become engaged in a conversation to address hazards and mitigation of hazards on their job.

All jobs go through a pre-planning process not only for production but to identify safety issues that could potentially arise from the work to be done.  This falls in line with the company philosophy that production and safety are equally important and go hand in hand.  We state that safety equals production.

All foremen and higher field supervisors are OSHA 30 trained and are competent person trained in excavation.  Our individual training list is quite extensive some of which includes traffic control, CPR/ first aid, HAZWOPER 40, drug & alcohol recognition, GPS training, heat illness, and OSHA 10.

All new employees go through an orientation with the safety director who goes through the company’s safety procedures and introduces the SMART program. All new foremen go one step further in the orientation process and meet with the operations manager who explains their responsibilities as a leader.

Each trimester, we train on a company wide basis subjects that include driver training, SPS/hazardous materials, spills, and fire control among other subjects.  We celebrate safety by recognizing outstanding individuals in safety with our extra mile awards.

D&V employs third party subcontractors to further ensure our employee’s safety to focus solely on keeping outside hazards away from our area of work.  When we have a project with more complicated traffic control, we will often hire an outside subcontractor to manage this so we can focus on our work at hand.  We also have private utility locators come to our jobs to give us a picture of what’s underground.  Once the utilities have been marked we have a vacuum trailer with a specialized crew that will pothole all known utilities.

Lastly, we do an annual review our safety programs with a third-party consultant to make sure they are up to date.  D&V is Gold Shovel Standard Certified and has proudly won 6 awards in United Contractors R.E.A.L. safety award program.