Safety, It’s Our Choice
Safety: We believe that safety is a culture, not a regulation. We accept the responsibility of not compromising an employee’s safety and health. Through the values of our guiding principles, we strive to return our employees, clients and visitors safely to their families every day.
Kanawha Stone Company views safety not as an unachievable philosophy, but as a practical and manageable process. Introducing new safety systems and ideas to a safety environment can be the starting point in refining a safety culture. Managing safety and providing excellent safety performance allows Kanawha Stone Company to not only capitalize the moral obligation to their employees, but to decrease direct negative safety indicators such as high OSHA recordable rates and catastrophic incidents. This also allows KSC to manage and control indirect negative safety indicators such as lost productivity, disrupted schedules that yield hidden cost to the owner. Kanawha Stone agrees with the Construction Industry Institute (CII) statistics that Owners incur the expense of contractor’s poor safety performance. According to the CII Article, Zero Injury Economics:
“Many owners think that someone else pays for a contractor’s workers’ compensation insurance and the costs of the worker injury. In fact, all monies spent by a contractor come from owners. As a contractor works less safely, the owner’s costs are higher. Some owners feel that if they get the lowest bid, then their costs are as low as possible. The assumption is not true if the owner takes the long view. If an owner will work with select safer contractors, then the owner’s cost will be significantly less. Owners, who pay attention to contractor safety, experience fewer third-party lawsuits and have more efficient execution of their work. In so doing, they can lower their construction costs dramatically in the long term.”
Many factors contribute to an excellent safety performance and a strong safety culture. Partial implementation of safety systems can result in an owner’s inability to achieve a desired safety culture. Kanawha Stone Company believes in taking the necessary steps when planning for project execution to assure all factors related to achieving optimal safety performance are identified, planned, communicated and executed.
Training Program
Kanawha Stone Company’s training program incorporates the following processes:
1. New Hire Safety Orientation of Company Safety Policies and Procedures.
2. Task Specific Safety Training for equipment operators and off road truck drivers.
3. Annual Supervision and Management Safety Training
4. Mandatory weekly documented safety meeting (toolbox talks).
5. Daily Task Hazard Analysis
6. Accident Investigation and Root Cause Processes and Procedures.
7. Transferring Lessons Learned from accidents and root cause investigations to all employees to prevent reoccurrence.
Drug Test Policy
All employees performing safety sensitive functions shall, as a condition of employment, be subjected to Pre Employment, Random, Reasonable Suspicion and Post Accident drug screening. Failure to adhere to or refusal to participate in this policy shall be treated as failure to meet substance abuse policy requirements and will result in employee termination.
Disciplinary Policy
Unsafe acts and/or practices not considered to be immediately dangerous to life and health, such as employee misconduct, failure to wear appropriate personal protective equipment, not performing pre-shift equipment safety inspections, etc., will result in the following disciplinary actions:
- 1st Occurrence-Verbal warning and notations made in writing to the Company Safety Department
- 2nd Occurrence-Written warning copied to the Company Safety Department, Project Manager and Operations Manager.
- 3rd Occurrence-Termination of employment
Unsafe acts and/or practices considered as immediately dangerous to life and health shall be grounds for immediate termination of employment.
Multi Employer Job Site Responsibility
The responsibilities required by all parties on a multi employer job site are a vital part of developing a safe work environment. Pre-planning and communicating the requirements and expectations of all employers is the fundamental basis behind an effective program. Communication of expectations is identified in the pre-construction phase of the project. Once responsibilities are established, regular safety meetings and evaluations help identify the effectiveness and any changes needed as the project conditions change.
Subcontractors are required to meet or exceed all safety requirements and to meet or exceed all federal, state and local requirements for safe work practices and environmental regulation.
Subcontractor Qualifications
Prior to engaging a subcontractor to perform work, a safety review is required. Subcontractors are required to submit:
- A copy of the company safety program.
- A copy of the OSHA 300 logs for the previous three years.
- A completed Qualification questionnaire.
- Fitness for Duty Plan
- A list of proposed chemical and hazardous substances, which may be used during the course of work, shall be submitted during the qualification process.
The safety manager shall review the documentation provided by the contractor to either qualify or disqualify (for safety) the contractor. The safety manager shall make a note on the questionnaire as to whether the contractor is qualified. If disqualified, the safety manager shall make a statement as to the reason. The subcontractor will be allowed to modify their plan to come into compliance. If they do not come into compliance they will not be allowed on the project.
Subcontractor Safety Requirements
Subcontractors are required to participate in site safety programs and share information as follows. Subcontractors shall: - Identify the employee responsible for safety for the jobsite. If not physically assigned to the job, an onsite safety liaison shall be identified.
- Provide disciplinary actions for employee violations of safety rules consistent with policies for disciplinary actions. All disciplinary actions shall be reported to the safety manager.
- Maintain an injury log. All accidents, which result in injuries to employees or property damage, shall be reported immediately. Significant near misses shall be reported within 24 hours.
- Accidents resulting in injury, property damage and significant near misses shall be investigated by their safety manager to determine the basic cause and contributing factors. The accident investigation shall identify preventive measures and assign responsibility for implementing those measures. A copy of the accident investigation shall be provided to the KSC safety manager within 24 hrs of the accident.
- All subcontractor forms related to safety are subject to audit, review and approval by KSC’s safety manager.
- Subcontractors are responsible for proper signage of work areas and for proper container labeling.
- An MSDS shall be submitted to the KSC safety department before locating any chemical at the project.