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Safe Dubai
Formed after a spate of accidents with plant machinery, Build Safe Dubai now has sixty major firms signed up across the Emirate. Dutco Balfour Beatty boss Grahame McCaig spoke about the aims and objectives of the organization.
Safety, as we all know, is one of the hottest topics in the construction industry at the moment. With ever taller buildings reaching for the sky, more machines and men are needed to build them, with perhaps inevitable results.
In Dubai there has been a municipality code for years detailing the do's and don'ts of building it big while keeping workers safe.
However, until recently there has been no way for organisations to share knowledge of mishaps, so that patterns of unsafe working can be identified and eliminated.
So in January 2008, a few large firms decided to pool their knowledge of recent accidents. One of these companies was Dutco Balfour Beatty, GM Grahame McCaig explained; "Well, it started with Bovis Lend Lease who had five major contractors.
"They got us together to help share health and safety information in Dubai. The reason for this is that they had an incident in the UK where a guy was killed on one of their sites. A detachable excavator bucket detached while it was working and fell on him. When they looked at their own safety records within the company, they realised that there had been three similar accidents.
"Then their IT department looked further into it and they discovered that there had been nine similar incidents recorded around the world, where a bucket had become detached and killed a worker.
"So the intention was if we start sharing information the opportunity would be there for us to recognise circumstances happening on our site, or where we were using these detachable buckets for example, so we could go and look to make sure that accident doesn't happen. So that was where it started" he said.
Soon, a consortium of businesses was formed, originally comprising of health and safety representatives.
McCaig added; "It didn't take long for us to realise that if we could expand the network and we could expand the amount of people sharing the information we could possibly prevent more incidents from happening all around.
The organisation operates under the mantra that safety is ethically the ‘right' thing to do - and the ‘smart' thing from a business perspective.
"What we are trying to do here is trying to promote a minimum standard of health and safety, we think should be implemented by any normally run business that is being run by any responsible manager. We are not a statutory authority and we do not seek to regulate the industry - we don't see that as our objective. What we are doing is that we are a bunch of construction industry related disciplines, because we are contractor driven we actually do have a lot of consultants and project managers as well as sub-contractors and health and safety related people together" McCaig said.
He went further "My personal opinion in a market like this, which is so busy and so frantic is that it would be almost impossible for some sort of local authority to fully regulate a market that is running at this pace, so the responsibility for regulation does transfer back to self regulation.
"So [large employers] have to take responsibility for our own heath and safety. The DM standard that was put in place in 1991 is a very good standard to follow. There is nothing wrong with the standard and there is nothing wrong with the regulation. The problem is that I don't think those regulation is being implemented by everybody to the same extent as they should be and that's what we're trying to promote."
Of course there are many challenges in working safely, some of them have been thrown up by the modern complexity of Dubai's ultra-modern cityscape. Others, such as falls, are well known in the industry and there is much that can be done about it.
There are a lot of problems with at height working. If someone falls off a building and they are attached by some sort of lifeline, then it is very important that you get that person down from there as soon as possible.
"There are the statutory authorities that deal with that, being the fire and rescue department" McCaig said, adding; "The problem we have is that very few people that fall off a building are connected to anything, and if that happens, then they are dead and that is the issue we are addressing.
We want to organise people so that they don't fall off in the first place. If they do fall off, then we want to make sure things are put in place so that they can be rescued from that situation.
"Protective equipment is actually the last resort you should be employing to keep people on a building. Slings, harnesses and PPE should not be used instead of measures to stop people falling off from buildings.
"Edge protection, and there are plenty of different types in Dubai should be used on the edge of all buildings and people have to be trained and told how to work in those environments. Build Safe Dubai offers a lot of generic risk assessments and a lot of generic tool box talks for you (the site manager) to use. McCaig added "it is down to the individual people who are working on sites to do their risk assessments and understand what the dangers are in a particular area."
With no end to the construction boom in sight, the Emirate is going to need the knowledge pool of Build Safe Dubai for a long time to come.
One of the statements BSD makes on its list of goals is that there is no ‘intellectual property' associated with health, safety and welfare. This means that around sixty companies in Dubai can share knowledge and data with each other, usually in the form of bulletins circulated every couple of weeks or so, detailing mishaps and suggesting best practice. Better than this, absolutely anybody can get most of this information from the web site, found at www.buildsafedubai.com
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