A BEAR WALKS ONTO A SCAFFOLD…
From wildlife and extreme weather to tight urban jobsites, construction hazards change with the location, but the standard crews bring to the site cannot.
Builder Preacher on Site Hazards
Every crew keeps a list of things that showed up on site uninvited.
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A new one made the list this season.
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He took a stroll down the scaffold outside our wall on a mountain job in California's Eastern Sierra.
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He did not sign in.
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Anybody who has worked in bear country just nodded.
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He got the walkway, and he moved on. And it is not a knock on the site. Up there, the bears were here first.
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Here is the part that matters. That one was the easy hazard.
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The hazards change with the zip code, and we have worked a few of them.
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In Cathedral City, summer runs into the 110s. This year the heat warnings showed up in March and again in October.
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In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, winter runs October to April, and this January brought the coldest air in seven years.
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On a tight urban site, there is no laydown area, no parking, and a sidewalk full of people.
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None of that shows up on the drawings. All of it shows up on the job, where any one of them can cost a day, or worse.
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And this time of year, the hazard worth the most attention is not on the site at all.
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Nobody misses a bear.
A deer at dawn is a different story.
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Back home in Wisconsin, deer crashes top 17,000 a year, mostly at dawn and dusk, when crews drive in early and head home late.
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The hazard changes. The standard does not.
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Nobody controls the heat, the cold, or the deer. We control how we show up for them.
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No crew mobilizes until the site gets the same read the drawings get.
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Our own crews show up briefed, tied off, and looking out for each other.
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The office and the field talk every day, so the plan moves when conditions do.
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In the heat, care beats the deadline. In the cold, membranes and sealants answer to the thermometer, not the calendar.
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On a tight site, we plan every delivery around the curb. On the road, we keep our wits about us.
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From the desert to the Upper Peninsula, the standard travels with the crew.
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