NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Tony Barsotti, Technology Design and Construction
MR. SCHNEIDER: Next I want to introduce Tony Barsotti, who has nearly 25 years experience in mechanical construction trades. He also has a career in occupational safety and health starting with asbestos exposures in the pipe trades in the mid-seventies. His safety and health work over the years has included apprenticeship and journeyman training, legislative and regulatory activities. For the past three years, he has been Environmental Health and Safety Manager for Technology Design and Construction Company, an EPC firm constructing semi-conductor fabs for Intel. He has a B.S. in social science and ASP certification.
I give you Tony Barsotti.
MR. BARSOTTI: Good morning. We have overheads and also a handout which has additional documents that we are not going to go over, but they are there just for your reference. The handout also is pretty much the slides as well.
What I am going to speak briefly about is the results of the effort on this Intel project, that we have just completed. TDC is a joint venture, it's an EPC firm. We got the assistance of the CPWR with a NIOSH grant to support our efforts on trying to control sprain and strain injuries which we had been working on.
The intention of the grant and our efforts with it was to implement and measure the interventions. The project had already begun. We were probably about 10 months into the project of about a 20-month to 22-month project before the grant activity started, although we probably only had about 500,000 or 600,000 manhours on a 3.5 million manhour project.
Our intention, in order to make this as effective as possible, was to utilize the project's existing communications system in a way to be able to access and get to the crews themselves. Since the project itself is a combination of both general contractors, EPC -- we are doing general contracting, and we did about 35 to 40 percent of the work with direct hires or our subsidiaries, and then the rest were subcontractors. But with this we had previously finished a project prior to this in the area, so we had some relationship with most of the subcontractors before and had established some expectations.
But what we had wanted to do with this was to do it in such a way that it was generally good for us, for the owners -- in this case, Intel -- for our subs and also to support the research efforts which were necessary to try to develop some measures around this.
In terms of the project itself, we had strong owner involvement in the environmental health and safety program generally. Associates of Intel know that the company likes to support and be involved with their people in a lot of ways, and in this way in particular.
Additionally, it was an owner-controlled wrap-up insurance program, so there was another level of vested interest in which they had a direct involvement.
Before we began on the grant, we had a structured and a well defined EHS program, which was similar to what Stew was talking about. We have a mandatory stretching program. We have some information about it and we will talk in a minute about it.
There is a strong commitment to training on this project as the general. In addition to a two-hour orientation session, we ran everyone on the project through fall protection and haz com training, which was an additional hour and a half for each of those sessions; and then through the project on different phases. We had introduction of chemicals, as we go to bring on chemicals, and install tools. We ran everybody back through another hour and a half to a two-hour session again with it. So this is just from the general's point of view in terms of the training that we were providing.
There is a strong emphasis on pre-task planning and housekeeping, a real commitment to drive housekeeping on an ongoing basis and not at end of the shift or at the end of the week.
With the involvement of the crews, in a number of different fashions that we have, including what we call the group leader program, which is basically a foreman who alternate run weekly meetings, and then we have interactions with them, so that on one week we have communication, project communications, which tend to be top down. Then on another week we have it bottom up more. And then we meet with those crews, and they have additional responsibilities and have a separate incentive program for assisting us on that.
Then the other is similar to what Bechtel is doing and others in terms of moving to target zero or injury free or whatever these paradigm shifts are that are coming in the construction industry. We began over the last couple of years, and on this project that began about a year and a half ago, just prior to the grant, a commitment to an injury free workplace. We did extensive training around that as well.
All of which make some problems for the researchers in measuring the variables, where are they, how they interact.
In terms of the grant activities, our intentions were to, in terms of our limited time and resources, target the high risk trades and tasks. And partially we did that by seeing which subcontractors were willing to work with us on that. Because of the phase of the project and the subs that were involved, we utilized interior carpentry work -- most of the form and concrete work had been completed by this time -- the plumbers and pipe fitters, who were primarily self-performed or one of our subsidiaries, and electrical and the electricians.
With those we provided some additional ergonomic training and then worked with them on developing and implementing some specific interventions around some high risks tasks that they were involved in.
The second major area that we got support from the grant on was doing some evaluation of the project's programs, including the pre-cast planning, the effectiveness of it, the stretching program, and then continuing an evaluation of musculoskeletal injuries that we had on the project.
Any injury of any nature, including significant first aid cases and all recordables, we did a pretty thorough incident review, injury analysis of that, including the crews and the foremen and superintendents and project managers and gave them a lot of attention. When there were musculoskeletal ones, we were able to bring in, in most cases, the ergonomist, Billy Gibbons, who happens to be here with us today. He was on site one to two days a week for about ten months on the project.
Similar to what Scott had mentioned at the beginning in terms of the high risk tasks, all trades have the exposures around material handling, on the housekeeping, the loading from continuous standing or working on hard surfaces, particularly as the projects go on and everybody is working on the concrete slabs. We have a lot of tasks which are stationary tasks. Awkward and confined work areas, and then, as others have mentioned, working above the shoulder height or below the knees.
As we looked at the pipe trades in particular, there were the static loading issues in a number of tasks that they were involved with, in welding, both in stick welding to the block iron pipe, as well as the high purity welding, and the orbital welding that goes on in the semi-conductor industry. The electricians in handling the cable, both in terms of pulling wire from the spools, pulling it up in the racks or through the conduit, and then those working at the terminations in the panels, as Stew mentioned.
Carpenters. Again here we are looking at the interior and drywall-related, both in terms of getting the studs up and then handling the sheetrock are repetitive and forceful tasks and probably the highest incidence of repetitive work of any of the trades that we experienced.
In terms of the grant, some of the field implementations that we were able to get support from and actually implement in the field were utilization of stand stools for those with these stationary tasks, as well as anti-fatigue matting. It was an interesting thing there, because the researchers were looking for a good measure so they would have a control group of those who were using the anti-fatigue mats and those who weren't. But by the time the word got around, they all wanted them. And before the researchers could be involved with it, they were at all of the work stations that could be using them.
So it is one of those dilemmas in terms of research activities. If you have a good researchers have the need for these studies and the measures, but if you are out in the field and here is something that could make your life easier, you are not going to necessarily wait around for the result before you start utilizing it.
The sanding pole disks I think was European and this is actually one that we got from Scott. It's a great tool and is a device that clamps onto a pole. Instead of having to grab and hold the pole like this, you can push up against it. Painters and sanders have it and it was widely accepted. It is a very cheap fix, and they were appreciative of it.
Another issue had to do with the inertial forces on pulling the cables, the wire off of the spools, and especially we are looking at good sized cables that we are pulling that are maybe an inch and a half, two inches in diameter. This activity came from an electrician who sustained a hernia in the course of one of these pulls. He had an opportunity to really look at this activity itself and how it could be redesigned.
That last one there in the field implementation had to do with a task. In the semi-conductor fabs now, where the cleanroom space is very costly. The amount of equipment is minimized that has to be in the cleanroom, and below it you have a sub-fab. You know, the factories call the cleanroom the fabs. And the sub-fab below it is where you have a lot of the process equipment.
At any rate, there is cleaning around these pop-outs where the equipment utilities come up, laborers were doing a lot of stooping work, and these scooter prototypes really helped out.
The assessments that were done, including this flex and stretch, which is a stretching program that we utilize. Through our group leaders we were able to do the surveys and have a high participation of response with it and found about 80 percent of the crews participating in this mandatory program. But it was primarily a function of the culture of that subcontractor, whether they were supportive, have bought into it, or -- and not by trades, which is what we initially thought. Some wouldn't be supportive, iron workers possibly or something like that. But that really wasn't the way, as we looked at the data. And there is a great interest by the crews for a follow-up and additional training.
This next one here has to do with the -- and Tom Cook is here, not to talk about it today, but they had done a study, a survey, a perception survey, which had about 2,500 respondents. This is in your packets. We won't really go into this in detail, but they asked a series of questions. There were three particular questions: whether they had sustained job-related aches, pains or discomfort; if they were prevented from doing a day's work with it; and if they had seen a physician related to it.
The blue lines on this are responses to those questions and sorted out by the particular body parts. The blue lines are the University of Iowa group, and the red lines are the crews on this project, the D1B. This was taken pretty near the end of the project where more of these interventions had been in place.
I have just a couple quick graphs to show you as a wrap-up insurance and looking at everybody's claims on our claims experience. We had been tracking and probably looking at frequency more -- a lot through our emphasis with incentive programs on recordable rates and had tracked injuries. Once we started looking at the claims data, we compared the percentage of the claims against the percentage of claim dollars.
There you can see in the musculoskeletal and accumulative trauma injuries, although were about 40 percent of injuries, were over 90 percent of our claim dollars.
So we looked in particular at this 35 to 40 percent of the work, which was our direct hires. Here's what we have, the percentage of manhours on the project by -- that these people were involved in. And over here we have the concrete work, forming, this early work, and we see they are about 9 percent of the manhours on the project. There are about 12 or 13 percentage of the claims, and there are about at 32 or 33 percent of the claim dollars.
When we had looked at all of the direct hire subs and we had seen that these numbers were pretty even relative to the project as a whole. But when we compared what had happened in this phase of the project with what had happened here with our mechanical group, whose work actually began once the interventions injury free workplace and with the ergonomics grant activities, and a real strong culture in this mechanical group to pre-cast planning and commitment to the stretch and flex with it.
These claim dollars on here now include the blue line, which is the percentage of those claim dollars which are ergonomic related or potentially ergonomically related. We are looking at strains and sprains, disk herniations and hernias in those.
And as you can see it points out what everybody has come to recognize, and there is a lot more than one or two. What Stew is talking about -- our experience there is - this is 90 percent of our claim dollars or over and are related to musculoskeletal injuries.
A last few last bullets about where we intend to be going with this, continuing these interventions on the multi-employer, on a single project level like this, continuing to support it on a multi -- with the multi-site employers that we work with. We know we need to begin this, what we saw with the concrete work. We need to get it started early and before the project begins, utilizing both our constructibility efforts tying in with the design folks, and then generally building on our relationship with our subcontractors so that we can be more effective with this.
There are a couple handouts that have to do with a policy that we developed around soft tissue injury. It is really the same musculoskeletal injury prevention that's in your packet. It's a way that we have approached that, talked with our subcontractors around it, train to it, and then an assessment sheet which we have developed which can help in an on-site evaluation.
Thanks for your time.
