NOTE: This document is provided for historical purposes only.
Stuart Burkhammer, Bechtel Corporation
MR. SCHNEIDER: Let me start by introducing Stew Burkhammer. Stew is the Vice President and Manager of Corporate Environmental Safety and Health Services for Bechtel Corporation. He is a 34-year veteran there. In January '93 he was elected Vice President of Bechtel, and in January '95 a Vice President and Director of Bechtel Construction Operations.
He is a registered professional engineer, certified safety professional, and occupational safety and health technologist, member of the American Society of Safety Engineers, and currently on the board of directors of the Board of Certified Safety Professionals.
He served for five years as chair of the National Constructors Association's Safety and Health Committee. He is also chairman of the board of the Safety Equipment Institute. And he is on his second term as a member of the OSHA Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health where he is the chair of their Ergonomics, Fall Protection and Standards Reform Subgroups.
With that, let me give you Stew Burkhammer.
MR. BURKHAMMER: Thank you very much. You are going to have to bear with me. I caught a terrible cold Sunday night, so mine will be really a short presentation. And it will be shorter if I lose my voice while I'm talking.
It is really an honor to be here today to talk to you about a problem that for a long period of time I've been addressing and talking about. It is a serious problem in the construction industry, and that is musculoskeletal disorders in the construction industry.
And early last year, when Assistant Secretary of Labor Joe Dear came to the ACCOSH committee and said, "We would like you guys to develop a construction ergonomics standard," and the chairman, Knut Ringen, looked around and said, "Get going, Stew. When are you going to start?" So I got stuck with the job as chairman of the work group, which was quite a challenge, to say the least.
The work group compiled a lot of studies and information and did a lot of research. When we made our first presentation to ACCSH on where we were going and the standard that we had been asked to draft, we got quite a response from the industry. Twelve people came in and asked to speak on the subject, and they did. And they basically told us that we were all wet and we had better go back and get it right or don't do it at all.
So shortly thereafter, Congress put a kibosh on ergonomics and the moratorium was set, and we couldn't do any more work. So we gave what we had at the time to OSHA. As Linda or Peg said this morning -- I think it was Peg who said that in October they lifted the moratorium, and the work group is back in business.
I am going to be sending out letters inviting a lot of people to participate and join us. Hopefully they will. I think the more people working on the problem and addressing the issues and helping develop the construction standard will make it better.
We are not calling it ergonomics because I think in construction it really is musculoskeletal disorders. Here is a cartoon that I found that depicts the problems that I think we face in construction: vibrations, bending, stooping, kneeling, lifting, squatting, twisting, wrist motions, shoulder motions, neck motions, knee motions, elbow motions, wrist motions, and the list goes on and on.
I know a lot of people who are not in construction are tired of hearing me preach this issue. But construction is different. It is not your average manufacturing facility. It is not an automobile assembly plant. It is not a chicken plucker plant. Every day is different, and every day we have different hazards. We have different tasks. We have different things that we encounter, so it's an ever-evolving environment.
When I think of ergonomics, I think of a somewhat static environment, an assembly plant, a manufacturing plant, or a semi-conductor plant, where the same things are done over and over again, and the same repetitive trauma injuries occur over and over again.
In construction we see a lot of different types of musculoskeletal disorder injuries. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a common one among rebar iron workers who do a lot of twisting and tying and rotations of the wrist. A lot of electricians who do terminations and sit there all day in front of cabinets moving their fingers and wrists have carpal tunnel syndrome.
We see a lot of shoulder rotation injuries on carpenters, elbow injuries on carpenters, wrists on carpenters from hammering and sawing and continually moving the right or left parts of their body. Laborers do a lot of tamping, and you get a lot of vibration. They do a lot of jack hammering and use chipping guns. From all that you get vibration noise. Lifting, all crafts lift everyday so there is a lot of low back strains.
That's where I want to center my talk today, on low back strains and how a program that we implemented in Bechtel in 1993 made a dramatic difference in the low back injuries that we were seeing in construction.
If you heard Greg this morning in the opening session and his comment that they believe that one out of four injuries is musculoskeletal disorder related, I would think in construction it is more like one out of two. When you take a look at all the types of injuries that we see every day, every week, every month, and every year in construction, if you put them in categories, that it is about one out of two and a half. So in our industry we have a very serious problem.
They say that about $11 billion is the projection for loss costs overall for musculoskeletal disorders and ergonomic injuries. In construction the number is also quite high.
If you look at our company, prior to implementing an ergonomics or musculoskeletal disorder program, our loss costs were extremely high and our insurance premiums were high. We did a lot of things to lower those such as the back injury prevention program that I will talk about in a minute. We implemented a computer program where all the people on our work stations, could view four times a day, a screen that automatically comes up and has a two-and-a-half minute exercise program so they can exercise their wrists and body positions. This has reduced our carpel tunnel syndrome injuries from several in a year to one last year, in 1996.
So I think that is quite an achievement in itself, and it hardly cost anything to buy one of these little ergonomics programs and stick them on the mainframe so everybody's computer can use it, and it gives them a break during the day. A lot of people don't take breaks in the engineering and construction industry, especially in the offices where they are doing rush design jobs, and they are busy 12, 14, 16 hours a day at their computer. So having these breaks and letting them move around and do small exercise programs certainly makes a difference.
We found that back injuries were about 67 percent of our injuries. And it accounted for about 47 percent of our loss costs. We had to do something about this.
We met with the unions, our union company, and we developed a task force with our non-union company to come up with a way to improve our low back injuries to prevent our people from getting hurt every day.
It is a four-part program. The first part is training and orientation. Every employee that comes on the Bechtel project anywhere in the United States -- and now we have moved the program to Latin America. We are starting it down there so I say the United States and Latin America and Canada -- goes through an extensive two- to five-hour orientation program, depending on what kind of project it is, whether it is a -- nuclear outage or demolition project. It depends on how many client requirements we have to discuss or for a particular problem. So the new hires range from two to five hours for any employee.
One part of the program that we discuss in detail is the back injury prevention program. Our particular company uses mostly Ergodyne back support belts with the Velcro piece on the outside. That's very important because if you throw a box of back belts on the ground and say, "Help yourself," one, they are not fit to the individual; two, they don't know how to wear them; and three, they usually just put them on and cinch them up and wear them all day. That can do more damage than the program is worth.
Just wearing a back belt can probably cause a back injury, if you don't know how to wear it and you weren't trained in its use and what it does and what it doesn't do, and there are some things it doesn't do, the employee has to understand that and use it properly.
The third part of our program is stretching and exercises. Every employee on a Bechtel project, and that includes the site manager and every single superintendent and supervisor and office clerk and payroll clerk and timekeeper starts the morning by doing five minutes of exercise and stretching exercise.
This accomplishes more than just the employees getting out there, lining up and looking stupid every morning. We have a safety message that we give every morning to every employee, and we use this time to do that.
Also, if we are doing any particular type of work that day, like a heavy lift or some area that we want to keep people out of for a certain reason, we discuss that during this time. Then the site manager gets up, or the field superintendent gets up and gives a short, motivational talk in the morning. We do this every day, and if we have second shifts, we do it at the beginning of the second shift.
One particular project decided that just doing it once in the morning, then lunchtime comes, and everybody sits down and stuffs themself and gets lazy, and the exercises don't do them a lot of good after lunch. They decided to do five minutes after lunch. Only instead of taking five minutes of the company's time, they take five minutes of their lunch break. So we do the five minutes in the morning on the company's time, and they do the five minutes at lunch on their time.
It has become quite a deal on that particular project. That job has also gone 2.5 million hours without a loss time accident. There is real camaraderie between the employees that have made that work on that job.
The last part of the program, and a very important part, is the retraining and follow-up training to make sure that we go out and talk to these people every day, answer questions or anything else they want to talk about, make sure they have their belt on properly, and make sure they are lifting properly.
Sometimes we issue rewards for people that do things right. If they know the safety message, if they have their back belt on, if they are doing the program right, we give them a little token of appreciation occasionally.
This program has been a big success. We have reduced our back injuries by 50 percent, and we reduced our loss costs by 47 percent. That equates to over $10 million in loss cost savings just by implementing this program.
We are also trying it on CM projects. We are requiring our subcontractors, and third and fourth year contractors, and other types of contractors on jobs where we have no direct tie, to try our program. We have been having some pretty good success, contractors are getting pretty excited about this. What we are selling is an overall zero accidents concept, and it really works.
I want to thank NIOSH and OSHA for the opportunity to be here today and for this conference. I think this is something that has been needed for a long time. I am excited about it. I am excited about ACCSH being involved and helping to move on with the construction ergonomics standard. I think with all of us working together we can hopefully achieve something like this by maybe - not at the end of 1997, but certainly sometime in 1998.
Thank you very much.
