Safety is a challenge in construction. Ours is a trade that requires ladders and power tools, compressed air, and electricity. There is dust always and everywhere and some of it can be very toxic. Through it all, there is work that needs to get done, so there is a balance that must be maintained; safety must never be compromised for the sake of productivity, but there is also no such thing as a perfectly safe, active worksite.
This was something I rarely gave any thought to when I worked for other people. Typical of most men in their twenties, I was highly confident in my ability to work quickly, efficiently, and safely. I would humor the boss by following his rules when he was around, but I was not afraid to occasionally nail off crown molding from the top step of the ladder or pin back the guard on my skilsaw as soon as he left the site.
Years later, when I started my own business, I discovered how my relationship with safety changed when I became the responsible person in charge. When you are a worker, you have a worker’s comp insurance net floating under your ladder at all times. When you are a boss, you are responsible for that net, and you know that if your worker falls hard, your rates will go up so fast and so abruptly that the net will turn into a tangled web for you. Far more importantly, these are your guys; they make your company work, and if they are anything like my guys, they are loyal, trusted, hard working men with families. If any one of them were to be injured on the job, I would feel the same as if it were one of my family members, and I would feel 100 percent responsible, which makes me even more keen to keep my jobsites a safe, smart-working environment.
In the first year of my business, I took whatever work I could find. One of those jobs was replacing fascia on a local, private school building. It was a pretty typical maintenance job that involved spotting the rotting pieces, identifying the failed system that caused the rot, replacing the fascia, and fixing the root problem. It was two-man work, so I hired my just-out-of-high school brother to come be my second set of hands.
Andrew is a good hand. He is strong, smart, and handles tools smoothly and safely. He is also 6’5”, so sometimes he doesn’t even need to use a ladder, and most importantly, he is good company, not afraid of hard work and always quick with a joke. With his help, we were ahead of schedule on the fascia repairs, and it looked like we might get the job done a few days early. Anytime I get ahead of schedule, I take it with a grain of salt; in construction, it seems like there is always something that will slow you down eventually. This project followed the rule rather than the exception, and we got stuck on the back side of the house shaving and shimming terribly uneven rafter-tails and re-running roof flashings. It was tedious work, and at the end of a two-week job, especially one in which the first week and a half had gone so swimmingly, it was a little disheartening to have to slow way down and plod our way to the finish line.
I was on a ladder with a Sawzall, doing my best to artistically hack away the excess material from the top of a rafter tail, while Andrew was down on the ground cutting the fascia piece we would install as soon as I was done. He was working on sawhorses and had my best skilsaw with a brand new blade to ensure a good cut, so I was surprised when all of a sudden, mid cut he yelped, dropped the saw, and clutched his hand between his knees. My initial annoyance at the interruption evaporated, and dread washed down the back of my neck like an ice bath. Years before I had a buddy who accidentally run his hand through a table saw and ruin his guitar playing for life. Cleaning blood stains off the table saw the following day was a grim project. Every saw that we use is capable of changing a person’s life in a fraction of a second. Now, I was looking at my baby brother: a fantastic drummer, a rock climber, and good guitarist himself; always good with tools and quick with his hands, doubled over next to the cutting table and all obvious signs pointing to a catastrophic hand injury.
I jumped off the ladder and sprinted over, bracing myself for what I was about to see. “It’s ok,” he gasped, “it’s ok, I think I just nicked it.” He slowly stood up and removed his right hand, which he had been using to immediately apply pressure to the base of his left thumb. The back of his glove was torn from the valley between the first finger and thumb, along the base of the appendage and all the way to wrist, ruining the glove. To my surprise, there, underneath that glove was just a little nick in one of the few meaty sections on the base of Andrew’s thumb, about three eighths of an inch long and the exact width of a skilsaw blade. The wound was so shallow it had only just started to bleed.
How he managed to get off so light on what could and probably should have been such a much worse injury, I have no idea. Relief flooded over me, along with the wave of fatigue and nausea that follows an extreme adrenaline rush, but it was quickly vanquished by a hot, fiery anger.
“What the hell did you do!?” I demanded.
“I don’t even know man. I think I just zoned out,” he replied. “I really have no idea why that thumb was anywhere near the blade.”
I exploded on him. Hadn’t I taught him how to cut properly? So many times! Hadn’t we set him up in the best possible position for safety? Hadn’t I constantly reminded him to be safe and think through what he was doing? Hadn’t I, only moments before his injury, reminded him that these days, when we were tired and the work was tedious, were the days when we were most likely to lose focus and get injured, so we should be especially on our guard?
Now I was warming up, and I gave him the other barrel.
“What about my brand-new company? A worker’s comp claim would likely sink me. And what about you, your drumming, your music, and your rock climbing? What would you do!?”
And then the real kicker.
“What about mom?! What would she say to me if I let you cut your thumb off!?”
Eventually, I exhausted my supply of admonishments and glared at him as I ground out a final, “Don’t you everdo something like that again.”
Andrew, always, always quick on the draw, solemnly looked me straight back in the eyes and gave me two thumbs up. Except he kept his left fist completely closed as if his thumb had been cut off.
“Got it.”