Mascot has introduced European safety standards in our construction project.
So far our accident rate is ZERO.
PLAYING IT SAFE - ON SITE
Throughout Asia workers are being killed and injured almost daily due to lack of safety concerns. Mascot Viet Nam's investment project would have been no exception to this rule - if we had not decided to be proactive about it.
From the very outset we and our consulting engineers - Royal Haskoning and DK Engineering - spelled it out in very clear terms to our Vietnamese contractors that we demanded proper safety on the construction site. The contracts had all the right wording to ensure that no workers would be exposed to unnecessary hazards.
From day 1 on the site it became clear that the piling contractor paid no attention to this issue. When I arrived on the site, the piling contractor was in full swing. Nine meter long concrete piles were handled by workers in plastic sandals and baseball caps or fake army helmets that had been siphoned off the tourist souvenir industry.
Two workers were crawling on top of the piling robot - 10 meters up in the air without any kind of safety belts. Down on the ground electricity cables with torn insulation were laying around among puddles of rain water.
I clicked away with my camera and said a few angry things in my all too poor Vietnamese, but no one really paid attention. We shut the whole thing down on the spot.
Day 1: Piling worker without proper protection. A few weeks later, Safety officer Lam still found cables with torn insulation like this one on the ground. Today these problems are history, after Mascot and our engineers introduced syestematic training and enforcement.
In the coming days our consulting engineers did a tremendous - and patient - effort to minimize the risks, but it was apparent that it would take a much more sustained effort in terms of systematic training and enforcement to achieve real improvements.
In cooperation with our engineers we have developed a simple and rather effective concept for dramatic improvement of the health and safety standards in our construction site. Even though the contractors in principle are totally responsible for safety supervision, we have our own full time safety set-up on site.
Our accident statistics are ZERO due to systematic training and enforcement on the site.
The training includes evacuation drills. The alarm is sounded, and the workers start running away from a mock collapse of one of the massive steel structures, which are erected on the site by Seico.
Emergency medical assistance is included in our evacuation training exercises. On the neighboring construction site in the back of the picture, it is clearly seen that others may benefit from our experience: The workers there are working on the roof structure without any safety precautions at all.
No workers are allowed on site, before they have gone through the mandatory training programme. The rules are simple and the sanctions are equally easy to grasp: Yellow cards for first time offences and - considering that football is a national obsession also in Viet Nam - all workers know what happens, when a red card has been issued: You are off the site immediately.
Of course it adds to our building costs to give a lot of priority to this, but the return is very nice indeed: Our construction project will soon pass the first 100.000 man hours milestone, and we have ZERO work accidents so far.
We want to share our experience with anyone, who wants to listen. With funding from Danida's Public Private Partnership Programme, we are trying to spread the word to other investors, contractors and local authorities in Viet Nam. We plan to hold a local seminar to present the model, and judged from what we see in the neighboring construction sites, others could certainly pick up a few good ideas.
Our information sharing will also include media coverage and a presentation at a major conference on Corporate Social Responsibility to be held in Ha Noi next year.
"You have to do better than this." Safety Supervision officer Xuan Chinh was not satisfied,
when it took four minutes to get all workers to the safe area, after the first evacuation exercise.
