At Hewitt Young Electric, we place the highest priority on providing employees with a safe and clean work environment. Indeed, it’s hard to overstate the importance of safety in construction projects. What makes it so critical?

• Unsafe practices lead to job site accidents. Besides the obvious personal toll of any injury, job-related injuries can lead to workers’ compensation claims, and possibly lawsuits.
• Time delays. When a worker is injured on a job site, the location of that injury immediately becomes an accident site. In some cases, it is cordoned off, pending investigations by OSHA and other authorities. This renders that spot inaccessible to workers, which often results in substantial delays. It’s also worth noting that an injured worker who leaves the site is one less worker to keep your project on time.
• Cost overruns. When you figure in potential costs associated with WC claims, legal fees, higher insurance premiums, delay penalties and more, it’s easy to see that costs associated with any job site injury can add up quickly.

Certainly, accidents impact business operations; but more importantly, they can profoundly impact the lives of injured workers and their loved ones.

So, what are the costs associated with a job site accident? First and foremost, there’s the human cost. A worker could be seriously injured or possibly lose their life as a result of an accident.

Then there are financial costs, and while it’s extremely difficult to acknowledge these in comparison to human pain and suffering, they are very real in construction projects—and they impact projects in tangible ways.

In any case, at Hewitt Young Electric we place the highest priority on providing employees with a safe and clean work environment.

Article written by Mike Giantonio