People and principals drive injury-free environment

When it comes to DPR’s commitment to safety, the statistics tell part of the story.

Like the fact that the Redwood City office closed 125 projects last year without a single DPR employee suffering a recordable or lost-time injury. And that the Oregon region finished the year with zero lost-time and recordable injuries. In fact, all totaled, DPR’s 13 offices completed well over 300 projects in 1999 without any recordable or lost time injuries.

Beyond the numbers, however, the real story about safety at DPR is that employees who know that when they come to work on a DPR jobsite free of injuries, they will go home at the end of the day the same way.

“It’s not about insurance rates, it’s really not about money,” says Corporate Safety Director Rodney Spencley. “It’s all about people. We’re creating a culture where we have the highest likelihood of injury-free projects.”

Three-Pronged Strategy

The success of DPR’s safety program is driven by three key principals: supportive leadership, personal commitment, and free and open lines of communication.

Supportive leadership translates into time, dollars and resources spent to create a culture that puts a safe job-site at a premium. To ensure open lines of communication and to demonstrate their commitment, senior managers and engineers from DPR and its subcontractors make a point to personally meet craft people in the field and discuss any safety concerns they may have - and then follow up on any issues.

Establishing a safe working environment is top priority. During preconstruction, the team develops a “roadmap” for maintaining a safe jobsite. “The team gets together with the subcontractors to look for potential hazards, determine where our greatest exposures are, and decide how to deal with those hazards,” Spencley says.

Identify & Mitigate Hazards

Bill Powell, safety manager for DPR’s Oregon region, points out that safety is also addressed at the start of each workday, when the foreman and crew detail out their scope of work and the sequence in which it will be done. They identify potential hazards and determine the personal protective equipment and engineering controls they will use to mitigate them. With zero lost time and zero recordable injuries last year, the Oregon region has set the standard not only within DPR but also for its subcontractors. On one major project in Hillsboro, DPR has worked close to two million man-hours with no lost time accidents.

DPR has achieved some remarkable results, when measured by the dollars it must spend for workers’ comp per $100 of payroll - a figure Spencley notes is “rock bottom” compared to the industry average. However, the challenge still exists as long as there are any injuries.

“We’re as close to injury free as any organization has ever been, but there’s always room for improvement,” he says. “There’s no interest in comparing us with the industry average; we have to compare ourselves against ourselves. The question is, can we do better? The answer is, yes, we will always challenge ourselves to be injury free.”

Near Miss

No accident, but it was a close call
root cause required

First Aid

No off-site treatment
splinters, band-aid

Recordable Incident

Off-site treatment
prescription medication, stitches

Lost Time Incident

Needed medical attention
more than one day off work due to injury