Big Project ME editor, Melanie Mingas spoke to some of Dubai’s leading experts in health and safety to find out what are the major issues that need to be addressed by the industry.

What have been the most significant recent developments regarding health and safety in the region?

MF: Abu Dhabi municipality is monitoring incident statistics over a 12 month period for the first time. Whether that is going to be adopted across the UAE remains to be seen, but it gives an opportunity to at least monitor compliance progress, which could be a light at the end of a rather dim tunnel at this point.

MK: The EHSMS has an obligation for all construction companies working in Abu Dhabi to put forward their EHSMS for approval. Habtoor Leighton Group (HLG) was one of the first four to be approved and on a quarterly basis we had to submit our statistics. The intent is to analyse those and establish a baseline criteria then to set key performance indicator (KPI) targets for the contractors within the segment.

MF: It does sound like a positive development; there were 29 fatalities in Abu Dhabi in 2011. From an industry perspective, how does that sounds benchmarked against other parts of the region?

MK: In terms of the amount of work in Abu Dhabi it’s unacceptable to have that many fatalities.

KF: Municipalities can collate the statistics on LTI and fatalities and use the data to implement measures to areas that require it, but this gathering of data is totally reliant on Companies being open and honest with their reporting which is sometimes not the case.

MK: Under the EHSMS, we as the main contractor are obliged to report accidents on site from subcontractors and that goes against our record, but it shows that there is another contractor. The municipality actually follows up with the contractor involved and that’s extremely good practice.

MF: Obviously you are on the sites and by analogy you have the global financial crisis and one of the reactions to that is more regulation. Is regulation the answer or is it a change of culture and attitude that is more important when it comes to health and safety?

MK: It’s probably a little of both. The changes in the regulation will have a knock on effect on the culture and one particularly good thing about the legislation in Abu Dhabi is that there is no grey area and it gives us a tool to state a requirement that has legal backing.

If we can use legislation the culture will improve automatically, it’ll have to. The two are very much linked, but the culture is changing on a lot of projects and we can see it. Some sites are better than others but you can see it in the workers themselves, even though they come from countries where the risks you see are acceptable. I have witnessed the same thing in Hong Kong, where there is no concept of danger.

KF  Peoples’ definition of risk differs from person to person, for example we could catch somebody working on a very unsafe scaffold or not wear a safety harness when needed but when they see you they simply put their helmets on thinking that this is the only unsafe act they are committing.

SR: In additional to cultural background there is enormous pressure on the speed of projects so you don’t have time to train people properly and in some cases we see unskilled labourers have been employed without the relevant experience and become a civil mason. In the rush to speed things up all the quality process are jumped. We have witnessed this particularly in scaffoldings and even a major bridge collapsing, because these unskilled workers are then using poor products, again because the project is in a rush.

I think all these things add together to contribute to the particularly condition we have. From an insurance perspective, there are two types of losses; those which are very big in nature but happen only once every ten years, like a big fire. Then there are the losses that are quite frequent in nature and although they are minor incidences, they still create lost time. So instead of minimising the minor accidents the aim will be to prevent them, so the health and safety measures take effect right away.

At the same time when you take these mega losses, it’s beyond your capacity to stop them but what you can do is take precautions to minimise the impacts. For example when a fire occurs, how quickly can we respond? The most dangerous thing can be the materials stored on site and the construction waste, which cause a lot of fire.

If you take fire safety as an example, there are a lot of regulations but there are still fires. So how do you reduce the impact of mega losses? If the regulations have been followed you shouldn’t see more than one or two floors of a building burning.

MK: I think in the UAE, the civil defence has taken a big step forward with its introduction of the fire and life safety code and that also covers buildings under construction. Civil Defence has also appointed Houses of Excellence responsible for the projects, to ensure they comply with the fire and life safety code. I think this is something where the insurance industry could help those parties who they insure by being proactive in advising us in how to mitigate the risk of loss.

Within Abu Dhabi, the municipality has put a lot of effort intro training their inspectors; when they visit sites they know what they are talking about, they understand that we are all health and safety professionals and they are a trained inspector who can know how and where things have gone wrong.

That’s important; the inspectors should be properly trained and working with us.

We have introduced what is colloquially referred to as ‘black point inspections’ and it is a very similar system to a driving licence, except when we see an incident that is life threatening we actually look through the whole supervisory chain. Where negligence can be proven, warning points will be given and when a certain number of points have been accumulated, they are out.

We have written this into HLG’s management system and we are very proud with our management system. This is only one of the initiatives we have introduced.