Recordings

This webinar is brought to you by the New Zealand Society of Safety Engineering (NZSSE) and Construction Health and Safety New Zealand (CHASNZ) for this informative webinar on managing fire risks in a building under construction. The fire safety design of a building typically includes several different safety systems, however a building under construction could have most or all of these systems inoperative. Include additional ignition risks like hot works, potentially increased fuel loads from construction waste and plastic shrink wrap and you have a recipe for disaster. We only need to look to the Gothenburg water park fire a year ago or the more local Sky City Convention Centre fire in 2019 to see the devastating effect a fire can have on a large project, not to mention the impacts to the environment and local economy and the potential for injury or loss of life. This webinar presents some pragmatic, effective mitigation measures that all construction companies should consider, to reduce the risk of fire during construction.

How well prepared are you, at your remote work site, to deal with an emergency? How would you feel, looking after a very unwell person for an hour, while emergency services try and find your site, send the right resources, travel there, and take your patient from you? We often find ourselves working in high hazard environments. A broken arm might make you feel squeamish, but your first aid training has set you up to deal with it, right? What about a heart attack? A stroke? The major bleed from an amputation or inability to breathe from a fall or something hitting a person? Some of these injuries can result in a very poor outcome. Your other health & safety systems, effectively planned and rigorously followed minimise the chance of that happening. But, what if … ? It’d be terrible, but you can maximise the chance of a favourable outcome, by being appropriately prepared. Deane is a civil engineer. After a career from the Ministry of Works to Opus, he started in private practice in 2002, based in Hokitika on the South Island’s West Coast. Deane has worked across a wide range of industries as a technical engineer, a project manager and a risk manager, from roads and railways, to industrial and institutional facilities, the insurance industry, ferries, heritage and emergency facilities, disaster response management, to underground coal mining. Deane is a keen volunteer. He has been an IPENZ branch chair and board member. He is currently a chair of disciplinary committees. Possibly as a result of excessive optimism, shortly after starting his own business, he surprised he had no work. Walking around town one day, he spied the St John ambulance station, and asked if they take volunteers. He has since been trained as an emergency medical technician, and is now a registered paramedic. His variety of volunteer and paid roles in St John have included working on a road ambulance, training other first responders, and working in the national communications centre supporting road crews, FENZ, Police and patients in the community.

Real risk management is about more than forms and compliance. It’d be hard to find a person who says they are not looking out for others, yet people keep getting hurt. After working on a construction project where a worker suffered a fatal injury, Deane developed a passion for protecting people. Not for filling out forms, or “complying with the law”, but genuinely keeping people safe at work. Deane will talk through a few jobs he has been involved with, describe some risks he has identified, and touch on how he sought specialist advice about how real those risks were, then communicated the risks and more importantly their controls, to workers and clients. Hopefully, you recognise or reflect on things you’ve done to protect people. If not, maybe you’ll see ways to up your game. The main thing Deane will encourage you to do is, think about protecting people, seek (and apply) specialist advice, and if you see something then say something.

Since 1992, New Zealand has had “performance-based” health and safety law, first under the Health and Safety in Employment Act and now under the Health and Safety at Work Act. This approach to regulation was adopted to give organisations the greatest possible amount of flexibility about how they achieved the required health and safety standard, without prescribing specific solutions. Organisations have been supported by an army of consultants offering everything from generic templates through to sophisticated, bespoke advice. Since 1992, New Zealand’s health and safety statistics have barely budged. The industries with the highest rates of harm are basically the same industries as they always have been. And businesses report that their biggest problem is understanding what they’re supposed to do. After the independent taskforce reviewed health and safety performance, and identified that the 1992 law wasn’t working, significant reforms were undertaken – but these essentially doubled-down on an assumption that health and safety regulation needed to be performance-based. Since then, discussions of issues with the health and safety regulatory framework have tended to focus on how to fix specific issues with the current practice (competence of H&S consultants, skills pipelines, etc), without questioning that underlying assumption. This webinar will question that underlying assumption, and ask the question: is performance-based regulation actually fit for purpose? Would we be better off plucking low-hanging fruit in our H&S performance by being a little bit more prescriptive in our regulations? Attendees may or may not agree with this contention – prompting a spirited debate is exactly the intended outcome.

The committees of the RSEG and NZSSE invited their members to a hybrid in-person/online event where Jack Mains presented a webinar titled: “Entertainment on the edge – what the public don’t need or want to know about amusement rides”. Jack shared some anecdotes from his many years certifying amusement devices and the risk assessment process required to ensure amusement devices are enjoyable, but also safe. Rob Holland, chair of the NZSSE, also gave a short presentation about the popular log flume attraction and the work he and his colleague Scott Jackson (chair of the RSEG) completed there.