Grace under fire

Central Market, under construction in Abu Dhabi, has won an award for site safety, an accolade partly put down to incessant training and tool box talk

“Our priorities are to prevent fires in the first place, then to identify them quickly and finally for trained workers to deal with them,” adds Dent.

“We take pictures, we run Powerpoint presentations and we also have a completely blame free culture here, which is as imperative as the communication.”

At the heart of all that Aldar, ACC, Atkins and EC Harris are doing at Central Market lies the principles behind BuildSafe, for which Broderick is the Abu Dhabi spokesperson. Aldar will only work with contractors that are signed up with BuildSafe, he says, and the BuildSafe notices and instructional diagrams decorating the site back up this claim.

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“If there are any incidents, BuildSafe investigates them and encourages the sharing of knowledge rather than covering up mistakes. That’s how the industry improves.”

It can be easy to see a construction site – especially one for a project as large as Central Market – as a hundred mini-projects, a thousand small jobs, a million separate tasks…and, in many ways, that’s true. Workers arrive, head to their floor, their section, their duty for the day and rarely interact.

However, having spent an hour or so on-site here it demonstrates just how uniting HSE can be.

“No matter what problems exist between the client, the contractor and sub-contractors – and, of course, issues do occur – everyone wants the same thing when it comes to health and safety. We’re all pulling in the same direction,” explains Broderick.

It must be good to know, when you’re 67 floors up, carrying out hot works, that should anything happen, 6,000 men and a whole lot of safety procedures have got your back.