[Updated 7/15/20] As governors take steps toward reopening their states’ economies, builders and remodelers are getting used to a new normal on the job site. Construction has been deemed an essential or critical industry in most states throughout the shutdowns, and work has been continuing on many job sites. But the rules have changed: Employers are charged with maintaining safety practices designed to prevent the spread of the deadly COVID-19 disease caused by coronavirus. Those work practice requirements will likely stay in place even as the list of industries allowed to conduct business grows.
Like the rest of the nationwide coronavirus response, policy is being set mostly at the state and local level. Although the CDC and OSHA both have resource pages up on the Web with general advice on maintaining a safe job site, neither agency’s advice specifically targets construction. But around the country, some states and municipalities are providing specific guidance for the construction industry. Colorado, for example, offers a detailed explanation of Governor Polis’ orders with respect to job sites (see: “Multi-Industry Construction Guidance”). In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where only limited construction has been allowed to continue, the city published mandatory guidelines for construction during the pandemic.
COVID-19 Safety Resources
National, state, and local resources on safety best practices to observe during the health crisis. Click here.
Throughout the nation, required safe practices appear to be very consistent from state to state. It starts with workers, delivery drivers and anyone else entering the work site signing in. This is to assist with contact tracing in the event someone does come down with COVID-19. At the start of the day, workers are asked to self-certify that they haven’t been exposed to the coronavirus. They’re asked about their symptoms, and sent home if they report a dry cough, fever, shortness of breath or other COVID-19 symptoms such as runny nose, nausea, sore throat, or body aches. Some companies are also asking workers to check their temperatures on a daily basis before coming to work.
Once on the job, workers are required to maintain a 6-foot distance from each other. Where that’s not possible because of the nature of the work, they’re required to wear masks, and told to face away from each other if possible. Groups larger than ten people are prohibited. Employers are told to reduce the size of work groups as much as possible, even if that means staging crews and forcing the work to slow down. Tool sharing is discouraged. Surfaces must be cleaned and disinfected frequently. Bottles of hand sanitizer and portable washing stations are becoming standard in or near portable toilets.
Builders get proactive. In southern California, production builders are taking the policy seriously. Rod Plunkett is a safety officer with Shea Homes and a member of the Southern California Builders Safety Alliance. In a phone interview, Plunkett said, “We have some guidelines from CalOSHA, but we’re doing stuff ourselves and trying to stay out ahead of them. So, we’re trying to schedule work so we don’t have trades on top of each other — which is not a bad thing, giving the trades the time to do their job. But, yeah — 6 feet everywhere, masks mandatory everywhere, hand washing stations, the whole drill.” Shea’s portable toilet contractor was unable to locate soap or toilet paper, says Plunkett, “so we found resources. We ended up getting a brewery to make hand sanitizer for us, and buying it for the trades. We’re getting creative to keep moving.”
Other builders in the Safety Alliance are taking a similar tack. Said Plunkett, “Brookfield Homes have really stepped up and are on top of it, and Taylor Morrison Homes have really stepped up.” But performance by the trade contractors has been mixed. “It’s like a 50-50 split,” said Plunkett. “Fifty percent of them are thankful and grateful and appreciative of being able to work, and they’ll do whatever it takes to do that. There’s another percentage that act like they’re doing you a favor by keeping the six feet and wearing the masks, and they have the attitude. But we’re zero tolerance. If a trade’s not wearing their mask or not maintaining the 6 feet, they’re out of there. They’re off the job. We’re not taking any chances of the state shutting down our site.”
In Colorado, safety consultant Dan Johnson says his company, SFI Compliance, is focusing hard on COVID-19. “We’re still out there inspecting our clients’ sites, and we are still looking for all safety and health hazards, as well as focusing on COVID,” said Johnson. “But we have hired some people to help us do more inspections to just focus on the COVID-safe work practices. And really making sure everybody is following the guidelines.”
About 95% of SFI Compliance’s clients are contractors, about half residential and half commercial, Johnson said. On housing developments, he said, builders are keeping it to one trade per house. Even then, he said, there’s room to create more social distancing. “Say we go into a single family house, and we see some drywallers in a room, we’ll talk to them and say ‘Hey, we have to spread this out, we should only have two people in this room,’ so they can maintain that 6-foot distance.”
Slow cadence. In Massachusetts, remodeler Kevin Cradock is back at work after a brief shutdown. Cradock has six ongoing jobs, most of them in Boston or Cambridge, cities with strict regulations for COVID-19 safety. The restrictions are slowing down the work significantly, Cradock told JLC. “All our jobs are large gut-renovations, so we have inside and outside work,” said Cradock. “But we’re restricting the inside work to one sub at a time, instead of two to four. So that is slowing us down. And we’re spending about 20 hours a week per job on cleaning and sanitizing.”
“We’re socially distancing from the subs, so it’s hard to observe exactly how they’re doing stuff,” said Cradock. “But the work that we are doing, with the PPE and with having people work individually rather than team-driven, by the nature of that it just slows down.” Fortunately, Cradock’s contracts are cost-plus, so he’s billing clients for the actual hours spent. “We’re being real upfront with people,” he said. “We don’t have a choice, we have to do this.”
Cradock’s project leads are interviewing all workers to make sure they don’t report symptoms of COVID-19. “We have a script,” he said. “Everything we have written down in our plan, we’re actually doing. So we’re asking people if they’ve been sick, if they’ve been around people that are sick, the whole thing.” Absenteeism is affecting the pace of jobs, he explained: “We’re exercising an abundance of caution with whether or not people are coming to work. Of the crew that we have back running, we’ve probably had two to three people out every day that aren’t really sick. But ‘Hey, my wife has a tickle in her throat,’ or this or that.”
“We haven’t had anybody really get sick,” said Cradock, but there’s anxiety among the rest of the crew when people are out. “We’re trying to navigate the call-ins while trying to respect people’s privacy. There’s nothing to report, but the unknowns are making people anxious about it. They’re worried about their co-workers.”
“Tomorrow we have a Zoom call with everybody that is working on site,” Cradock said. “A lot of that will be saying, ‘Don’t worry about the people that are out. It’s not serious, it’s just what we have to do.’ I’ve had a couple of project managers out, and there’s nothing wrong with them. Ordinarily, they would be at work. But obviously these are not ordinary times.”
Permitting and inspections have also been affected by the COVID-19 emergency. Ezra Hammer is the vice president for policy and govenment affairs at the Home Builders Association of Metro Portland. “Our jurisdictional partners out here were obviously hit the same way that the builders were hit,” said Hammer. “They had to pivot to situations where they could accept new applications without person to person interaction. A number of our jurisdictions were able to pivot pretty smoothly over to systems where they are able to accept digital plans and digital applications. But some were not, and so they have had to put in place systems where there are either secure drop boxes for plans to be left at, or rooms within building departments where plans are dropped off. In the latter situation, a number of jurisdictions are either sanitizing those plans or leaving them for a number of days in order to minimize any sort of spread. And even in situations where digital plans are being accepted, it took a number of our jurisdictions up here several weeks to get up and running with those programs. So on the front end of things we’ve seen the cities and counties be unable to accept new plans in a way that they were previously able to do, and that has created a slowdown.”
“It has also taken our jurisdictions time to get up and running with digital hearings and public meetings,” said Hammer. “There are requirements to meet with neighborhood organizations in many jurisdictions, and depending on the type of project you are building there are requirements to go before various planning commissions, design review commissions, city councils, et cetera. And all of those processes have been a little bit slow getting up and running.”
Washingon re-opens (carefully). Homebuilder Justin Wood, president of the HBA of Metro Portland, is a builder both in Portland and in neighboring Vancouver, Washington. In Washington, builders have been shut down for weeks. But on Friday April 25, Governor Jay Inslee issued an order reopening some construction sites. The safety requirements in Washington, however, are significantly stricter than in Oregon. “Washington is back open on a very careful basis,” said Wood.
“In Oregon we’ve had to do training, and we’ve really pushed that out to the subcontractors,” said Wood. “And then it’s about monitoring all the subcontractors that they are able to maintain personal space and use the safety precautions as necessary. It’s more personal responsibility with supervision. Whereas the Washington model is going to be quite a lot of monitoring and keeping track of who’s on your site every day and really being able to follow up on that information. So it’s going to be a lot more management of the sites.”
