- After the Berlin Wall fell,
our company went into
East Germany to establish
a new mining operation.
When we went to the job and one
of the first things we found
was in the warehouse they
had caskets already made.
Holy cow, you know we're
going from trying to work
on people you know not being injured,
these guys have already got boxes made
for people who get hurt.
I'm Brad Giles, Principal with
Bradley Giles and Associates.
I've worked as a safety professional
for over 40 years of my career.
And what of the adages that I believe
is that leadership drives culture
and culture drives safety.
Every environment you go in to you have
to work on improving that culture.
I could tell you that probably the most
impactful to me was World Trade Center.
Where our guys were
working 12 hour shifts,
two 12 hour shifts,
pulling pieces of steel
out and they're still
red hot burning at about 3,000 degrees.
We dealt with so many unknowns.
We were there for the safety,
we weren't there to beat
em' up in violations,
we were there to try to help the employers
and help the employees to you know figure
out how to do things the right way.
I firmly believe culture drives safety.
You know it's something
you have to start off with,
you have to build that platform.
We worked for over 25 years doing
a variety of things in Egypt.
The culture there was mainly
working with people's hands.
You had a very large workforce,
and the government really
wanted you to utilize those.
Again that was a culture
that believed in faith,
you know if it's gonna
happen it's gonna happen.
Going into the various
villages and cities,
they were hundreds or
thousands of years old.
Very narrow streets and confined
areas for you to work in.
We would build freshwater,
wastewater lines
down the middle of a street,
and you would have somebody sitting
on their front doorstep five feet away.
I had the opportunity to go to Denver,
they asked me to come down for
two weeks and a take a look,
there was some issues.
My two week assignment
ended up being two years.
They were having a lot of issues,
and they projected huge losses.
So when I went in initially we
had 3,000 employees on site,
built up to well over 11,000
people on site everyday.
Safety became a high profile activity.
And in the end you know reduced
our injuries dramatically,
so instead of losing money
I think they came in at like
a $200 million surplus.
We've proved to the owners
of those contractors,
who manage those contractors that planning
and executing for safety was actually
a good business decision.
