Action better than words

Labour Minister Danny Montano assured that if there has been any breach of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), the contractor would be held responsible. Emile Elias, whose NH International Caribbean Ltd is handling the project, said that an investigation is being conducted and NH “was not ruling out anything.” He added that his first concern was that the workers got appropriate care for their injuries.

Works Minister Colm Imbert, at yesterday’s post-Cabinet news briefing, said the OSHA council had been set up, although he made sure to also say that the timing was only coincidental. And Udecott chairman Calder Hart, appearing before a parliamentary committee on Thursday, revealed that international experts will be coming to investigate the cause of the accident.

Now the public has to wait and see if the right words will be followed by right action. There are only three basic possible causes for this accident: materials failure, human error, or some combination of the two. If it is the first, then this incident must be filed as one of those accidents that chance dictates will happen no matter how many precautions are taken.

Indeed, if it is true that NH International has never had an accident involving so many workers in 41 years, then this is a very good record, as is the 880,955 accident-free man hours on the waterfront project site. If, however, it turns out that human error was at the heart of the accident, then a good record is a secondary consideration.

Trade unionist Robert Guiseppi, who heads the National Trade Union Centre (NATUC), has asked whether there was a safety supervisor on the site and if life cables and harnesses were provided.

Mr Elias has already said that the site has safety procedures and safety inspections were done daily. The investigation must find out if this was indeed so. If NH International has a safety manual, then a thorough check must be carried out to ascertain if these procedures were followed and, if not, whether not following them was directly related to the scaffolding accident.

And, although this should go without saying, the investigation must be carried out by an independent agency. We emphasise this, because the temptation to gloss over, if not outright cover up, the causes of this accident will be considerable.

Even if professionalism may dictate otherwise, NH International has obviously self-interested motives to absolve itself from blame. But so does the Government, inasmuch as Prime Minister Patrick Manning has made the construction of new buildings in the capital city the showpiece of his Vision 2020.

This means that an independent investigation must be independent of both the private corporation and the public one. We therefore expect that full dossiers on the international experts Mr Hart spoke about will be provided to the public.

The fact is, the workers were very lucky that no one was killed.

But NH International and the Government were also lucky, since the repercussions if anyone had died would have been dire.

Both of them should take this incident as a warning, and ensure that no similar accidents occur in the future.