State’s Building Boom Is Taking a Fatal Toll
As a stylish apartment complex takes shape in Irvine, three men pick their way through an unreinforced trench, between walls of unsecured dirt up to their ears.
At a new cookie-cutter subdivision going up a few miles to the south, a man wearing neither safety harness nor hard hat traipses across a narrow wooden roof frame, 20 feet above the ground.
On hectic construction sites across Southern California, workers wield saws without wearing face shields or goggles, navigate around unmarked excavation pits and stroll bare-headed past signs that say “Hard Hat Area.”
These are the front lines of California’s deadliest business--construction.
The state’s building boom, perhaps the most physical manifestation of its rollicking prosperity, has generated a striking side effect: growing numbers of worker deaths and injuries.
Ninety-three construction workers were killed on the job in California last year--edging for the first time past all other industries, according to federal data released Thursday. Although other industries come close, experts say construction’s shift to the top of the list highlights the worsening safety picture for construction workers over the last five years.
The casualty list for just the last 10 days in Anaheim includes one death by electrocution, three workers hospitalized after accidents at Disneyland’s new Grand Californian Hotel and one miraculous escape when a framer plummeted from atop a four-story convalescent home, smashing rear-end first through the third-story flooring to the ground more than 30 feet below.
He came away battered, but alive.
One culprit in the trend appears to be the roaring economy, which has thinned the labor pool and increased the workload in an inherently risky business.
At Devcon Construction Inc., Silicon Valley’s largest general contractor, schedules have surged to 25% to 30% faster, said Ken Sullivan, the company’s safety director.
“The dot-com market has created an incredible demand and they need their facilities so fast,” Sullivan said. Compressed jobs can be done safely, he said, but “it pushes the sequence. Trades are working at once, and one trade’s materials can create a hazard for another.”
Then there’s the near-desperate quest for a few good men.
“You can’t find qualified guys to hire,” said Matt Valente, owner of Valente Concrete Inc. in Corona. “My foreman makes about $40,000. His kid just got a job in Silicon Valley making $80,000, right out of school.”
Valente said he has turned down projects during this summer’s blistering building cycle rather than adding workers he considers chancy--but many contractors simply can’t afford that luxury.
Instead, they are augmenting a work force stretched taut by the boom with cheap, untrained workers, many of them Latino immigrants.
Injuries to these workers are rarely reported, but the men who gather near Home Depot stores each day looking for work carry the marks that attest to their reality.
Raul Cevallos’ hands have smooth shiny scars that make his skin look like a topographical map, the result of being burned by hot tar, he said. And Oscar Diaz said his thumb hasn’t worked right since a drywall he put in at a Laguna Beach catering business fell on him two months ago. He ignored the pain for the promise of $10 an hour and stuck his thumb in saltwater to ease the swelling, rather than seeing a doctor.
“I have no money, I have no papers and I needed to work,” he said.
Accidents on Increase
In the last five years, 433 people have died working on construction sites in California, by Cal/OSHA’s count. Countless others have been seriously injured.
And the swift pace of accidents is continuing. State safety officials logged 747 mishaps at construction sites last year--up 2% from 1998 but nearly 40% since 1995.
The official numbers may only hint at the true size of the problem. They do not include those tens of thousands of day laborers and other non-payroll workers who are picked up by dusty trucks or walk casually onto job sites.
Until a recent infusion of cash, budget cuts had left the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement program unable to do much more than conduct legally required accident investigations. That meant fewer unannounced spot checks to keep builders on their toes.
“Let’s face it, this is an industry that hasn’t been policed in a long time,” said Vicky Heza, acting deputy chief of enforcement for Cal/OSHA.
The agency’s accident reports give a grisly litany of everything that can go wrong in the course of erecting the new offices, subdivisions, plants and public works a bustling economy demands.
Amputations. Falls from roofs, scaffolds or ladders, which have nearly tripled since 1995. And lots of cave-ins.
That’s what happened to Sergio Rolando Barillos. He was hired in late March to build a retaining wall for a Tarzana homeowner’s swimming pool. The job was what city officials call a bootleg: The homeowner had not obtained a permit for the work.
Barillos helped dig a trench for the wall nearly 100 feet long and as much as 10 feet deep. But the ditch had no shoring to keep its walls stable and, when a miniature landslide rattled the site, Barillos was trapped, smothered by dirt, his chest compressed by its weight. Co-workers rushed to dig him out, but the 49-year-old Guatemalan immigrant died of asphyxiation.
Los Angeles County stopped the work and cited the homeowner. Cal/OSHA is investigating.
Though the building industry has expanded nationwide, the death toll in California has increased more steeply than elsewhere. Construction fatalities hit a peak in 1998 and are up 18% since 1995, a stark contrast with overall workplace deaths in California and nationwide, which have fallen to the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1992.
Some view such accidents as an unavoidable side effect of the boom.
“There’s more being built, more activity,” said Tim Coyle, senior vice president of the California Building Industry Assn., which represents 85% of the state’s home builders. “I don’t think there is any evidence that job sites aren’t as safe.”
But other industries are growing without paying such a high price, regulators note. Not only have on-the-job deaths declined in most other occupations, many have set new benchmarks for safety. The state’s overall workplace injury rate hit an all-time low in 1998, the latest year for which these figures are available.
The contrast is striking to Cal/OSHA’s Heza. She said: “It says this is an industry where we need to focus more attention.”
This sense of urgency fueled hearings in Sacramento in June and prompted Cal/OSHA to send teams of investigators to residential construction sites in Southern California twice this summer.
Occupational-safety officials nationwide also have stepped up construction-industry enforcement, levying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines against contractors in Texas, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere in the last three months.
In some cases, regulators say, contractors are operating at a dangerous pace, forcing several trades to work literally on top of each other rather than one after the other.
Profitability drives the schedule crunch, builders acknowledge. Eliminating hazards and equipping workers properly can add anywhere from 10% to 40% to a project’s budget, especially if contractors have to shut down to take protective measures, experts said.
“Every contractor tells me, ‘If I bid it that way, I won’t win the job,’ ” said Lane Ellison, owner of Common Sense Safety Inc. in Huntington Beach, which provides on-site safety management for general contractors. “I’ve probably heard that 70 times in the last two years.”
It’s often hard to know for sure when time pressure results in bad decisions.
Francisco Mendoza Jr., 25, was killed in January on the massive TrizecHahn Hollywood/Highland project when a crane’s slings gave way, bringing more than 42,000 pounds of steel beams crashing down on him.
Two witnesses reported that a general contractor’s foreman told Mendoza and a co-worker to ignore the slings’ weight capacity and to move the load in one pick, the Cal/OSHA case file says. Ellison, the general contractor’s safety advisor, said that Mendoza may have been urged to hurry by the foreman, but made the deadly miscalculation on his own.
Agency investigators never identified the foreman, but assessed two unusually severe penalties totaling $88,000 against Mendoza’s employer, Malcolm Drilling Co. in Irwindale, for being aware of the situation’s potential danger and failing to act. Malcolm Drilling is appealing the fine, a company spokesman said.
Mendoza’s family has filed a lawsuit.
“I will never be over this,” Mendoza’s mother said. “I spend every day crying and crying. The saddest thing about this is, it’s something that could have been prevented. I know it.”
A Call for Oversight
Another factor heightening the risk to workers is the industry’s overtaxed labor force, experts say.
California’s construction employment has exploded--growing at triple the rate for all other industries--and now stands at 741,000. But the industry is battling economic cross-currents devastating the ranks of experienced tradespeople.
“When the industry was down, we saw tradesmen either leave the state or go into other careers,” said Gordon Pippell, a former builder who runs Courage Safety Systems, a San Clemente consulting firm.
The new work force is predominantly Latino, mostly younger men often hindered by inability to speak English.
“If there’s a safety violation going on, the foreman can’t even tell the workers what they’re doing wrong,” said John Wilson, a former roofer who now runs PP Industries, a Placentia firm that acts as a liaison between unions and residential contractors.
Recent sweeps by Cal/OSHA and new state legislation, which raises penalties for violations and makes general contractors equally responsible when subcontractors are at fault, could help improve the industry’s safety record.
But most safety advocates are skeptical. Some say only bad news for the building industry--a downturn--will do that. Others favor installing mandatory labor management committees on work sites--a step often resisted by both contractors and unions--to force managers and workers to collaborate on safety.
“That’s the only way to stop injuries before they happen,” said Fran Schreiberg, and Oakland lawyer specializing in workplace cases. “Nothing else will make a difference.”
Meantime, new tales of bruised and broken bodies keep flowing in, accelerating as the summer building season reaches its zenith.
The margin of error that took Chris Buice was so small, so seemingly inconsequential.
The 43-year-old Riverside man had worked as a carpenter for 15 years at Prieto Construction Inc., an Irvine company that lays concrete foundations.
On July 13, Chris was at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, helping to build a parking structure. He used a circular saw to cut a 14 1/2-inch hole in a wooden deck on the second floor in preparation for pouring concrete.
Then, somehow, he fell through the narrow opening into a 10-foot pit.
“My guess is, it was hot day and maybe after making the cut, he stood up and got dizzy or somehow lost his balance,” said his brother, Steve, a top executive at Prieto. “Even now, everyone who looks at the opening can’t believe it happened.”
Chris was rushed to the hospital. Steve followed, driven by a colleague who decided his boss was too shaky to drive himself. Doctors worked for hours to save Chris, but he died from the head trauma.
Chris left behind a large, extended family: a wife, 7-year-old twins and four other children and stepchildren.
Cal/OSHA is investigating whether the cut should have been covered or if Chris should have been wearing a safety harness.
“He was a very good carpenter,” his brother said. “Very careful, too.”
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Dangerous Work
Construction deaths are increasing while on-the-job deaths overall are going down. In California, construction deaths outpaced those in every other sector for the first time last year.
