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A group of Landis construction workers in hard hats and high-vis vests at a construction site on a cloudy day.

Building Relationships with Safety at the Forefront

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Gary Melerine and Kyle Condon
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Blog
By Director of Field Coordination Gary Melerine & Chief Construction Officer Kyle Condon

Now, more than ever, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, all companies are tasked with re-thinking how they approach keeping their employees, partners, and communities safe. This National Safety Month, celebrated across the country throughout the month of June, it’s extremely important for local industry leaders – especially those in the construction field – to reflect on existing practices, policies, and procedures relative to safety and continue to adapt and evolve as we’ve been forced to do these last 15 months.

Since its establishment over six decades ago, Landis Construction has always prioritized a company culture rooted in safety, professionalism, and community partnerships. We value our relationships with our staff, our clients, our subcontractors, and our surrounding community above all else, and in order to maintain them, it’s imperative we keep them safe.

Having strong safety protocols and plans in place before work begins is essential for any construction project, but particularly for those located within active building sites or locations. One such project where safety planning and close collaboration played a key role was our recently completed Linear Park project at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The Convention Center hosts up to 130 events in a year and can attract over half a million visitors. This highly public, highly visible project required a dedicated safety team, detailed control processes, executive oversight, and deployment of our rigorous safety practices. The Landis project team worked closely with the architect (EDR/Manning Architects), the Owner (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center New Orleans), and nearby businesses to ensure that risks were anticipated and eliminated in order to protect both Convention Center guests and employees. Those risk-eliminating methods included soliciting the most qualified and professional subcontractors with experience and resources to perform their scopes, safety hazard identification and analysis, pre-task planning meetings, and more.

As the selected general contractor and project partner, we act as an extension of the Owner and strive to do what is right, fair, and most importantly, what is safe for their business. Every project is different, which is why Landis creates site-specific safety plans to meet the unique needs of each building, jobsite, and all those within the impacted area. This past year, our teams constantly monitored the rapidly-changing safety guidelines and recommendations by local and federal officials. When the first local case of COVID-19 was confirmed last March, Landis took immediate action, making the difficult decision to temporarily pause construction on all of our active job sites at the time. While this presented a challenge in terms of scheduling and client expectations, the pause allowed us to step back, review and ultimately step up by rewriting our site-specific safety plans.

These new and improved guidelines not only better served us during the unprecedented early months of the pandemic, but will continue to improve how we approach safety in the months and years ahead. For our employees and subcontractors, that distinct line-in-the-sand created an unmistakable marker for the change in expectations and provided strong clarity of what to expect from Landis moving forward. For all project partners and stakeholders, including our clients, this provided greater certainty that we would not experience unforeseen interruptions due to COVID-related incidents.

 

We have continued to leverage and increasingly utilize our long-standing relationship with Engineering Safety Consultants (ESC) to oversee all safety aspects of our work, including safety reviews and other key services – this partnership has been vital to our success throughout the pandemic and will continue to be critical to our success moving forward.
A quote graphic on a red background that reads: "In response to 818 Howard - COVID-19 Site Specific Safety Plan: This is fantastic. The most in-depth, detailed plan I have seen thus far. Most contractors are simply saying 'Follow CDC'. Thank you Landis! - Norbert Lathan, ESC Safety Consultants."
In 2015, Landis employees celebrated working 172,383 hours with zero incidents/injuries, and we strive to achieve the same level of success each and every day. As they’ve done for the last 65 years, our team will continue to excel in this area and utilize evolving technologies, best practices, and industry standards to provide the level of safety and service the New Orleans community deserves.

The safety of our team, clients, partners, and surrounding community has always been and remains our top priority. As we’ve done since our founding, we will continue to display transparency in all that we do, both internally and externally, during and beyond the COVID-19 crisis. We encourage anyone with questions, comments, or concerns to please reach out to us online, by email at info@landisllc.com or by phone at 504-833-6070.

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