Everyone here at Ocean Builders works hard on the SeaPod project, and a lot of that work is potentially hazardous. As a company, we feel the responsibility to give our employees a safe working environment where we can minimize risks and hazards.

One of the integral parts of maintaining a safe working environment is Reynaldo Howell, our industrial safety and security officer. It is his job to ensure that everyone not only has a safe environment but also knows how to properly use safety equipment and personal protective equipment such as fall harnesses.

We have recently built a training room at the factory that we can use to bring the employees together for meetings and safety education. In the video below you can see Reynaldo giving a demonstration to our team about how to wear and use a fall protection harness. When working at heights where a fall could injure or kill someone, it is important to use these harnesses to help prevent accidents.

Accounting for more than 35% of all deaths, falls from height are the number one cause of death in the construction industry. One of the most unfortunate things about this statistic is that many of them would have been prevented had they been using proper fall protection. While falls aren’t the only risk in this industry, they can be some of the most devastating while also being some of the most preventable incidents.

While no company wants to see its employees get injured, there is another level for us here in Panama. It is very common for people to live with their extended families here, and for many of our employees, they are the primary income earner for their household. This means that if they are hurt or killed, then their entire family would be affected financially more than in other cultures.

This is one of the many reasons why we take safety very seriously and constantly work to maintain safe working environments and keep them up to date on safety training as much as we possibly can. Providing safety equipment such as hearing protection, fall protection, burn protection, and other forms of PPE coupled with proper education on how to use the equipment and how to work safely have created a safe working environment for our employees that we fully intend to maintain.