Illusion of safety?

Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

Eight workers died on the job at the CityCenter and Cosmopolitan construction sites from February 2007 to June 2008.

The number is shockingly high and has been blamed on the workers themselves and the torrid pace of construction on the Las Vegas Strip, among other things.

The general contractor, Perini Building Co., has repeatedly said it has done everything it can to create a safe work environment, but reports on the two work sites contradict that.

The reports were written by the AFL-CIO’s Center for Construction Research and Training with help from the federal government’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in response to the rash of accidents on the Strip. Over the course of 19 months, 12 construction workers on the Strip were killed.

The reports focus on the two sites being built by Perini. During site visits, researchers noted a series of dangers and found problems with Perini’s safety program.

As detailed in Tuesday’s Las Vegas Sun by Alexandra Berzon, the reports suggest that Perini seems satisfied with an illusion of safety. Management was criticized for failing to make safety a priority. Workers are blamed for accidents and fired for failing to follow safety regulations. Yet supervisors and management are not held accountable for safety, the report said.

In one instance, the report notes that a Perini safety official walked over a hole, went up a damaged ladder and saw a worker without safety glasses. The worker was sent home, but neither the hole nor the ladder was fixed.

During a safety orientation the researchers attended, Perini officials told workers to report safety problems but didn’t tell them how or to whom to report the problems. It also noted that a Spanish-speaking translator was present for only 15 minutes of the daylong orientation, despite the fact that 30 percent of the workforce doesn’t speak English.

Perini officials did not immediately respond to the report, but we hope they do. The report raises a number of serious issues, including a lack of enough safety officials to police the site, insufficient ventilation systems to remove fumes and a failure by the company to look at the root causes of accidents.

That is particularly troublesome. After eight deaths on the job on its projects and an untold number of injuries, the company should be doing all it can to find — and eliminate — the causes.