On a large project, safety is somebody's job. On a house, a maisonette, a four-unit block, it is nobody's job in particular, which usually means it is the owner's job, whether or not they know it.
The costly part of site safety is rarely the equipment. It is that nobody decided anything before work started, so every decision gets made at speed, by whoever is holding the tool.
Decide these before the first delivery
- Who is in charge on site, by name, every day. Not "the fundi" collectively. One person who can stop work, and who everyone knows can stop work.
- Where materials go. Sand, ballast and blocks stacked away from the working edge and away from where people walk. Most of the small injuries on small sites are trips and falling material, not dramatic accidents.
- How people get up and down. A proper ladder or a built stair, secured. Improvised access is the most common serious risk on a small build and the cheapest to remove.
- What happens to an injury. Where the first aid kit is, who has a vehicle, and the nearest facility that can handle a cut, a fall or an eye injury. Write the details somewhere on site.
The basics people skip
Helmets and boots for everyone, including visitors. The owner walking round on a Saturday in sandals is exactly who gets hurt, because they are the one not thinking about what is overhead.
Eye protection for cutting and grinding. The single highest-consequence, lowest-cost item on any site. A pair of goggles costs less than one clinic visit.
Edge protection on anything raised. Any slab edge, stairwell opening or first-floor perimeter that someone can walk off. Temporary is fine. Absent is not.
Keep the site tidy at close of day. Nails, offcuts, exposed reinforcement bars, open excavations. Ten minutes at the end of each day removes most of what injures people at the start of the next one.
Lock it, and think about who else can get in. Children get into unsecured sites. An open excavation or an unsecured stack of blocks is a serious hazard to someone who was never working there.
Water, power and the two that get forgotten
Temporary power on a wet site deserves a real distribution board and cabling kept off the ground, not a socket extension running through a puddle. And if anyone is working in a trench deeper than chest height, the sides need support. Collapses happen in ordinary soil, without warning, and they are not survivable for long.
Write down what happened
Keep a simple site diary: who was on site, what was done, deliveries received, and anything that went wrong, including near misses where nobody was hurt. Near misses are free information about the accident you have not had yet.
It also has a second use. A diary of attendance and deliveries is the same record that tells you where your money went, which is why cost control and site safety tend to improve together: both depend on somebody writing down what actually happened on the day it happened, rather than reconstructing it at the end.
None of this is specialist. It is a morning of decisions, a modest shopping list, and the habit of ten minutes' tidying at close of day.