Confessions of a Female Safety Engineer

Confessions of a

Female Safety Engineer

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Wendy S. Delmater

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Abyss & Apex Publishing, LLC

Contents

Author’s Note

How I got Into This – or – I’d Rather Be Baking Cookies.

Scarcity is Your Friend

The First Hurdle

Earning My Spurs

Tales from a New World

Smile! You’re on Camera

Can You Top This Darwin Award?

All Good Things Come to an End

What is this ‘Sleep’ of Which You Speak?

Back in the Saddle

The Consulting Years

Life in the Big City

Operation Water Shield

Dodging Trains for Fun and Profit

Weekend Excursions and Vacation Relief

Fan Dance

The View From Nine Circuit Breaker Houses

My Bird’s-Eye-View of 9/11

Reconnaissance

Near Grand Army Plaza

Send in the Clowns

On the Flying Trapeze

NYU, and Winter Mud

Jamaica Yard

The Fatal Few

The Green Building, Battery Park City

In Praise of Turtles

On Roosevelt Island

Essex and Delancey

Alphabet Streets, and Con Ed

The Tale of the  Laborious Labor Leeches

Bellvue

Tall Boys, Steamfitters, and Chill

An End, And the Start of Mandatory Overtime

The Final Six Credits & Fort Knox

Sharpen Your Pencil While at School Construction

Tales out of School

Bronx Rail Yard  Near Manhattan College

Bronx Rail Yard Near  White Plains, And a Flapper

Staten Island Ferry

Mixed Use, and Magic

Beanies, Baby

Westchester Yard

Coney Island Yard

Times Square Gets A Finger

Hyatt on Library Row

The Boob Job

Left Hanging

Solow, You Can’t Get under It

Target and Shell Game

Uptown Girl

Downtown Brooklyn

The Toothless Wonder

Multi-Station Edge Repair

Hotels, Art, and  the Meatpacking District

Up in the Air

Remote Control

Postscript, or  "So, Aren’t You Some Kind of Feminist?

Glossary

Endnotes

Copyright Notice

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also By Wendy S. Delmater

Safety guidelines are written in blood.

–safety truism

The Engineer’s Dilemma

It’s not my place to run the train

The whistle I can’t blow.

It’s not my place to say how far

The train’s allowed to go.

It’s not my place to shoot off steam

Nor even clang the bell.

But let the damn thing jump the track

And see who catches hell!

–author unknown

Author’s Note

I spent my last couple of decades between worlds. Construction safety management is gray collar work; that means it bridges the gap between white collar professionals and blue collar labor. By and large, my career was all about translating from one world to another.

I’ve also spent the last few decades translating thoughts, writing and editing. I’ve spent two years as the national newsletter editor for the construction division of the American Society of Safety Engineers, edited an online science fiction magazine (Abyss & Apex) that is known for finding new talent, written books on how to find a spouse in midlife, and I’ve written a volume that tries to explain the experience of depression to the non-depressed. These creative projects were also all about explaining one world to another.

Welcome to my world.

Confessions of a Female Safety Engineer is an inside look at hidden New York. Construction in New York City is divorced from the overall culture of the metropolis, which only intrudes when a tradesman plays music on his radio or they talk about sports scores. And within the world of construction management, there is no odder place to be than that of the construction safety engineer.

I will also take you inside obscure neighborhoods and introduces you to unforgettable characters. The stories are true, although many of the names have been changed to protect the innocent, or the absurd.

Come along on an adventure I never expected, where a woman gets to participate in one of the last bastions of work in a male-dominated field. These are my field notes from the other side.

It’s been a hell of a ride.

Wendy S. Delmater

How I got Into This – or –

I’d Rather Be Baking Cookies.

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I was abandoned with three small sons, aged six (Dan), five (Chris), and three (Jon), to provide for. At the time my ex-husband was not paying anything toward the children. And when he did eventually pay child support, it was only $100 a week for all three of our kids. So, I had to work outside the home. And as I looked around me I saw a disturbing trend: single mothers who worked two jobs in the Pink Collar Ghetto to make ends meet. Maybe they’d work as house or office cleaners on top of being waitresses or home health aides or clerks. This meant they were never home and their children in effect lost both parents. I did not want my sons to lose me as a parent, too.

I therefore looked for a single high-paying job to support us, one job only, so I would have time to be a parent. And I found that high pay rates ultimately meant either an advanced degree which I did not have time for, or looking at non-traditional work for women in male-dominated fields.

But which field? I was determined that my work be something I could at least be good at and enjoy, because I’d seen first-hand while growing up how doing work you hated could sap your strength and steal your soul. My father had been a Navy pilot in WWII: carrier landings, flying inside of hurricanes, the works. He loved to fly, lived for it. Then his eyes went on him, back when you could not wear glasses and fly. So he got an honorable discharge, and went to college on the GI Bill. He opted for a ‘safe’ tenured teaching career. And although he was very good at teaching, he hated it. His heart was in the sky, and my father became a bitter six-pack-a-night alcoholic who sat there and watched old war movies when not taking out his frustrations on his family.

I was determined to take a lesson from that. So yes, I was looking for a high-paying, traditionally male position, but it had to be something I liked. I was also looking for a career in a field that would not be taken over by automation or shipped overseas. And I had to be able to take my existing experience as a restaurant manager and the person who ran my ex’s home improvement business office, and be able to start making decent money before our foreclosed house was taken by the bank.

Luckily for me I was offered free occupational counseling and testing by a local charity. The testing told me that I worked well alone, and should avoid things I was not constitutionally suited for, like accountancy. I learned my various marketable traits. They suggested I get a copy of What Color is Your Parachuteii, so I did. The triangulation exercises in that book helped me map paths from where I was to where I wanted to be. I could not go back into restaurant management since that would mean I only worked when the kids were not in school but...management. One thing stood out in those exercises; my management skills were transferrable.

While I contemplated a new career I worked as an office temp. I also learned the ropes of being truly poor, navigating various government agencies and learning the brutal facts about how our system has failed them. Because I was living rent-free in a foreclosed home and made $6 an hour I only qualified for assistance with childcare costs! My sons and I made do with thrift store clothes and food bank food. Thanks to my brother sending me old computers with software installed, I learned at home how to type and use a PC, and I got familiar with various programs that would help me earn a living: MS-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and some desktop publishing.

As an office temp I could see a trend from the inside: in the late 80s companies gave secretaries a little more money and called them administrative assistants when they learned programs like Excel, and then the companies used the admins plus a spreadsheet program to replace most of expensive middle management. Otherwise, managers did their own administrative work. So if I went into management I would probably never have a secretary; I’d be lucky to share an admin. I’d need to learn the software skills I was honing as a temp to survive in management.

I also noted an unexpected pattern. Let’s call it Wendy’s High School Lunch Table Theory. The same like-minded folks that hung out together in high school seemed to congregate at the same businesses. In high school there were the jocks, the artsy types, the fashion plates, the mean girls, the geeks...and now as an office temporary I discovered that there were offices that seemed to attract similar personality types. Like my father teaching, I might do well at a business full of very different people than me, but I’d not be comfortable.

Still, no matter where they placed me, as an office temp I learned quickly. I picked up positions like Executive Secretary and doing monster spreadsheets for huge companies. And then a temp agency placed me at the job that would change my life forever.

Scarcity is Your Friend

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As an office temp I not only learned scarce skills, mostly in Excel since I was not a fast typist, but once I had those spreadsheet skills I quickly learned how to play the temp agencies against each other. I was registered with multiple agencies—temp-to-perm ones that tended to have longer assignments—and when one temp firm had no work the others always did. When multiple agencies offered me temp positions I’d take the higher-paying one.

One of the three agencies I was registered with saw my experience running my ex’s home improvement company’s office for ten years and placed me at a large construction site startup, as a combination admin and plan clerk to the general contractor until they could get an admin who was a faster typist. The first week I was stuck in an office trailer that had no heat in February since the electricity was not hooked up yet. We worked in parkas wearing fingerless gloves, by daylight. As someone who loved to go camping it was rather fun, actually. And the people were great: hard working, dedicated, witty, and smart. This was an office environment that attracted people from a lunch table I’d be comfortable at. Bonus! The job was during school hours for my kids, and five minutes from home.

In a few weeks the construction office moved into a nearby building, an abandoned mental hospital office, slogan, You don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps. In a few more weeks a fellow came from their corporate office to do safety orientations for the staff and each subcontractor as the trades were signed on. This was a revelation to me. The only thing I’d enjoyed about being a restaurant manager was the safety work. You mean, I could do safety full time?

I checked out the possibility of doing safety management as a career. It paid well. More importantly, the work was not considered an overhead expense as it paid for itself with employers in lowered Worker Compensation insurance costs and lower litigation costs. Furthermore, this work was in no danger of being replaced by technology or being shipped overseas. I found that there was a huge need for safety managers. And what was even better was that hardly anyone wanted to do it!

By this time the construction company had hired me away from the temp agency. From the instant I told them I wanted to do construction safety work, full time, their corporate safety office did all they could to get me into that position. It seemed that they were constantly training people to be safety managers and losing them; project managers and superintendents wanted to get a little safety on their resume and would go back to being PMs and supers after being trained. The fact that I wanted to do safety, and only safety, really appealed to them.

The construction company immediately had me meet with their corporate safety manager, who signed me up to take an associates-degree-equivalent correspondence course with The Alliance of American Insurers. The safety director put my training under the auspices of the site project engineer. I was given the title Assistant Safety Manager and pursued my studies while simultaneously handling the plan clerk work for a $178-million dollar project.

At this point, I got back out my copy of What Color is Your Parachuteiii and did the triangulation exercises again. This time I had a more definite goal in mind. What would be my path to being a safety manager? There were several.

My research told me that safety management jobs branched into three paths: Insurance, Industrial, and Construction. Construction safety managers had the highest pay, the biggest labor shortage, and the most payoff for the companies they worked for since the workers they managed were considered high-risk by insurers, and a safe track record in construction meant a company paid substantially less in insurance.

Construction safety management itself had two main paths: one could follow large construction companies around the USA and the world (and hope to not get laid off and abandoned in a strange place), or one could base oneself in a major metropolitan area and do various construction projects there. As I did not want to drag my small children around the country, and lived near New York City, I chose what seemed to be the most stable of the two options, a location-based construction safety management career. So how would that work in NYC?

As a trainee safety manager I was studying Federal OSHA and EPA regulations, as well as New York State safety-related laws concerning everything from asbestos & lead removal to the transportation of hazardous materials. But it seemed that New York City had its own safety laws, which were all about protecting the adjacent buildings and property. New York City’s safety laws as well as federal and state safety laws were upheld by a severely understaffed position called Site Safety Manager. That was my goal, then, to become an NYC licensed Site Safety Manager. The question then became, how to go about becoming one?

An NYC site safety manager’s license required a 40-hour course and an exam. To sit for the exam, you needed to have eight years of verifiable work in heavy construction on what they called a major building, or only four years’ experience if you had a degree in safety or a related field. At the time, NYC defined a major building as a construction project that was at least eight stories high or had a footprint of at least half a city block. One of the buildings on our multi-building courthouse project was going to be eight stories tall and the project was slated to run three years! It was a good start.

Due to the severe shortage of construction safety managers, my employer sent me to a week-long crash safety management course at the National Safety Council, then in Chicago. I had a marvelous trip where learned a great deal in a class full of others who loved this subject. I missed my gradeschool-aged sons very much but my sister watched them for me.

I learned the history of the safety movement in the United States. Around the turn of the century, several disasters happened at the dawn of our Industrial Revolution. First there was the Great Chicago Fire of 1870: the main problem that caused it to spread so far was not Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over a lantern, it was the fact that all of the responding fire departments had different diameter hoses with different couplings. Railroad, mining and steel production in brought a tremendous increase in accidents, and unions formed. Then there was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, an avoidable tragedy that could have been prevented by unblocked, unlocked fire exits. 145 young women died, and the public was outraged. Insurance, which only used to cover property, started to cover people. Worker’s Compensation insurance, which started in Europe, made its way to the USA, state by state.

The history of safety management was one long bloody march from uncaring employers who felt a few deaths and disfigurements were the cost of doing business to an outraged public insisting that such a cost was absolutely unacceptable. I learned, then, the various ways to protect workers. I’ll weave them into real world examples, later in this book.

After the week-long safety course was over, on Friday, I had a day to myself to see the city before I flew back home on Saturday afternoon. I got cheap tickets to the Chicago symphony and went out to eat for dinner, using most of my expense account for that day on a nice meal. I was thrilled to see that some members of my safety class that week were dining at the same restaurant, some executives from United Parcel Service. I tried to join them. Outside of the classroom, however, these men dropped their polite veneer. It was my first encounter with rabid misogyny. Who did I think I was, believing a woman could be a safety manager or even want to talk to exalted them? They left the room in a huff, so upset that the maître d came over to try and smooth the situation. In recompense for my bad experience he offered me a voucher for free meal, with wine and dessert. Ha! Thanks, nasty UPS execs!

Then it was time for the symphony. But an elderly man was sleep in my cheap seat. He apologized profusely, explaining that since he was semi-retired he liked to sleep during the performances and no one ever bought this inexpensive seat in the back. He was one of the curators of the Chicago Field Museum. As a recompense for taking my seat (there were 30 empty seats nearby, no problem for me I assured him) would I like a personalized tour of The Field Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago tomorrow, including where they set up the exhibitions in the back? Sure!

So Saturday morning I got a free personalized tour of one of the world’s most famous natural history museums. I got to see things most visitors never glimpse, like where they did radioactive carbon dating of artifacts, and how they set up the exhibits. Then my personal docent guide took me through the nearby Art Institute of Chicago, which has world-famous pieces like the iconic painting American Gothic. This was followed by a delicious free lunch with that voucher. I flew home feeling more confident that I knew enough to start making a difference as a safety manager. I was awed that they needed someone to do this sort of work so badly that they’d paid for this marvelous trip.

Back at the construction site where I worked, I studied. I started leading safety meetings for the project management. I learned to read blueprints and all about construction scheduling. I was, nominally, part of the management team and went to job progress meetings.

But my problem was getting out of that construction trailer, and into the field. The safety department might want me, badly. But the project manager wouldn’t authorize it.

Because I was female.

The First Hurdle

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There were four other women who worked for my employer on that site: the estimator, the human resources manager, the secretary/admin and one of my best friends on the construction site, Lori.

Lori was a younger woman who was a structural engineer. Very brilliant, very nice looking in a girl-next-door-cheerleader sort of way, very down to earth. We ate lunch together often and she loved to spoil my sons. I asked her into my plan clerk office and shut the door.

Lori, I said, would you believe they won’t authorize me going out into the field to do safety work?

Why? she asked, incredulous.

Because I might get hurt.

What??? How old are you?

I’m thirty-four, I replied.

Her eyes went huge. I’ll bet they wouldn’t say that if you were a guy! What can we- she snapped her fingers. I know! Let’s have this conversation again outside of Sam’s office.

Deal. We left my office and walked down to the hall between the Dave project engineer’s and Sam the project manager’s offices. Their doors were open and we could see in passing that Sam was at his desk. We stood just out of sight, but not out of earshot. She nodded for me to begin.

Lori, they won’t authorize me going out into the field to do safety work!

Why not?

Because they say I ‘might get hurt.’

Are you kidding? And just how old are you?

I’m thirty-four, I replied, sounding very annoyed. All rusting of papers from the boss’ office had stopped.

"Thirty-four? Well. I’ll bet they wouldn’t say that if you were a guy, " Lori growled.

I know. It’s ridiculous.

Lori, eyes sparkling, ended our mini protest by giving me a thumbs up as she looked at the big boss’ office. Oh, I have to meet someone. Catch you later! We parted ways, going opposite directions.

I was authorized to go out into the field the next day.

Earning My Spurs

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The next morning I was called into the Dave the project engineer’s office.

We’re letting you out in the field. Spend the time learning. Your background is in residential remodeling, not heavy construction. So if you are not familiar with a process, stop and ask questions. They have a lot to teach you.

I nodded.

Dave continued, "I’ve spoken to the superintendents and asked them to meet with you. Here’s a radio (a walkie talkie). Here’s how the radio works. Be careful using it. Anything you say on this everyone else will hear. And you are not to stop the work out there except for an IDLH: a situation immediately dangerous to life and health. Got it? Good. Go meet with the