|
Crusade Against Substance Abuse
 |
| Florentino Gregorio speaks out on immigration
reform and enforcement. |
|
A knight of contracting upholds a strict code. Along with completing a job promptly with little complication, keeping concise documentation and ensuring the jobsite is safe is imperative. That means keeping the jobsite free of substance abuse, which is a continual cause for a knight’s crusade. Drug abuse a subject that is often brushed under the table. Nationally, approximately 74 percent of all drug abusers are employed and approximately 8 percent of all workers are drug abusers, according to Avitar Technologies Inc., a leader in oral-based, rapid diagnostics, including onsite drug testing and disposable drug-abuse testing technology.
With only 70 percent of large companies testing their employees, testing is essential for the contractor, as his or her crews work in a jobsite jumble of heavy equipment, power tools and people.
“As a horror story, I had two employees at a dump site working two dozers,” Dillon begins. “At the end of the day, we had just dropped off a grader to clean up the dozer tracks. The two guys decided that cleaning the tracks would be easier if they took the motor grader and scraped the tracks off by themselves. Not only did they take the grader, but one of the guys stood on the tracks and guided the grader into the tracks to clean them off.
“The guy who was standing in the tracks fell down and the grader ran over and killed him. He also had the emergency phone on him and it broke the emergency phone. It was a tragic accident,” Dillon says shaking his head. “When they did the autopsy, he had just taken a huge hit of cocaine, among the other drugs in his system. And they aren’t sure that he had almost died, which caused him to pass out and fall in front of the motor grader. Even more unfortunate, the guy driving the grader was also loaded with drugs.”
“There had just been a drug screening the week before,” he admits. “However, I found out that somehow they slipped off the jobsite. When it was all said and done, it was ruled an accident — which it shouldn’t have been because the guys were on drugs. Because of that, through my insurance, I’m still paying for motor grader driver.
“Now, we make sure that every time we do a drug screening, we send the safety director to the jobsite. She has a list of everyone on the jobsite and she rounds them up and makes sure that everyone is tested,” Dillon concludes.
“That’s a comprehensive program and that’s what we all have to do,” Fortin explains. “We’ve done that for the last 15 years. When we do a drug test, we know who is selected and we set it up so they were coming in that day, usually on payday. When they came to get their paychecks, they would get tested. And we set it up so that if they come in to get tested and they walk away, it’s a positive test. So they don’t have a chance to get away.”
“When it happened, the police came immediately and they took the motor grader driver to the hospital to get drug tested immediately,” Dillon remembers. “I didn’t realize it but neither my insurance company nor I can get a hold of that drug test. If I would have known that, I would have gotten my own test.”
“Is that a part that should be instituted in the program?” asks Lange. “When an accident happens, that person is taken for a test.”
“The company needs to have a representative there and get its own test along with the police test,” says Dillon.
“Post-accident testing — how it’s done is critical. To me, it has to be right there onsite,” says Fortin. “To send somebody over to get drug tested and you give them two hours [between the incident and testing] is a terrible policy.”
“And it was at least two hours,” Dillon says.
|
