Workers on the $12.8 billion nuclear reactor refurbishment at Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington plant were told to stay home one Friday in December after bosses noticed safety habits getting sloppy.

Tools and parts were being dropped from scaffolding and workers were not always clipping safety harnesses on railings to prevent plunges at the generating station just east of Oshawa.

In one alarming incident that proved the proverbial straw the broke the camel’s back, a bag of metal components weighing about 20 pounds was dropped from above and narrowly missed a worker.

But it could have been worse. Much worse.

“I called the staff in and said, ‘enough’s enough,” says Cliff Eubanks, a Mississippian who heads the joint venture refurbishment project for contractors Aecon and SNC-Lavalin on behalf of Ontario Power Generation.

It wasn’t just the drop that caused concern to Eubanks and OPG chief executive Jeff Lyash. It was the casual reaction to what could have been a life-changing injury.

“I saw a videotape of that. The worker who was almost hit looked up nonchalantly. I thought, ‘the folks are not in the right frame of mind,’” adds Eubanks, who has seen too many preventable tragedies in 34 years of similar projects.

The “safety stand-down” clinic that followed the next day on a mock reactor for 300 supervisors and staff was intended to reinforce the importance of avoiding injury or death, and how to improve procedures for hundreds more workers on the 10-year refurbishment.

“If you ever have a fatality in the organization, you will never be the same. You won’t,” Lyash says to emphasize the point, recalling his own experience as executive vice-president of energy supply for U.S. firm Progress Energy from 2008 to 2012.

“I sat in the living room of a mother and explained why her 24-year-old wasn’t coming home,” the Pennsylvania native pauses, brushing away a tear.

“I’m never doing it again. Never want to do it again.”

The young man, Cory Rogers, was killed in a hydrogen explosion doing routine maintenance on a generator in Wilmington, N.C., just seven months before another 24-year-old died building the TTC’s Spadina subway extension near York University.

“Those are the kinds of things you have in mind when you’re doing this,” Lyash says of the safety stand-down, where he gave an impromptu pep talk.

Front-line supervisors at Darlington had noticed a small but increasing number of troubling incidents on an otherwise exemplary safety record.

They were included in daily reports scrutinized by Lyash, a nuclear engineer, as he tracks progress from his downtown Toronto office. He can view the work on a live webcam as well.

“We began to see a pattern we didn’t like. No injuries, just behaviours we would characterize as at risk,” says Lyash.

“If you’re working above the ground, you have to be wearing a fall protection harness and you have to be clipped off,” he adds.

“People were making excuses like, ‘I was just walking over there to get that tool.’ Yeah, I hear ya, except that’s not the behaviour we want.”

Hence the decision to briefly halt the refurbishment of the first of four reactors. The complex work began in mid-October and is slated for completion in February 2020 before the other three nuclear units are tackled over the remaining seven years of the project.

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There are daily targets for the work, but it’s about more than the productivity alone.

“If you’re driving those results and you’re not driving the safety behaviours, people start taking short cuts,” says Lyash.

“They believe they’re 10 feet tall and bulletproof. Everyone thinks accidents will happen to somebody else,” Eubanks adds in a separate interview.

He notes that safety stand-downs are more common on major projects, where workers are often cycling through for specific jobs and the workforce changes over time.

“The extreme version of this is, if you have a life-changing injury on the job, or God forbid you have a fatality, it has a devastating impact. Certainly for the individual effected, for all those involved, and for the project,” says Lyash.

In North Carolina at the Sutton electricity generating station, Cory Rogers was working on a generator from which the hydrogen gas had not been fully purged. The volatile gas was ignited by a fan or work light Rogers was using. Plant owner Progress Energy was later fined $31,500 by state regulators who found nine safety violations.

Years later, Lyash wells with emotion talking about the incident.

“People tend to think about these projects in abstract, but these projects are people. You have to care about the people that are doing it and their safety and their health,” he says.

After the 300 supervisors and managers gathered at Darlington to develop better plans and procedures for all their crews and their disparate tasks — some performed through robots because of radioactivity — they were asked to sign pledges to reinforce the importance of safety.

Workers were back to their shifts on Dec. 2, although a crew with the most safety infractions was held out until the following Tuesday for additional training.

Lyash is betting the lost time for the safety stand-down will pay off.

“If you take the time to get those behaviours right, in the long run you’re more productive. It will save us more than a day.”