Patriot Towers Celebrates Four Years of Being Accident Free

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Patriot Towers celebrated a four-year anniversary on December 25th, 2018 they take very seriously: a safety record over that stretch of 1,460 days with no lost time work accidents. Owners, Doug Harradine and Rich Schickler, are well aware of the industry’s grim statistics and made a conscious decision to not contribute to them.

“Our employees, regardless of their roles, are the key to our organization’s prosperity. 

 They are our biggest success, and we decided that they deserve the safest work environment in the industry,” Schickler said. “We ensure all our team members are trained, mentored, and are on their way to being experts in every aspect of telecommunications construction safety.”

For instance all of the company’s field employees are initially trained and then recertified in all aspects of the tower industry, such as CPR/First Aid, Rigging, RF Awareness, OSHA 10, Gravitec, Anritsu and many others. 

“We have a full time field trainer that works with our employees from day one of their employment at Patriot Towers and throughout their career with us,” Harradine said. “He trains from the basic tower climbing skills and daily harness inspections to advanced rescue and rigging techniques.”

The company holds weekly safety meeting, that reinforces the Patriot Towers safety standards and expectations. Each week a different topic is trained and discussed amongst all field staff to ensure everyone understands the risks and the hazards that come with a specific task and/or weather condition. Harradine said their Safety Manager, Field Trainer and Field Operations Manager are continuously in the field, at job sites, reinforcing their safety standards, above and beyond the OSHA requirements.

Patriot’s owners say they put their money where their mouth is by allocating four percent of our annual budget for safety training.

“As owners we believe that our success is based on the creation of a culture of safety throughout the entire organization,” Shickler said. “I know it sounds cliché, but it isn’t.  One day we woke up and realized that accidents don’t just happen. We stopped accepting them as a way of life in the field. We decided that every accident was preventable. For many years, we lived with bad apples that did not share our core values,” he said. “Now, we do our best to only allow those that share our values to work with us.  It is a sacrifice, and it is difficult, but we owe it to our stars to eliminate the B and C Players from our organization.” Comments? Email Us

By Jim Fryer, Inside Towers Managing Editor

January 18, 2019

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