Safety lead Bob Scott details safety checks during battery-electric bus site walk

Bob Scott, a safety lead in the construction engineering group of the Safety Department, said during a site walk that his team inspected safety practices at a battery-electric bus construction project and addressed a handful of corrections on site.

Scott said his unit “provides full-time safety on site for that as well as oversight for the contractor safety” and that its work covers both capital delivery projects and transit-oriented development, including private projects built near agency tracks. He said the team “oversees between 100 and 120 projects.”

The inspection focused on common construction safety risks. “For the walk today, we walked on the battery electric bus project. We come on this site regularly just to kind of audit their safety program,” Scott said. He described observing workers in aerial lifts, scissor lifts and boom lifts, and checking that fall protection was in place and that workers were “properly tying off.” He also noted masonry work and scaffolding operations and said staff made a few corrections while on site.

When not conducting field visits, Scott said he reviews safety plans, crane-pick plans and regular work plans and uses photographs taken during walks to build a written record of observations. “I use the photos in our reports at the end of the walk. So, I’ll write a report a little bit later on today documenting what we saw, we observed,” he said.

Scott emphasized the program’s culture goals: safety checks are intended to keep people healthy without preventing or slowing necessary work, and on the rare occasions when a worker thanks staff after a small correction, he said that is “probably my favorite part of the job.”

The department will file a photo-backed report summarizing the inspection findings and any follow-up items identified during the walk.