Reading your editorial in the February issue ‘Blood sweat and tears’, reminded me of my experience of site tragedy in Spain, when I worked on a new power plant in Aragon. One April morning I arrived at site to find all worked stopped and a large police presence all around.

A young rigger, married with children, had a tower scaffold collapse under him and, as we discovered later, he wasn’t hooked up. The difference in which the whole site, from management down to worker, treated this tragedy was memorable. Out of honour to a fellow worker it is the custom in Spain for the whole workforce to depart site for the day as a mark of respect.

On that morning in the beautiful Ebro Valley, the quiet trudge of everyone off site and the silence into which the site fell, regardless of who was culpable, remains very much in my memory. I wish us Brits would stop and think a little more about life, and the esteem we ought to have for colleagues.

Source

Construction Manager

Postscript

John Waller