Safety program
A written safety program for drilled shafts — and a named person who can stop the work.
ESC maintains its own Written Safety & Health Program, Rev 1.0, aligned to OSHA 29 CFR Part 1926. It is our program, not a third-party certification — we say that plainly because the difference matters to anyone prequalifying a subcontractor. What follows is the substance of it: the standards it is written against, the Competent Person who holds stop-work authority, and the twelve task-level Job Hazard Analyses by name.
Competent person
Authority to stop the work sits in the field
Prequal reviewers ask who the Competent Person is and whether anyone can actually halt production. Both answers are the same name.
Stop-work authority
Jean Prinsloo holds stop-work authority on every ESC site — and is the designated Competent Person for the work that earns it.
Stop-work authority is exercisable without escalation and without waiting for a production decision. The same person carries the Competent Person designation across the scopes below, so the authority to stop the work sits with the person qualified to recognise why it should be stopped.
- Excavation
- Rigging
- Respirable crystalline silica
- Fall protection
- Daily rig inspection
The document
Read the program, don't take our word for it
The public edition of the written program, so you can assess it directly rather than assess a summary of it.
Written Safety & Health Program — public edition
Rev 1.0-G · aligned to OSHA 29 CFR Part 1926
The programme itself, as a PDF — the standards it is written against, the Competent Person designations, and the Activity Hazard Analysis and JHA structure summarised on this page. Read it before you decide whether to ask us for anything else.
This is ESC’s own written programme. It is not a third-party certification, and it is not an audited or accredited document — it is what our crews are held to, published so you can judge it yourself.
What it's written against
Federal regulation, Massachusetts statute, and one standard we chose
Three different kinds of obligation, kept distinct: the federal construction standard, independent state duties that apply on their own terms, and a drilled-shaft consensus standard nobody requires of us.
- 29 CFR Part 1926Aligned to
OSHA safety & health regulations for construction
The Written Safety & Health Program (Rev 1.0) is structured against the construction standard — the subparts that govern excavation, rigging, fall protection, respirable crystalline silica and powered equipment on our work.
- 29 CFR Part 1904Complies with
Recording & reporting occupational injuries and illnesses
Recordkeeping and reporting obligations are met as written, including the reporting duties that apply regardless of an employer's recordkeeping exemption status.
- ANSI/ASSP A10.23Voluntarily adopted
Safety Requirements for the Installation of Drilled Shafts
Formally adopted where it is more protective than the regulation. A10.23 is a consensus standard written specifically for drilled-shaft installation — it is not required by rule, and ESC holds itself to it because the work is drilled shafts.
- M.G.L. c. 82 §§ 40–40EComplies with
Massachusetts Dig Safe law
An independent state duty covering notification and excavation practice near underground facilities, carried in the programme alongside the federal standard rather than folded into it.
- M.G.L. c. 166 §§ 21A–21GComplies with
Massachusetts overhead high-voltage line law
A second independent state duty governing work near energized overhead lines — notification, clearance and precautions — which applies to rig setup and boom movement on our sites.
ANSI/ASSP A10.23 is the one to look at if you are comparing bidders. It is a consensus standard written specifically for the installation of drilled shafts, it is voluntary, and ESC has formally adopted it where it is more protective than the regulation. A generic program cannot make that claim, because a generic program has no reason to.
Hazard analysis
Twelve task-level JHAs, plus an Activity Hazard Analysis
An Activity Hazard Analysis covers drilled pier installation end to end. Beneath it, twelve task-level Job Hazard Analyses cover the operations a drilled-shaft crew actually performs — listed here by their document titles so you can see the scope before you request them.
- Mobilization, demobilization & equipment offload
- Drill rig setup & ground-bearing stability
- Overhead power line clearance & encroachment prevention
- Underground utility locating — GPR, soft dig, hand excavation
- Drilled shaft auger drilling — rotating auger & kelly bar
- Rock coring & socketing — core barrel, DTH, silica, noise
- Drill tooling changeout & auger cleaning
- Open shaft protection — hole covers & barricades
- Rebar cage handling, rigging & setting
- Concrete placement — chute, pump, tremie, wet hole
- Temporary casing installation & extraction
- Spoils handling, truck loading & work-zone traffic control
Metrics
What we can certify, and what we won't compute
One exemption explains both the number we state and the numbers we don't. Set out here rather than omitted, because the reasoning is what tells you how we'd answer your prequal form.
What we certify, and what we decline to compute
One exemption explains both halves of this. As a firm of ten or fewer employees, ESC is partially exempt from routine OSHA 300/300A/301 recordkeeping under 29 CFR 1904.1(a)(1). That exemption is why we can state a count and why we will not state a rate.
- Recordable injuries & illnesses — a count
- ESC certifies zero OSHA recordable injuries or illnesses in 2023, 2024 and 2025. A count of events is something we can attest to directly, and we do — in writing. This is a signed certification by ESC, not a third-party audit, and it should be read as exactly that.
- TRIR & DART — rates
- ESC does not publish incident rates. A TRIR or DART rate is a fraction, and its denominator is total hours worked — a figure a partially exempt employer does not maintain. We can honestly certify how many events occurred; we cannot honestly divide that by a denominator we do not have. Publishing one anyway would be publishing a guess with a decimal point on it.
- Experience Modification Rate
- The EMR is not ours to post. It is issued directly by our broker, and that is how you should receive it — as a current letter from the issuer, on request, rather than as a number typed onto a web page.
If your prequal form has a field for any of these, tell us and we’ll answer it in writing with the basis stated — including the signed certification behind the recordable count. Ask us directly.
Per-project documents
The rest of the packet is issued per project
Some documents are only meaningful when they are addressed to your job, so they are produced on award or on request rather than posted here.
Certificate of insurance
Issued naming your entity, with the additional-insured and waiver-of-subrogation wording your contract requires. A publicly posted certificate would be addressed to nobody and out of date by the time you used it.
Completed site-specific cards
The Activity Hazard Analysis and the relevant JHAs completed against your site — the actual utilities, the actual overhead clearances, the actual access and ground conditions. Blank templates are the generic part; the completion is the work.
Prequalifying us for a drilled-shaft package?
Send the scope and your prequal form — safety program, hazard analyses, and current certificates come back with the quote within 3 days.