The New York office of Lend Lease poised to achieve 100% passive fall protection on steel buildings

NEW YORK – Lend Lease’s collaboration with steel subcontractors and local unions has led to the development and implementation of innovative systems to achieve 100% passive fall protection on the firm’s steel buildings in the New York metropolitan area.

Driven by a company culture focused on operating Incident & Injury Free and a 6-foot tie-off policy that surpasses industry standards, Lend Lease’s journey towards 100% passive fall protection started after completing steel erection on the first New York metropolitan area project to obtain 100% ironworker tie-off – North Shore-LIJ Health System’s Katz Women’s Hospital at LIJ Medical Center.

"Lend Lease strives to go beyond mere compliance with statutory and safety minimum requirements on all job sites and continually enhances safety measures. The bottom line is that we believe that all workers on a construction site should work in the safest environment possible," said Cary Coltun, Executive Vice President, General Manager, Healthcare.

It was with continuous safety improvement in mind that while working on the firm’s next steel project, the Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Center for Science and Medicine, Lend Lease embarked on the development of new passive safety systems to address both perimeter and interior fall protection. The result was a perimeter protection system for steel structures and an interior horizontal netting system installed on the underside of steel framing. Both were mocked up and trialed on the Mount Sinai project and the horizontal netting system was successfully installed at North Shore-LIJ’s Cohen Children’s Medical Center as well as Delta’s Terminal 4 Headhouse at JFK International Airport.

Unwilling to settle for anything less than complete worker safety, Lend Lease headed back to the drawing board with the firm’s steel contractors and unions. The result was a full protection netting system that has been bought and is set to be instituted on Columbia University’s Jerome L. Greene Science Building and Winthrop-University Hospital’s new Diabetes & Obesity Institute Research Building, representing the first time the system will be used in the United States.

"Lend Lease’s collaboration with the local union and our steel subcontractors provided an integrated solution and addressed a longstanding safety issue that has plagued job sites for many years," said Cary Coltun. "We simply were not going to rest until we got this right," Coltun stated.