Focus On Safety: Implementation of Safer Masonry Bracing Program and Beyond

“We are a safety culture and we care enough to show it.”
– Frank Upham, Director of Safety, S.D. Deacon Corp

Safety Director Frank Upham of the west coast general contractor S.D. Deacon initiated a study resulting in a revised worker safety rule that includes an innovative way to protect workers who are putting up masonry walls.

The standard used to be only that a masonry wall to be “adequately braced,” the replacement standard explains how a contractor can safely meet that standard.
“Our idea was to create a better life safety system and to shrink the window of opportunity for accidents,” he said.

New Bracing System

The new technique takes into consideration the risk of high winds pushing down a masonry wall before the grout inside the block wall has hardened.

An inexpensive coil loop insert is placed between the blocks and the rebar is threaded through the loop. With this system, workers can brace the wall while it is being built.

When the grout has hardened the insert can be removed, the hole filled in, and painted over.

Currently, contractors putting up masonry walls use the same bracing systems used during the construction of a tilt-up building. In this system, steel pipe braces are attached to the wall and to the slab with an anchor bolt.

The system is adequate but leaves a window of exposure between when masons finish the wall and grout is hard enough to take the load, which can be from one to three days, Upham said.

The new system is simple for workers to understand and saves money on labor because it can be put into place faster than the traditional anchor bolt bracing method, he said.

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Wind Speed

In addition to providing a new kind of brace, the new rule sets an action level for wind speeds on masonry wall projects.

“We defined what is adequate and we gave it some hard number,” Upham said.

To determine how well the coil loop inserts would brace the wall, two test walls were built about a foot apart. Air bags were placed in between them then pumped up using a compressor to simulate the pressure-per-square-foot a high wind would create, Upham said.

The tests conducted by an independent testing lab did not fail until the pressure exerted was equivalent to a 45 mph wind, he said.

By reviewing five years of wind speed charts, Upham found that for example, there were more than 250 days in that period when the wind reached 30 miles per hour and above in the Portland area.

Upham said observers routinely overestimate wind speed by about 10 miles-per-hour. That is why the competent person on site is required to monitor the wind speed. “When the wind reaches 25 mph the competent person then checks the braces and clears the people off the scaffold and you start to consider evacuation of the limited access zone. At 35 mph you vacate,” he said.

Bracing for any wall over 24 feet in height has to be designed by a professional
engineer because of changes in load complexities and other factors, Upham said.

Limited Access Zone

In addition he spells out conditions when bracing is needed and when it is not required and defines the limited access zone that should be created around a masonry wall under construction.

Upham was inspired to improve the standard after an electrician on one of his company’s jobs was injured by a masonry wall that came down during a wind storm.

The man recovered from his back injury, but after visiting him at the hospital, Upham said “I had a profound sense that there had to be a better way.”

Upham found several like minded stakeholders from the masonry contracting industry and they began to talk about a simple and inexpensive way to keep masonry workers safer on the job. The details of the concept were worked out using a work site redesign grant from OR-OSHA. The requirements were that it be easily understandable and easy to implement not only for Superintendents and Project Managers, but for the workers on the site that would be judging conditions and making moment to moment decisions.

A further innovative use of this system was the idea of S.D. Deacon Superintendent Mark Dry. He figured out that you can use the anchors placed for bracing to hold fall protection equipment. Encouraging thoughtful innovations by end users that help keep crews safe is Frank’s ongoing goal.

“Everybody that I have shown this to has just been wowed by it. There is not one negative comment,” said Upham, who credited his company’s owner Steve Deacon, for giving him time away from his job to work on the effort.

Frank has become well known up and down the west coast for seminars at conventions and construction companies that wish to implement this Safe Masonry Bracing Program.