A concrete reinforcement company working on a new condo tower in Burnaby was lucky to escape with a big fine and no injuries to workers after multiple 30-foot rebar cages at the site collapsed because they weren’t properly secured.
Tycon Steel Inc., a Victoria company, was fined $26,813.79 for the November 2018 incident.
The company had been installing vertical rebar cages (also known as zones) for the stair and elevator core on the ground level of Tower 5 of the Station Square development on McKay Avenue in Metrotown.
But the temporary support system put in place to secure 30-foot cages were inadequate, according to Worksafe.
“By not adequately supporting these zones, one of the zones collapsed, which led to the collapse of multiple zones and some of these zones had workers working at heights from them at the time of the incident,” states a Worksafe report obtained by the NOW.
The company was ordered to stop work on the project, install a barricade around the collapsed core and get a plan from a professional engineer outlining how to remove the damaged components and start over.
Tycon complied, and the stop-work order was lifted on Jan. 14.
It was a costly mistake, according to owner Dan Seel, and it won’t happen again, he said.
“In the end, what we learned from it is we put together new safe-work procedures for this – for the fix and going forward for standing cages of this extent – which we’ve written into our manuals for everything going forward,” he told the NOW. “They will be followed because this will not happen again.”
The collapse of the cages could have set the Tower 5 project back about 15 days, but Seel said Tycon put in overtime to accelerate the work and get it back on schedule.
The company will be installing the same kind of rebar cages at Tower 6 next week, according to Seel.
“Our procedures are in place,” he said. “We’ve got new support systems, and we’re bringing Worksafe into the conversation before we start the process again.”
