Crews handled multiple overhead cranes working simultaneously to construct three towers on a tight urban site.
Photo courtesy Katie Bricker
Midtown Union
Atlanta
Excellence in Safety
Region: ENR Southeast
Submitted by: Brasfield & Gorrie
Owner: Granite Properties, MetLife, Streetlight Residential
Lead Design Firm: Cooper Cary
General Contractor: Brasfield & Gorrie
Civil Engineer: Kimley-Horn
Structural Engineer: Uzun+Case
MEP Engineer: Newcomb & Boyd
Hotel Developer: AMS Hospitality
Brasfield & Gorrie was able to safely execute simultaneous construction of a 26-story office tower, 26-story residential tower and 14-story hotel on a tight site in urban Atlanta by bringing together a team that kept the project on track while keeping crews safe on the ground, even as four tower cranes and one mobile crawler operated simultaneously.
Heath Wilson, Brasfield & Gorrie operations manager, says the project was a testing ground for solutions that have become standards for the contractor. The project’s success came from building a team and forging lasting relationships, he adds, creating a culture that saw owner, design and contractor teams pulling together to solve challenges.
“We were able to do this by tearing down the typical construction silos and separation between the owner, design team and contractor,” Wilson says, adding that the team worked together to find solutions instead of fault.
One safety initiative involved equipping tower cranes with anti-collision devices, a practice that Brasfield & Gorrie has implemented firm-wide. Another was STCKY, or Stuff That Can Kill You, a safety initiative piloted on the project and also subsequently rolled out company-wide. Instead of focusing on traditional metrics like recordable incident rates, the program focuses on categories like falls, utility strikes, confined spaces and falling objects to anticipate failure. Those are stressed during daily safety meetings and controls are placed before work starts to mitigate potential hazards. As a result, the project logged 386,492 worker hours on the project with zero lost-time accidents and a recordable incident rate of 0.51.
Derek Lacey, Texas & Southeast Regional Editor at the Engineering News-Record, is a seasoned journalist with a broad range of experience. A graduate of Auburn University, his work has earned awards in everything from investigative and feature reporting to multimedia and photography. Derek is based in Huntsville, Ala.
