When Des Walters won a contract to provide dive services for a major construction project, he knew his company's reputation would depend on keeping workers safe.
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Entrepreneur: Des Walters, Managing Director
Company: Descend Underwater Training Centre
Business type: Commercial diver training and commercial diver contracting
Founded: 1979
Turnover: Under $2M
Head office: Albury, New South Wales
Contact details: +61 2 6041 1405
The Descend Underwater Training Centre Story
When Des Walters’ company Descend Underwater Training won the contract to train 137 of the workers who would help build the Sydney Airport rail link tunnel in time for the 2000 Olympics, Walters couldn’t have forseen much of what followed.
For example, he didn’t intend to rewrite the Australian Occupational Diving Standard, or to develop a program that would become mandatory for other dive schools, much less create a world benchmark for industrial safety. “That’s just the way it worked out,” he modestly explains.
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Key learning points:
- OHS best practice - Best practice necessarily includes best health and safety practice.
- Risk management - The culpable death of an employee or a client is one of the greatest risks to your business.
- OHS first - Occupational health and safety starts at the front-end of program development.
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Walters certainly wanted best practice on the construction site. The Transfield-Boygues joint-venture project was building the world’s second-largest diameter tunnel and, for the first time in Australia, a slurry tunnel boring machine was to be used on a site. The job was a great opportunity for Walters’ company to increase its reputation - or harm it, if anything went wrong.
After 33 years of commercial diving and instructing, Walters understands the risks inherent in his business. He says: “For me, what is the worst thing that could happen? From the business perspective, where is your greatest risk? We are most exposed if one of our workers or students dies. God forbid if we had an accident. The culture in Australia at the moment is that we have no accidents - they are all caused. Somebody is at fault. Therefore we place a lot of importance, time and effort [on] risk management. Every single time you go underwater, you have to ask ‘How do we minimise risk?’.”
Before the tunnel project, the world safety benchmark for compressed-air projects stood at one failure incident - in which a worker requires medical attention - for every 90 hours working under pressure. Descend’s program reduced the incident rate to one failure incident every 1400 hours. Despite working for long periods at greater than usual depths, the severity of incidents was also less than previously accepted benchmarks.
In July 1999, Descend’s achievement was recognised with an award for hyperbaric excellence (planning, training and operations) by the Australian Diver Accreditation Scheme (ADAS) of the Federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
“What it is really about,” says Walters, “is putting procedures in place, not just for the health and safety of your workers - they are the important ones who leave families behind if there’s a disaster - but for the livelihood of your business. If you don’t do it, then you are seriously at risk.”
Walters strongly believes that occupational health and safety should begin before a project - not as an afterthought or as a set of ad hoc procedures. Of course, regular independent safety audits can always improve procedures.
Walters says: “I figure [that] if I have to defend our operation in a court of law and the coroner asks: ‘Why did this man die and why do you think your operation is safe?’, then it’s not just me. Our overall operations have been commented on by WorkCover and by ADAS.”