Brennan worked in collaboration with The Boys & Girls Club of Greater La Crosse (Boys & Girls Club), the Women’s Fund of Greater La Crosse, Wieser Brothers General Contractor (Wieser), and Mathy Construction (Mathy) to organize an annual field trip for local female members. The event offered young women an opportunity to experience working at Brennan and to ask questions about working in the trades. It was a memorable day for all! Watch the video recap below:
Safety starts with putting people first.
It’s not just about checklists, inspections, and meetings, said Steve Skau, vice president of safety and compliance for J.F. Brennan Company. It’s also about everyone on a job having the ability to give feedback and know it will be valued.
“Everything we do at Brennan starts with safety, no matter what scope of work we’re doing,” Skau said.
In industries like marine construction, the penalty for skipping or rushing through “simple” industrial rigging inspections or “ordinary” storage practices can be catastrophic for all of our equipment and tools, but most importantly for the people involved.
For example, Brennan uses endless and synthetic slings (straps or tie downs) to hoist and secure all kinds of materials: from piping and equipment, to dredges and other vessels. Reliable slings are critical to the work we do. We must ensure they are in excellent working condition before we use them and maintain them for our teammates who must safely use them next. Here are a few important questions we answer from curious customers and our own people.
Brennan blog posts were viewed 13,622 times in 2019. Reviewing our most-searched blog topics helps us construct a list of the marine industry's most critical topics and those most pertinent to our company. So, what were the most-searched topics?
As a marine solutions company, J.F. Brennan Company, Inc. (Brennan) faces a unique array of regulations and rules. While every company deals with regulations, most deal with rules that impact operations only on land or only in the water. We are accountable for regulatory requirements in both areas and have been for years. So, what's changed and what are we doing about it?
Dive teams mobilize every day to complete a broad assortment of tasks utilizing 3‑person dive teams. Historically, this has been the standard not only within Brennan's practices but for most other inland diving organizations. The Association of Diving Contractors International (ADCI) gives guidance that requires, at a minimum, a 3‑person dive team. While this practice is sufficient in some circumstances; such as non-penetration inspections and wheel jobs (propeller repairs); with our growing scope of work it became apparent that a 4‑person dive crew—adding a standby diver—should be our internal minimum standard moving forward.
By Michael Cannell—Quality and Safety Manager
As construction projects pick up speed across the country, so do construction- and safety-related news stories. It’s important to ask: What is J.F. Brennan Company, Inc. (Brennan) doing to ensure the safety of our team? And, can we increase safety measures without sacrificing productivity?
There is nothing more important on a job site than safety. To prevent an injury, one must recognize the potential risk and take mitigative action beforehand. The challenge that companies like us face is not so much trying to figure out how an incident happened, but training employees to recognize the potential of injury before it happens. Once that mindset has been ingrained, team members must be empowered to address and escalate it without repercussion.
A story of Total Quality Management for an inland marine company.
At Brennan, training is the backbone of our safety program, and we have come to discover a high return on investment by bringing much of our training in-house. Doing this helps us prepare our workforce for our unique work features, which in the long run, lowers our Experience Modification Rate (EMR). A company’s EMR is a number used by insurance companies to determine the past cost of injuries and any future chance of risks. The lower your EMR number, the better your standing compared to similar companies. The average industry EMR rating is 1.00, so companies that can get a lower rate than this save money when it comes to insurance premiums (not to mention savings associated with eliminating workplace injuries). When taking into account the number of manhours we work each year, our current EMR of .52 translates to a savings of up to $400,000! We believe one of the reasons we achieve such a low EMR is because we focus on quality when it comes to training.
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