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Making ‘The Safe Choice’ the Easy One, with Chris Daniels
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"We have to get to the point in safety in general across the construction industry, where the safe choice is always the easy choice. And, I mean, I hate to say it, we're not there yet." - Chris Daniels, Senior Safety Director at Mortenson.
Safety excellence requires making the safe choice the easy choice, especially in a high-risk construction environment. On this episode of The Canary Report: Safety & Risk Management, I sit down with Chris Daniels, Senior Safety Director at Mortenson, to unpack what safety leadership truly looks like across high-risk projects, from wind farms to data centers. Chris brings 16 years of field-tested experience and a refreshing honesty about what works and what doesn’t. We dig into why making the safe choice the easy choice is the future of construction safety, how compliance-only thinking can hold teams back, and why real progress starts with empowering workers, not just tracking metrics. If you care about building safety cultures that last, this one’s for you.
Here are some of the topics that we explore:
- How to effectively manage safety in remote wind farm construction
- Why traditional compliance-first approaches must evolve toward safety-by-design
- The critical balance between procedural controls and empowering workers to make safe decisions
- How to evaluate subcontractor safety qualifications beyond basic metrics
- Why tracking potential serious incidents (PSIFs) matters more than recordable rates
- The importance of understanding field conditions and worker constraints when designing safety protocols
- How engaged workforce reporting of near-misses indicates a stronger safety culture
Chris Daniels is the Senior Safety Director at Mortenson, a leading construction and real estate development company, where he specializes in managing complex safety programs across high-risk construction environments. With over 16 years of experience, Chris has developed extensive expertise in renewable energy safety, particularly in wind energy projects, where he served as Wind Safety Director for nearly a decade. He currently leads safety initiatives in Mortenson's data center division, bringing his comprehensive understanding of multi-site, multi-trade safety management to these sophisticated building environments.
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