Red Santana (far left) with members of the Haugland team at the company’s headquarters in Melville, LI during Safety Week.
Eddie “Red” Santana is Environmental Health & Safety Director for the Haugland Group. After starting his career as an Operations Manager at NYU Langone, he brought his skills as a safety expert to the construction industry. For the past five years, he has worked at Haugland, a major New York-based infrastructure construction services company with over 1,000 employees, 10 divisions, and 12 locations.
BTEA President Elizabeth Crowley spoke with Red about Haugland’s emphasis on environmental health, the rise of staged accidents, and how the Scaffold Law has adversely affected the company’s business.
BTEA: Tell us about Haugland Group and the type of work the company does.
Red: Haugland Group is a diversified infrastructure services company that specializes in civil, utility and energy construction. We work across a wide range of projects, from rebuilding power grids and transportation infrastructure to renewable energy installations. Our work is deeply rooted in strengthening critical infrastructure and ensuring communities are resilient, safe and connected.”
BTEA: Talk about the work that Haugland does around environmental health.
Red: Environmental health is integrated into every phase of the project and goes from planning all the way up to execution. We implement robust environmental management practices that focus on minimizing our impact, from erosion control to habitat protection to responsible materials handling, and emissions reduction. On renewable energy projects, especially, we work closely with environmental consultants to ensure that we not only meet the compliance standards but exceed them where possible.
BTEA: What are some of Haugland’s safety practices that you would like to highlight?
Red: Safety is a core value for us. A lot of people say it, but at Haugland, we live it. We don’t treat it like a checklist. It’s embedded in our culture from day to day. Our teams undergo continuous training and certifications. We conduct regular safety audits, risk assessments, we run parallel with operations, and we support each other.
BTEA: How are you using technology in your work and what are some of the cutting-edge tools you employ?
Red: We’ve adopted technologies to enhance both safety and efficiency. This includes drone inspections, GPS guided machinery, and digital modeling, like building information modeling. On the safety side, we’re using real-time site monitoring. We have a pro core platform that we use to do audits from day to day. We incorporated the Intellishift program, which monitors our vehicles and our equipment. It also allows us to evaluate our drivers, do audits with the vehicles and equipment that we have out in the field, and follow up with disciplinary policy when necessary.
BTEA: How has the Scaffold Law impacted Haugland and to what degree have staged accidents affected your business? Do you see a connection between the Scaffold Law and staged accidents?
Red: The Scaffold Law in its current form creates a disproportionate liability burden on contractors, regardless of the actual circumstance of an accident. While we fully support the intent of protecting our workers, the law’s absolute liability standard has made it susceptible to abuse. Unfortunately, we do deal with staged accidents on a regular basis, and they’re a growing reality in our industry. At the Haugland Group, we’ve seen firsthand how it’s driven our insurance premiums through the roof, largely due to the increasing exploitation of this outdated statute. Those added costs ultimately get passed on to our clients and, by extension, to the public overall. So, because of these laws and the fraud and because parts of the system are, in essence, broken, there winds up being a ripple effect that impacts many of us. There’s a clear connection between the financial incentives created by the Scaffold Law and the rise in fraudulent claims. Reforming the law to reflect comparative negligence rather than absolute liability would help curb these abuses and allow companies like ours to redirect resources to where they’re needed and to proactive safety training measures that generally protect our workers, which is what we want to do.