ASPHALTopics | Fall 2020 | VOL 33 | NO 3

ENVIRONMENTAL
ESSENTIALS
Ryan Downing
Planning for safety during a pandemic
The senior leadership team of the Tomlinson Group of
Companies was attending a strategic business review
and conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, when COVID-19
changed everything in Canada on March 13, 2020.
After a weekend of conference calls, the company’s
leadership team put a series of different staging protocols
and processes in place around such things as physical
distancing, respiratory protection when two metres of
distancing was not possible, face shields, equipment
cleaning, questionnaires for all personnel arriving to
a site or a Tomlinson facility, and guidelines for all
employees on how to stay safe.
Communication was vital to the success of Tomlinson
Group’s speedy roll-out of protocols. One of the first
things the company did was to quickly set up a section on the
home web page to communicate how to best protect against
the virus. Daily emails were sent with the relevant information
to all employees. The safety team at Tomlinson Group
published its COVID-19 recommendations and practices to
the website where they could be accessed and downloaded,
and continues to do so. Binders with all the safety information
were distributed to each project site across Ontario to ensure
compliance.
Early on, the Tomlinson Group established its COVID-19
task force, which is represented by approximately 50 people
from different divisions within the company who met daily
to discuss issues. Our mission was clear: keep working, but
work safely. Everyone embraced the mission. In fact, we
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