Death rates are set to spike

Brendan Charters of North York, Ont.-based Eurodale Developments sent us the following update about how his business was faring during the Covid-19 pandemic.

For the past three weeks, our office staff (design, operations and accounting) has been operating remotely, from home, to do our best with respect to physical distancing. Jim (Cunningham) and myself as owners have continued to be the only ones in the office. Our sites have remained operating as an essential service, with additional safety protocols on site including splitting persons working in a site by floor, or focusing on exterior work, when possible.

Our regular sanitation facilities were made more available and inspected daily to ensure they were able to deliver for workers. Cleaning routines of sites (door handles, tools, etc.) was increased and a few workers were away for quarantine due to symptoms and travel, but returned to work last week.

After careful review of the infection rates across Toronto, Ontario and Canada, we decided that effective April 13, all Eurodale project field sites will be suspended until further notice. We pushed to ensure active sites were safe and secure and weather tight as best we could, and while the Provincial Government still deemed us to be an essential service, at this time when infection and death rates are set to spike, we felt it most responsible to our workers, trades, customers and related families that we cease all field operations for a period in hopes of doing our part to flatten the curve and reduce everyone’s risk to exposure.

We plan to use this time to continue design and plan projects for our clients, retool our business operations and develop new protocols to ensure our return to field works is even safer than when we suspended operations. That way we will continue to be able to deliver our best to our clients and ensure the continued safety to our workers as leaders in the industry!

We hope the best for all our colleagues in this business, and that personal and business health is maintained through 2020 and beyond.

How about the rest of you, Contractor Nation? What action have you taken to deal with the crisis?