181 180 Growth Rings
Joe Tommasi speaks during the 2013 National
Managers' Meeting. Tommasi joined Davey
in 1994. He was named vice president of
corporate safety in 2018.
Employees on the Tampa Electric account gather
for a safety tailgate meeting prior to the start of
line clearance work for the day in April 2019.
Safety
Like leading in arboriculture and horticulture research, excellent service experience or
cutting-edge training, a focus on safety is one of the threads that has bound together
the fabric of the Davey culture stretching back all the way to the company's early days.
ere are countless examples showing how safety has been woven into the company's
culture since its inception in 1880. Here are just a few safety stories.
Early tree crews competed with each other to earn the company's top safety record.
In 1935, a crew of more than 30 Davey employees amassed 19,583 consecutive hours
without a lost time injury to earn top honors as the company's safest crew for the year.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, e Davey Bulletin regularly ran illustrations that used
humor to highlight simple ways employees could work safely. emes and mantras,
such as "Accident Free in '63," permeated various employee communications.
e company regularly held safety slogan and poster contests encouraging employees
to actively, and creatively, participate in improving safety. A 1977 slogan contest
crowned this winning slogan: "Just one moment of carelessness can ruin a lifetime
of safety."
More importantly, the company has backed up such safety messaging with focused
training, inspection efforts and industry participation.
In April 1968 the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) Z133 formed to estab-
lish industry-wide standards for safety in tree trimming operations. Members of the
committee represented several groups with interests in the green industry, including
tree care companies, universities, the federal government and insurance companies.
Davey has maintained a seat on the industry's consensus committee since its founding.
Employees at Davey have been recognized for decades on the company's Safety
Honor Road. is annual listing of employees identifies those who have been free of
a recordable accident for one year. Multiple employees have made the Safety Honor
Road for more than 30 years in a row. In 2016, 3,400 Davey employees made the
Safety Honor Road, representing a 19 percent increase over the number of employees
who made the 2015 list. Of the 2016 honorees, 135 of them had been on the Safety
Honor Road for 15 years or more.
In 1987, Davey showed how safety extended beyond the company by partnering
with the Tilton Equipment Company, then the largest independently owned chain
saw distributor in the U.S., to hold a chainsaw safety program open to the public.
In 2005, Davey rolled out e Road to Zero safety initiative to promote a way of
thinking about safety – striving to reach a frequency rate of zero recordable incidents.
Making safety a value, and using e Road to Zero as a guide, helped Davey line
clearance crews record more than 2,300 incident-free work days through March 2015
maintaining rights-of-way for the Newberry Electric Cooperative in South Carolina.
e crews' safety record spanned 10 years.
SAFETY
Safety is a Value at Davey
