Located in North Vancouver, British Columbia, the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant Project (NSWWTP) is one of North America’s most complex wastewater treatment plant construction projects — built within a tightly constrained urban site surrounded by rail lines and active traffic corridors.
Against this backdrop, safety is a shared commitment that brings Metro Vancouver and PCL Construction together with a clear focus on protecting workers, the public and the surrounding community.
During the project’s first 1.5 million work hours, not a single worker experienced a Lost Time Incident (LTI). It is a significant milestone that reflects PCL’s strong safety culture.
“Safety is at the core of everything we do and one of our guiding principles,” says PCL’s Reg Sopka, vice president, Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). “We promote and foster a culture of truly caring about one another and ensuring everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.”
That commitment has earned industry-wide recognition. In 2025, PCL was awarded the prestigious CCA National Safety Award and Canada’s Safest Construction Employer (300+ employees), and PCL is a founding member of the Canadian Construction Safety Council (CCSC).
On this massive project with intricate complexity, the PCL team is drawing expertise from a mobile workforce that has delivered more than 470 water and wastewater projects of all scales across North America.
Leveraging integrated operational excellence across key sectors — Buildings, Civil and Industrial — experts from B.C. and Alberta are bringing a range of complex civil infrastructure expertise with contributions from U.S.-based Civil Districts. This enables the NSWWTP team to proactively identify risks and plan for safety, optimize designs and deliver long-term value for Metro Vancouver and the surrounding community.
The project team’s goal of safety excellence on-site is achieved not only through compliance but by improving how work is executed. Central to this approach are the five principles of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), a safety philosophy widely used on PCL’s heavy industrial projects that has been implemented across this complex multi-sector project. HOP starts from a simple premise: error is normal, and the systems around people — not the people themselves — are where lasting improvement is found.
PCL District HSE Manager Chris McCullough helped integrate the HOP safety approach across PCL in 2022. “By accepting that error is part of human performance, we can design work environments that allow people to ‘fail safely’ and prevent serious outcomes if things don’t go as planned,” says McCullough.
A key benefit of HOP is its focus on work as it is executed, not just as it is planned. Real-world work often involves responding to unanticipated variables. The HOP principles encourage leaders to engage crews in conversations which help to identify decision-making traps.
“By seeking to understand systemic issues and context, we build trust, which is essential for learning and improvement,” adds McCullough.
At PCL, safety is integrated into executive accountability, frontline leadership and day-to-day decision making. This integration signals to clients and partners that PCL delivers work with foresight, discipline and control.
Owners like Metro Vancouver seek partners that can manage risk, reduce uncertainty and execute reliably. Strong safety performance and strong project performance are closely linked. When safety is prioritized early and consistently, projects benefit from:
More reliable schedules with fewer disruptions caused by incidents or unplanned shutdowns.
Higher-quality outcomes supported by disciplined planning and consistent execution.
Informed risk management throughout preconstruction and construction.
Greater cost certainty through reduced rework, claims and lost-time events.
Combining PCL’s proven safety program with Metro Vancouver’s safety policies and priorities creates alignment without compromise — driving a cohesive, unified approach to safety across the integrated project delivery team.
Despite having PCL employees from across several districts and a growing subcontractor workforce on-site, the focus remains the same: ensure everyone gets home safely at the end of each day. And it’s producing results, with more than one and a half million work hours performed without a single LTI, meaning at least 1.5 million consecutive hours of work without an injury or illness that resulted in lost time. Put into perspective, 1.5 million hours is equivalent to one employee working 40 hours per week for more than 780 years.
Chris Mosher, PCL construction manager on NSWWTP, credits the workers on the ground for achieving the safety target. “You really only get to that kind of milestone if people really care and are very engaged in safety excellence on the project. So, it is really rewarding for the team to be able to celebrate and enjoy it.”
Mosher and the rest of the senior project managers recognize that while the milestone is worth celebrating, there is a loftier goal in mind.
“It’s a start, it’s not an endpoint,” adds Curt Chorney, PCL construction director on the project. “We are really focusing on continuous improvement and maintaining an incident-free work environment to ensure everyone goes home safely.”
Learn more about the North Shore Wastewater project: North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant Program | Metro Vancouver