Initiative to Support Health Care Workers Affected by COVID 19

Written By Wes Shelley
Fallingwater team members maintaining 6’ separation and sending hearts to our Canadian health care workers across the country.

Fallingwater team members maintaining 6’ separation and sending hearts to our Canadian health care workers across the country.

Today marks a month since we all had our lives affected by COVID 19 here in Canada. I, myself had a trip planned to visit the the high line gardens in Manhattan for March 16th. I feel so lucky that my somewhat naive caution saved me from travelling to what would quickly become the hardest hit part of North America. What clarified the decision to not travel for me was a meeting with Fallingwater’s Operations Manager, Drew where we discussed the early COVID 19 cases and how this might affect our operations if cases grew in Victoria. Drew is also a firefighter with View Royal and his experience in fighting forest fires translated well to this new challenge and he already had a plan in place for disinfecting tools, gates, and anything else we might come in contact with, crew members would transition to bringing themselves to the sites we service to eliminate carpooling, we communicated early to clients, maintained social distancing on sites. All practices would meet or exceed the recommendations given by Dr. Bonnie Henry to keep our teams safe and we feel we are leading the way in our industry with the precautions we have in place.

On the way to Macnutt Enterprises to dump the truck one day, one of our senior supervisors, Grant, heard a handyman speaking on the CBC about offering to do any little fix-it jobs that might help out the healthcare workers that don’t have the time or capacity to keep up with anything at home. Grant brought the idea forward to other members of the team, and our staff who feel so privileged to still be working are eager to offer their time on Saturdays to cut a lawn, clean up a yard, weed out some garden beds, whatever we can do to give these front line healthcare workers something positive to come home to at the end of their long shifts.

Update: this initiative is now closed.

 

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