The Greater Baton Rouge Industry Alliance (GBRIA) Safety Excellence Awards program is, at its core, an exercise in exploration.
Yes, the scores and placements matter, but the deeper purpose of the program is to ask contractors to think carefully through their safety processes and articulate them. That act of articulation is valuable in itself. When a company can describe its incident investigation process clearly, explain how front-line workers are engaged in safety decisions and demonstrate how lessons learned travel from one job site to the next, they have really considered whether they are doing all they can to keep employees safe.
Thirty years ago, GBRIA launched this program to underscore that safety excellence does not happen by accident. It is both top-down and grassroots up, driven by leadership that sets up visible expectations and sustained by workers and supervisors who own the culture on the ground. What began as a regional effort to recognize intentional safety performance has grown into one of the industrial corridor’s most substantive benchmarking exercises.
30 years of measuring what matters: GBRIA’s 2026 Safety Excellence Awards
This year’s theme, "Going Subzero," was a deliberate expansion of the familiar Goal Zero ideal. Zero recordables are a worthy target, but a target alone does not build the culture and programs required to reach it. Going Subzero asks what lies beneath the number: the investigation processes, the visible and consistent commitment of leadership, the worker engagement, the systems that catch a near-miss before it becomes a statistic.
The 2026 cohort, comprised of 42 nominated contractor firms representing approximately 208 million hours worked, reflected what that culture looks like in practice. Average overall application scores improved by nearly 5% compared to the prior year, the share of applicants in the top scoring tier grew and three of the four scored sections, Commitment, Training and Development and Learning Organization, all improved year over year. The average OSHA recordable rate among applicants was 0.21, a figure that compares favorably to any work environment you can name, including your own home.
The data also points toward where the industry’s work remains. External best practice adoption and continuous process improvement are areas where opportunities exist for the second consecutive year, suggesting that even strong safety programs tend to look inward more than outward. The use of leading indicators improved more than any other single question from 2025 to 2026 but still sits below the program average. And struck-by and caught-in events were reported as precursor occurrences by 44% of applicants, consistent with state-wide patterns and a continued call for focused attention on work zone controls and line-of-fire awareness.
This year’s Hal G. Ginn Award went to both Loadstar and MMR Constructors, two organizations that represent what the top of this program looks like after three decades of raising expectations. GBRIA congratulates all 2026 award recipients and thanks to the 30 nominating member sites, 22 volunteer judges and every contractor firm that participated in this milestone year. Thirty years in, the program’s most important finding may be the simplest one: the organizations willing to ask what lies beneath the number, year after year, are the same ones continuously getting closer to zero.
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30 years of measuring what matters: GBRIA’s 2026 Safety Excellence Awards
Midwest Cooling Tower Services earned Third Place in Specialty Trade Hard Craft Division I at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
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PALA Interstate received Third Place in General Construction and Maintenance Division I at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
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TNT Crane & Rigging earned First Place in the Crane and Rigging Division I category at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
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Brock Services was awarded First Place in Specialty Trade Soft Craft Division II at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
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Turner Specialty Services received Second Place in Technical Support Division III at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
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BrandSafway earned First Place in the Specialty Trade Soft Craft Division I category at the 2026 GBRIA Safety Excellence Awards.
For more information, visit gbria.org.
