5:00 am: The sun’s not up, it’s freezing cold. The building is dark. There’s no one around, even the normally crowded Las Vegas streets are nearly deserted.

A pair of lights hit a building, illuminate a sign: Sletten Construction. A small pick-up truck pulls into the driveway and goes around back. A man gets out of the truck, finds his keys and makes his way through the darkened offices.

"There’s usually no one here at this time of day," Sletten Construction safety director Tom Morano said. "All of our guys show up at the job site. I usually come in to see if there’s anything I’ve got to do and to get supplies for the day."

He goes into his office to find there’s nowhere to sit. Someone borrowed his chair.

Undaunted, Morano hauls out a box of drug-testing packs stored behind his desk. "I’m doing a drug-test later, so I’ll need one of these."

The shelves in his office are crammed with OSHA manuals and reference guides, employee safety training records and HAZCOM materials. He doesn’t miss having a chair; he never seems to sit down.

Morano shoves the drug-testing packet under an arm, heads for the door, climbs into his truck and takes off for the first job site of the day. He knows that Sletten’s crew is already gathering at the site of the Clark County Sanitation District’s new filters project, waiting for a fall protection seminar he arranged several weeks ago.

The sun has yet to appear.

Tom Morano has been safety director for the Las Vegas division of Sletten Construction for a year and a half, having started with the company right out of high school. Working his way up from laborer to foreman, he was with Sletten when the company took on a large job at McCarren Airport and the airport required a full time safety person on site.

Forty minutes later, Morano threads his small truck through the massive Clark County Sanitation District site on the eastern edge of the valley, an area the county has devoted to processing, filtering and cleaning waste before sending it to Lake Mead. Morano arrives to find workers yawning in the chilly air, just starting to pull their tools out of the shed.

Dan Ward is setting up a tall tripod to demonstrate the effectiveness of fall protection harnesses. He sees Morano and waves him over, says that he’s about ready to get started.

Ward is a fall protection specialist who travels the nation doing seminars on the science of savings lives in the event of a fall. He asks four workers to get into the fall protection harnesses he has brought with him. Three men step forward. Several others coax Morano to suit up. He gives in, grabs one of the devices and puts it on.

Sletten Construction’s workers gather around Ward’s tripod, their breath frozen by the chilly morning air, everyone waiting to see what he means to do with the thing.

One by one, Ward uses a pulley to lift each man, suspending him in the harness as if he had fallen. The test determines how the worker put on the harness because, according to Ward, there’s two ways to do it: The right way so that saves you, and the wrong way that kills you (see sidebar).

The seminar goes well, the lesson learned that saving your life in a fall is more than just strapping the harness on. You’ve got to do it correctly or the cost may be your life. Seminar over, the crew goes to work. Morano walks the job site.

He finds a downed safety line near a trench, takes the time to correct it. He spots a forklift driver without a hard hat. The driver smiles, says, "I saw you coming," his hard hat plopped on his head before the safety director says a word.

Morano looks down into the trench, concerned about the fall protection around the 96 inch pipe they’re installing. Are they better off tying off to a lifeline, or would alternative fall protection make more sense? A six-foot lifeline would do little to prevent an injury from a fall since the pipe’s encasement isn’t that far off the ground. Furthermore, the long lanyard creates a trip hazard around which the men must work.

Morano finds Ed Pearson, who heads underground pipe installation, and they talk it over. They’ll go to two-foot lanyards that will allow the workers to move freely, and yet prevent them from falling.

"I’m going to put together a safety committee at this job site," Morano said. "The job is huge, and I’d like to pull one guy from each crew for the committee. It’s good to give them a chance to talk about what’s working, and see what can be improved."

An hour later, Morano is on the other side of town meeting a new employee. Sletten Construction is building the new Ambulatory Surgical Center at University Medical Center. The company does pre-employment drug-testing and Morano has arranged to administer the test.

He’s there to perform a pre-employment drug test. "We’ve done this before, so you know the drill," he says to the worker. As with many large construction companies, the workforce swells and shrinks with each job and each phase of construction. This particular worker is well known to the company, having worked for them on other jobs in the past.

The man takes the sample cup and goes off. Morano drug tests each new employee, and since Sletten hires roughly 200 employees a year, he said it’s far more cost effective to administer the test himself and send the sample to the lab. He figures the savings for the company are around $10,000 a year. He lost five employees in October due to drug tests.

The rest of the day will be spent at Sletten’s other two job sites, walking the job with a backpack so he can make sure workers have the supplies they need to work without injury. He’ll carry labels for gas cans, materials to repair electrical cords, safety glasses.

In the time he’s been a safety director, Morano has trained some 200 workers in forklift safety, nearly 100 in respirator safety, and many more in fall protection and hazard communication and attended more than a dozen training classes and seminars.

Married to Kasey, they have a four-year old son, Colton. Morano said that being safety director has become, for him, more than a job. It’s a responsibility to send every worker home safe at night. "If you die on the job today, who’s going to be the most affected?" Morano said. "It’s going to be your family, your kids who won’t have a father."