CONSTRUCTION SAFETY The sky is falling on Calgarians After nearly 18 months after a toddler was killed from falling debris outside a downtown Calgary high-rise construction site, residents are still not certain whether it’s safe to walk the streets of the city core.   As objects continue to fall off construction sites around the city, concerned pedestrians are looking up and wondering what’s going on.   Kevin Griffiths, Calgary’s manager of building regulations, vowed  months ago to draft a host of reforms to enhance the city’s enforcement powers, including some that might be able to be enacted through bylaws. But the sky continues to fall.   Efforts to enhance construction safety laws and enforcement are being lauded by an operation risk manager. Rob Stewart says there needs to be stiffer enforcement to improve site safety.  “When you look . . . as a general human being, how you think that safety should be functioning, and then you see how it actually functions, it’s appalling,” he said. “There’s a huge disconnect.”   Local news websites are filled with anger and homegrown theories attempting to explain the sudden cascade of high-rise hazards. Most fall short. Alberta’s recent boom gets its usual blame, the labour shortage bringing more unqualified workers or unsupervised work. But the rate of construction activity here, even during the rush, was lower than in Toronto, according to building permit data.   “Two or three years ago, there could have been a little bit of that, when they were in their boom times and they were hiring at a pretty fast rate and some of the people were new to construction sites and hadn’t had as much time being familiar with all the safety procedures,” says Larry Rosia, dean of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s school of construction. But, he says, riskier work is typically handled by certified tradespeople, not labourers, anyway. “And a lot of those new hires were the first to go” after the boom   Calgary Herald published an interview with a worker who was on the decking crew of the Le Germain hotel last summer. He said the importance of safety precautions were repeatedly drilled into workers’ heads. Still, he admitted, he regularly smoked marijuana on the job.