The Safety Program, Reviewed Twice in 2025
What ICW Group and ISN’s RAVS 360 audit found — and the twenty years of program building that got us there.
Two reviews. Same conclusion.
Twice in 2025, Athena Engineering’s safety program was reviewed by independent third parties. Both came back top-tier.
In June, ICW Group — our workers’ comp carrier — awarded their Safety Program Award after an on-site review by Senior Risk Management Consultant Keith Schmedes. Two weeks later, we received our ISN RAVS 360 certification with an “A” rating and a 96% Safety Culture score.
Neither organization hands out recognition lightly. ICW writes the policies that pay claims when something goes wrong. ISN qualifies contractors on behalf of 850+ client companies including Disneyland Resort and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. They each had financial reasons to scrutinize. They each concluded the same thing: the program is mature, documented, and — most importantly — practiced in the field.
“The safety of our team is a personal point of honor for me, and I was humbled that our safety program was recognized as best in class.”
Athena Chiera, in a follow-up letter to ICW Group, July 2025
What RAVS 360 is designed to catch.
Plenty of contractors have safety programs on paper. Volume of binder material isn’t what separates a real program from a performative one. RAVS 360 is ISN’s version of contractor qualification designed to find the difference — verifying not just that written programs exist, but that they’re practiced when nobody’s watching.
The certification process tested 20 field and operations staff on safety knowledge (stop work authority, lockout/tagout, electrical safety, ladder safety), ran an anonymous company-wide culture survey, and put us through a formal interview with a professional safety manager. We came out with 96% on the culture score. Only three areas needed reinforcement — and the entire field team completed that follow-up training within weeks.
What’s in the program.
Beyond the written documentation, the operating reality:
- Fourteen written safety programs — Lockout/Tagout, Heat Illness Prevention, Fall Protection, Workplace Violence Prevention, Hazard Communication, Subcontractor Prequalification, Driving Safety, First Aid, Ladder Safety, PPE, the IIPP, and others.
- OSHA 30 within a month of hire for all field personnel. OSHA 10 for everyone who visits a jobsite, including office staff. Asbestos O&M (16-hour initial + annual refresher). EPA 608 + A2L refrigerant safety. Respirator fit testing. First Aid & CPR. Heat illness training every May, before the hot season starts. Athena pays for training time and certifications.
- MSA Safety Helmets with Mips impact protection (top, front, side, and rear). Rolling out since June 2025.
- Werner Podium Ladders for working at heights and Leaning Ladders for tight spaces a man lift can’t reach. Deployed in 2024 after a project executive watched a sheetmetal apprentice improvise an unsafe lean against a wall. Purpose-built ladder, problem solved.
- Anonymous Compliance & Ethics Hotline launched June 2025 via Syntrio — covering safety, ethics, harassment, and fraud. Custom routing bypasses any manager involved in a complaint, and a separate routing layer bypasses ownership entirely if it involves us.
- Return to Work + Nurse Triage programs — immediate clinical assessment when something happens, modified-duty assignments to keep recovering workers connected to the team.
- Detailed, documented risk management and prequalification program for all of our subcontractors.
Fifteen years. Zero OSHA recordables. Knock on wood.
Athena Engineering has gone fifteen consecutive years without an OSHA recordable incident. The industry average runs around 2.5 incidents per 100 full-time workers per year. Mechanical contracting is higher. Specialty HVAC — with hot work, confined spaces, refrigerant handling, and working at heights — is higher still. Fifteen years of clean reporting isn’t luck. But we knock on wood every time we say it out loud.
“Ultimately, all that matters is that every single person on our jobsites goes home safely. Whatever investment we need to make to ensure that happens is well worth the cost.”
Athena Chiera, VP of Business Development and Safety Program Lead
How we got here.
Athena Chiera took over the safety program in 2006, the year she joined the firm full-time. At that point, Athena Engineering had been running for 22 years on a more informal footing — experienced foremen keeping apprentices in line, written documentation minimal. That worked then. It wouldn’t scale.
Two decades later, the program is what it is now: written, trained, equipped, audited, culturally embedded. The 14 written programs accumulated over time. The mandatory OSHA 30 became mandatory because Athena made it so. The MSA helmets and Leaning Ladders are recent. The compliance hotline launched this past June. Each piece is another layer of the operating system. The 2025 ICW and RAVS 360 recognitions don’t mark an endpoint. They mark the year independent third parties validated what the team has been building.
The pragmatic takeaway.
Safety isn’t a slogan. It’s whether the apprentice has the right ladder. Whether the new helmet has impact protection the old hard hats didn’t. Whether the person nearest a problem has the training to stop work and the authority to actually do it. Whether the team going home tonight has all the same fingers, eyes, and lungs they had this morning.
Everything else is in service of that last part.
Want to know more?
If your procurement organization, general contractor, or facility team needs documentation on Athena’s safety program for prequalification or compliance review, reach out: info@athenaengineering.com , 909-599-0947, or here.
