Working safely in hydraulic engineering

Hydraulic engineering is a sector with specific and serious safety risks. Working on and around the water, on pontoons, in ports and along coastlines poses hazards not encountered in other sectors. Drowning, hypothermia, Weil's disease, blue-green algae, working at height above water - the top five risks in hydraulic engineering call for a structural approach.

The social partners in the sector wanted one central platform where all this safety information would come together. A place where a manager can quickly find the right information, where an HR employee can download toolbox materials and where a new employee can read what risks there are and how to limit them. Accessible, clear and always up-to-date.

We built veiligwerkenindewaterbouw.nl as a fully publicly accessible information platform. No protected portal, no account system - all information is immediately available to anyone who needs it.

The Health and Safety Catalogue for Hydraulic Engineering is the heart of the platform. This catalogue describes for each activity and risk which measures apply, which legislation applies and how employers and employees deal with them in practice. The information is organised by theme and type of risk so that visitors can quickly find what they are looking for.

Besides the Health and Safety Catalogue, the platform offers an overview of the top five risks in hydraulic engineering, information on personal protective equipment and toolbox materials that managers can use for short practical meetings with their team. Animated videos, posters and checklists are readily available.

The O&O Fund secretariat manages all content independently via Craft CMS. Add new articles, update existing information, publish toolboxes - all without technical intervention.

As an extension to the platform, we built a fully digital HSE manual, a Safety, Health and Environment manual for the hydraulic engineering sector, on the same Craft CMS multisite.

The manual is built according to a fixed hierarchical structure of main activities, subactivities, risks and measures. For each risk, there is space for applicable legislation and an explanation. Visitors are guided from activity to risk to measure via a logical clickpath. The structure has deliberately been kept flat and clear so that management remains simple and the risk of errors or duplication is minimal.

A special feature is the status structure: for each page, you can indicate whether a section is part of the HSE manual or has been approved as an official part of the Health and Safety Catalogue. This status is visible in the management and on the website itself, with labels and badges that clarify the official status of each section.

Editors work with a drafting system where changes are prepared before they go live. Through the Workflow plugin for Craft CMS, a formal review and approval flow is set up where content is submitted for approval before it is published. Essential for a manual where the legal and content accuracy of each section must be ensured.

Pages have a print-friendly view and can easily be shared via e-mail, so that the information is also usable during consultation moments and toolbox meetings in the workplace.

Safety information is often complex and comprehensive. The challenge is not to make all the information available, but to structure it so that the right person finds what they need in 30 seconds. A manager who wants to look something up quickly just before a toolbox meeting does not have time for complicated navigation.

We paid a lot of attention to the platform's information architecture and the logic of the click path. From general to specific, from risk to measure, from information to practical material. That logic is also the basis for the HSE manual.

Craft CMS as the basis, part of a multisite environment together with gezondwerkenindewaterbouw.nl. Tailwind CSS for the frontend styling. Blitz for static caching and maximum loading speed. SEOmatic for full technical SEO. Freeform as a forms engine. Sherlock for continuous security monitoring. For the HSE manual: Workflow plugin for review and approval flows, print-friendly page templates and a status structure for HSE vs Health and Safety catalogue.

Working safely in hydraulic engineering provides the sector with a central and accessible platform for safety information. Employees, employers and HR departments quickly find the information they need. The secretariat manages everything independently via Craft CMS.

The platform is part of a broader digital infrastructure that PixelDeluxe has built together with the O&O Fund for Hydraulic Engineering. Four platforms, one consistent digital presence for the hydraulic engineering sector.

Safety information only has value if people actually use it. A Health and Safety catalogue that no one can find or understand solves nothing. We approached this project from the user's perspective - the supervisor looking for something quickly, the HR employee who needs material for a meeting, the new employee who wants to know what to look out for.

This user-centred approach is also the basis for the upcoming HSE manual. The starting point is not the system, but the people who work with it every day.