As many people know, we safety officers are dynamic thinkers. Many of our bosses, however, are linear thinkers when it comes to workplace safety.
Administrators and managers often have so many things on their plates that, when an incident occurs on the worksite, they often do not want to know the reality of how the incident happened and what caused it so the incident won’t happen again.
All they want is the single cause. But those of us in safety know that very few incidents occur through one simple cause. This can be especially true on a construction worksite, which was discussed in an earlier post in this series explaining the differences between a construction site and a general industry site.
[Image courtesy of Flickr user Elliott Brown via a Creative Commons license]Most safety officers know that there is never just one single cause for any incident – an incident is usually a marriage of risk factors. One of the keys to mitigating incidents is knowing the factors that could cause incidents and their origin so a problem can be fixed and just be mitigated.
But for the sake of argument, let’s take a closer look at some of the factors that cause many construction site incidents, injuries and/or deaths. We will put these into different categories and address each category.
Hazards
Under the hazards category, some of the factors that cause incidents include falls (especially from heights), making contact with objects, having exposure to hazardous materials such as chemicals, pesticides or poisonous gas, and transportation (driving or riding in a dump truck or other vehicle that moves around a site, such as other heavy equipment or earth-movers).
Management
Under the management category of causal factors, these are usually things that are beyond the physical, like walking and tripping. Such factors that could be traced to management include insufficient or non-existent training of workers, a lack of active site monitoring, unsafe methods, poor enforcement of the safety program, a lack ofa safety program, or even non-compliance with local, state and federal regulations for safety.
Equipment
On many construction sites, there is a lot of equipment around that is used by workers and around workers. Some of these factors that could go into incicdents include equipment that is poorly maintained or is the wrong equipment for the job, or equipment that is defective or of a poor quality.
Workplace
The workplace category of factors is something that the general contractor could control with the help of sub-contractors (I discussed a bit about each of their roles in safety in this earlier post). This is referring to the overall worksite environment and the various moving parts, making sure that safety measures are firmly in place and there aren’t too many moving parts simultaneously.
Among these factors are having too many tradesmen working on the site at the same time, having hazardous or uneven walking surfaces, lack of guardrails or supports, lack of communication between workers and supervisors, and even having a very small work area for the number of people on the site.
Workers
We have talked about how all levels of personnel at a construction site have some responsibility for the safety of everyone on that site, and that includes the workers themselves. There are things that workers can do to cause problems on their own bodies and of those with whom they work.
Some of these issues could include workers taking shortcuts with their procedures, or eschewing safety altogether due to a heavy workload and a tight deadline. Also, workers who have a bad or negative attitude toward safety, don’t use the proper equipment, are tired or misjudge the overarching risk in a situation. All other factors can be mitigated around you, but dropping the ball yourself will likely cause problems – being vigilant with yoru own thoughts and actions is always the best practice.
Industry-specific Factors
As construction sites are usually far different than most general industry worksites, there are plenty of other factors for incidents that can be considered unique to construction at least in combination, if not individually. There are some occupations that have some of these factors, but as a group, these can certainly be vital for workers and their employers to mitigate whenever possible, because these industry-specific hazards can lead to a high percentage of incidents even if everything else discussed here are mitigated.
Workers putting in long hours (which lead to the fatigue mentioned earlier), weather conditions (since most construction sites are outdoors), the very high-activity and physical demands of the work, the transient workforce (which was discussed in this post and their inherent safety risks), the stamina it takes to do a job for long hours at a time in tough conditions, and the changing hazards on a daily or hourly basis as parts of the project get finished and other parts start.
As you can see, it is true that a construction site is one of the more dynamic sites when it comes to safety and worker activity. There are plenty of reasons why the death rates on construction sites are so much higher than on other worksites. With all that going on, it would seem daunting to be able to make the sites any safer than they arelady are, since many of these risks can’t possibly be mitigated 100 percent and still get the work done.
So what to do? John Mroszczyk, in his June 2015 article in Professional Safety magazine, will put forth a strategy that incorporates all of these issues and suggest that this won’t eliminate deaths overnight but an certainly make construction sites safer in the future. Check this out Friday.