Construction Safety: Human Cost, OSHA Fines and Lawsuits…
Knowing that each year about 900 construction workers do not come home to their families after work, safety on construction work sites must be taken seriously.
AGC, the Associated General Contractors of America recently published a study together with Virginia Tech, “Preventing Fatalities in the Construction Industry”. There are some interesting findings:
- Dangerous Lunch Hour: construction site fatalities peak at noon, and are much lower on Fridays than Monday through Thursday
- Small Contractors (less than 9 employees) are overrepresented in the statistics, with a fatality rate of 26 per 100,000 workers
- Fully 1/3 of fatalities are from falls, and about 29% from Transportation incidents with e.g trucks or pickups
- More experienced workers are not safer: fatalities start increasing after age 35 and keep growing so that 65 year olds are at the highest risk
- Industrial projects are the most dangerous, followed by Residential and Heavy construction projects
The consequences of a fatality are devastating. There is a great human cost where families will have to deal with grief as well as financial issues. For the company there may be OSHA fines, law suits and criminal investigations. There really is no excuse for a builder not to have an active safety program, no matter how small the company.
Basic safety activities include providing and checking PPE and fall protection, correct use of scaffolding and ladders, on- going safety training, check- ins and audits. It is also a good idea to actively promote a safety culture, and to use a root cause analysis tool to investigate accidents and near misses, and prevent them from happening again.
The TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis methodology is a proven way of getting to the bottom of incidents, and come up with effective corrective actions. Focus is on human performance, and how workers can be separated from hazards like electricity, falls or moving equipment.
We can organize on- site training, or start by signing up for a public course. We offer the 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training as well as the introductory 2-Day TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Training class.
Be proactive, do not let preventable accidents catch up with you… call us today!
#TapRooT_RCA #safety
