Mastering the Safety Message

By Jim Parsons

While safety has improved in recent years, construction remains one of the most hazardous occupations in the nation. Initiatives by OSHA, AGC and other industry organizations hope to alleviate some of the risk.

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The construction industry employs nearly 8% of the nation’s workforce and generates nearly 5% of the Gross Domestic Product, but it can be hazardous.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1,186 fatalities were recorded at private construction sites in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. Despite a 4% drop from 2004’s total, the figure remains the highest of any industry, according to the BLS.

The trend is no better for lost-time occupational injuries and illnesses. Construction’s incidence rate of 239.5 of injuries and illnesses for every 10,000 workers surpassed all other sectors.

Although some aspects of construction are inherently risky, it is possible to make sites safe, says Tom Broderick, executive director of the Hillside, Ill.-based, nonprofit Construction Safety Council.

“We have seen many contractors work millions of hours without serious injuries,” he says. “The challenge they all faced was to first make safety a core value of their respective companies. 

They then build accountability into every job description so that the core value is transferred from the CEO through the organization to the workers. And they provide the proper safety and skills training.”

But Broderick concedes that in a highly demanding business environment, safety may be competing with other priorities. “Many construction firms feel pressured to avoid schedule or cost penalties, causing workplace safety to suffer in the process,” he adds.

Albuquerque-based safety consultant Bill Green says that while many contractors appreciate how safety contributes to their bottom line, “they also see it as individual worker’s responsibility. We need to see a paradigm shift to make safety a company responsibility.”

Green adds that the formula for safe workplaces is “training, training, training to make workers understand that it doesn’t take much for something to happen. But contractors and subcontractors alike must also follow through on that commitment, such as being willing to pull people off a job when an unsafe condition arises. That’s an important message to send to employees.”

Safety without borders

Safety is difficult to convey when language is a barrier. As more foreign-born Hispanics have joined the U.S. construction workforce over the past two decades, their fatality and injury rates have risen as well. A BLS study found that the number of fatal work injuries involving foreign-born Hispanic workers more than tripled between 1992 and 2002. 

Multilingual worksites are also increasingly common outside the traditional Hispanic population areas in the Deep South and Southwest. The 2000 U.S. Census identified North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee as having the fastest-growing Hispanic populations, but any part of the U.S. with significant construction activity will likely have a significant number of foreign-born Hispanic workers. 

Organizations such as the Association of General Contractors have been particularly active in developing tools to help construction firms adapt their safety programs to the needs of workers with a limited grasp of English. 

“In the last five years, AGC has trained more than 6,000 attendees and produced more than 60,000 training CD-ROM’s distributed in both English and Spanish through OSHA’s Susan Harwood Training Grant Program,” says Michelle Myers of AGC’s Safety and Health Services Department. “We also provide dozens of online training courses through the Online Institute, including 12 in Spanish.”

Still, employers must be sure that they cover all facets of the language issue, Green says. “Hispanic workers represent different nationalities, cultures and dialects of Spanish,” he adds. “Employers need to make sure that they not only translate safety information accurately, but that their workers fully comprehend the messages.”

Building bilingual understanding was a key goal in a safety-training curriculum developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute.  Project Director Art Wickman, head of the Health Sciences Branch in the institute’s Safety, Health, and Environmental Technology Division, says that the technical jargon and idioms  found in many Spanish-language safety materials may still leave workers unsure of what they’re supposed to do.  

GTRI’s safety curriculum uses a combination of carefully crafted presentation materials, posters and pamphlets to cover topics such as fall protection, scaffolding, trenching and excavation, electrical hazards and material handling. The materials have been distributed throughout the Southeast by building associations, OSHA offices and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, as well as online. 

Wickman says Hispanic workers are much more engaged at training sessions where the materials are used. “I see a significant increase in comprehension when the training is done in a way that’s understandable to them,” he adds.

Researchers at Iowa State University’s Center for Transportation Research and Education have crafted a similar program that provides language and cultural training for both Hispanic workers and their American supervisors. 

“Iowa’s Hispanic population increased 153 percent in the 1990s, and the continuing shortage of craft workers will continue to attract more Hispanic workers,” says Iowa State professor and principal investigator Ed Jaselskis. He adds that language wasn’t the only barrier to effective training. 

“The interest among contractors was there, but it’s difficult to schedule classes during the busy construction season,” Jaselskis says. “The off-season is no better because Hispanic workers often leave in search of other jobs.”

The Iowa State team focused on finding the best delivery mechanism for the training. It developed a toolbox of language-training materials that could be conducted during 30-minute sessions before the workday started or during lunchtime.

Although elements of the toolbox program are still being refined and evaluated, “contractors that had better communication also had lower turnover rates and better productivity,” Jaselskis says. “More research will be needed to assess the effects on injury prevention, but my sense is that safety should improve as well.”

Proactive partnerships

Many of the industry’s leading trade and professional associations are helping workers of all nationalities and language skills prevent accidents by participating in OSHA’s Alliance program. These partnerships are designed to encourage collaboration across the organizations and with government safety regulators.

“The core elements for making these cooperative programs successful are employee involvement and utilizing comprehensive safety and health systems,” says AGC’s Meyers, whose organization is part of the Roadway Work Zone Safety and Health Partners, a coalition of five leading construction trade associations and the National Institute of Occupational Health.

The other construction associations working with the OSHA Alliance program are the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors National Association, Independent Electrical Contractors Inc., the Mason Contractors Association of America, the National Association of Home Builders and the Concrete Sawing and Drilling Association.

AGC is also an administrator for the OSHA Challenge Pilot Program, which is designed to provide employers with a “roadmap” for obtaining Voluntary Protection Program status for their programs. In exchange for working directly with OSHA representatives on developing and implementing comprehensive workplace safety programs, a VPP employer is removed from the agency’s programmed inspection lists. 

In addition, OSHA does not cite VPP sites for standards violations as long as they are promptly corrected. 

According to OSHA, the lost-workday incidence rate at an average VPP site is 50% below its industry average.

“Several AGC members have already earned the VPP Star designation for achieving exemplary success in implementing safety and health management programs,” Meyers says.

The cooperative approach was brought to the state level in March when the American Subcontractors Association of New Mexico and the state Environment Department’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau signed the Safety and Health Initiative Partnership Agreement to help create safe working conditions for the state’s subcontractors.

“This is the first agreement of its type that primarily covers subcontractors nationwide,” says Chuck Cambron, safety coordinator for Commercial Enterprises Inc. of Albuquerque and chair of the ASA-NM committee that helped formulate the program, which is structured similar to the federal-level Alliance program. “Our goal is to bring down accident and injury rates and make New Mexico the safest state for construction in the nation.”

Cambron adds that such a program is particularly important given that subcontractor employees make up approximately 75 % of workers who are exposed to hazards. 

“These are the people who are doing the actual hands-on work-operating machines and using tools,” he says. “We’ve already found that general contractors are more responsive in addressing safety concerns raised by participating subcontractors. We understand the pressures they’re facing from their clients, but we want to show that they can have a safe workplace and protect their bottom line.” 

SIDEBAR 1

DOT’s Examine Southwest Bridges in Wake of Minneapolis Collapse

By Scott Blair

Only a handful of the thousands of bridges in Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico are steel deck truss bridges, the type which spanned the Mississippi River on Interstate-35 in Minneapolis, which collapsed August 1st. All have been inspected in the past two years and will be re-tested in the wake of the Minneapolis collapse, according to officials in each state.

“We have confidence in our inspection process as it stands now,” says Diane D’Angelo, public information officer for the Arizona Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over three steel deck truss bridges in the state. “The bottom line is, if any of our engineers had any inkling through their stringent inspections that these bridges were safety problems, they would have been shut down immediately.”

Prior to the event in Minneapolis, the Arizona state legislature and the governor’s office authorized increasing the bridge inspection staff by 50%, D’Angelo says.

Nevada’s only steel deck truss bridge, on U.S. 93 over the Meadow Valley Wash, is much shorter and has additional redundancy with four truss lines instead of the two in Minneapolis, according to Marc Grunert, assistant chief bridge engineer with the Nevada Department of Transportation.

“We have an aggressive inspection and maintenance program,” Grunert says. “Even on some of the steel structures where we do see fatigue cracking, we have the ability to actually stop-drill the cracks so that they can’t propagate any further, right on the spot. We carry with us the appropriate drills and testing mechanisms to be able to identify those problems, such as magnetic particle testing, ultra-sonic testing or dipenetrant testing.”

New Mexico has four steel truss bridges, and is currently underway with a multi-billion dollar program to update and modernize the state’s highways and bridges.

According to the Better Roads National Survey, Nevada and Arizona rank first and second in the nation for having the best bridges. New Mexico ranked twelfth.

“The advantage that we have here is that we are dealing with a much newer infrastructure, especially in the Phoenix area,” D’Angelo says. “Most of our bridges are fairly new, and we have the advantage of a dry climate.”

SIDEBAR 2

Garage Collapse Halts Work on $2.9 Billion Las Vegas Megaresort

By Tony Illia

An Aug. 6 parking garage collapse halted work on the $2.9 billion, 8.2 million-sq-ft Fontainebleau Resort Hotel in Las Vegas. Four days earlier, a worker was killed in a fall on the same site.

Around 10:25 a.m., a 60-ft-long by 9-ft.-wide precast concrete twin tee fell from the top level of a seven-story, steel-framed garage structure. Two other twin tees immediately fell in succession. No one was injured.

Turnberry West Construction of Las Vegas, the general contractor, broke ground in February. WW Steel of Tulsa, Okla., is the prime subcontractor responsible for the garage, with Las Vegas-based Locsha Engineering as the structural engineer. Construction on the 4,500-space parking garage is being halted while an OSHA investigation occurs, although work will continue on other project components.

“It appears that there was an isolated manufacturing error with the twin tee that triggered the collapse, although a forensic investigation now taking place,” says Lee Haney, a project spokesperson.

This marks the project’s second accident within a week. On Aug. 2, three workers fell from a 30-ft-high wall. Norvin Tsosie, 36, died when his harness failed, dropping him an additional 10-ft into a hole. The other two workers only sustained minor injuries.

Fontainebleau is situated on 24.5 acres at the northeast corner of Rivera and Las Vegas boulevards - the former site of the El Rancho and Algiers casinos. Las Vegas-based Fontainebleau Resorts LLC is the project developer.

Plans call for a 63-story, 2.89 million-sq-ft tower with 3,889 hotel rooms and 1,000 condo-hotel units. There will also be a 100,000-sq-ft casino, a 60,000-sq-ft spa and a 3,200-seat performing arts theater. Fontainebleau is scheduled to finish in the fall of 2009.

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