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“What you should be looking for,” says Evelyn Bennett, vice president of sales and marketing at William Frick & Co., specialists in safety information products, “is a systematic approach that carries through, multiple times and in multiple ways.”

“It’s important to remember that construction sites change from day to day,” says Tim Reilly, market specialist for construction and utilities at North Safety Products, which markets personal protective gear, “which means everyone must be constantly aware of their surroundings and what’s going on. The one thing you really want to be aware of is people who are not on the machines, which is why employers are going to bright-colored hardhats and reflective stripping on hardhats and vests. The problems develop when employees decide they don’t need their hardhats because there’s nothing immediate going on overhead. Or they don’t need them in the cab of a vehicle. But the minute they step out, things can change.”

Eye protection figures among the top safety priorities on construction sites.

Reilly’s top gear priorities for construction sites include head, eye, and face protection, as well as fall protection and hearing protection. “Fall protection is a huge issue. Between 650 and 720 people die annually because of falls. Barrels or other kinds of obstructions are OK to keep people out of an area, but employees who have to work near a hole in the ground should have a horizontal lifeline and harness. This won’t prevent a fall, but it will protect the individual if the unexpected happens.

“We find if they’re busting up concrete, people will put on a face shield, for example, but then they won’t wear glasses underneath. Or they’ll put glasses on, but they won’t be safety glasses—I’d say it’s fifty-fifty they’re not safety glasses. Most people don’t wear adequate hearing protection on job sites. You’ll see people who have a pair of plugs in their ears, but they’re sticking so far out they’re basically just laying there. The fact is that if they’re worn correctly, foam earplugs that expand are as good as a muff and can offer a higher level of protection. People should be aware if they’re wearing a muff and then put glasses on, they’ll break the seal. The same with a guy smoking or chewing. If your jaw is constantly moving, you’re constantly breaking the seal. And nine times out of 10, when a person puts a muff on, they just sort of lay it over their ears. If it’s loose, it’s not going to do the job.” Reilly encourages employers to keep current with regulations such as ANSI 107-2004 Class 2 High Visibility Apparel, which applies to workers on federal-aid highways, effective November 24, 2008, and ANSI Z359.1-1992, which restructured fall protection as of October 2007.

Critical to job-site safety is awareness of backing vehicles. But the news from this arena is old news: Backup alarms have become so ubiquitous that they’re often ignored. According to University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, reports from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) indicate over half of work-zone fatalities involve workers on foot who are killed by construction vehicles moving in reverse. One problem is that employees tune out backup alarms; a second is the alarms themselves, which can be difficult to differentiate and pinpoint to a particular vehicle.

“The problem with normal narrowband beeper alarms is the sound is ambiguous,” says Jack Woginrich, national sales manager for Brigade Electronics Inc., which offers a broadband backup alarm. “This causes confusion about where the sound is coming from. And because they are so common, neither workers nor the general public associate typical narrowband backup alarms with an immediate threat. So while the alarms are designed to improve safety, they can actually contribute to danger by causing confusion and stress.”

The multifrequency range of the bbs-tek alarm from Brigade Electronics spans from 400 Hz to more than 10,000 Hz, eliminating the irritation of “alarm clock” narrowband alarms. The “hish-hish” sound is not only different from conventional alarms (one construction employee described it as sounding like “a sick duck”): Its particular strength is that it is directional, which means you can easily identify the vehicle it’s attached to. It also dissipates quickly, which helps reduce noise pollution. And while the decibel level can be the same as other alarms, the frequency is lower, which is much less of a nuisance to the human ear.

“You get immune to regular backup alarms,” says Steve Wagoner, who as general manager at CTE Sand and Gravel in Tecumseh, MI, equipped all the company’s loaders and haul trucks with Brigade’s broadband alarm. “If you’re beside a vehicle or machine that’s equipped with it, you don't hear it very well,” says Wagoner. “But if you’re behind it, it will blow your ears off.” The Mine Safety and Health Administration has certified the bbs-tek as meeting all MSHA requirements for 30 CFR 56.14132, which covers horns and backup alarms for service equipment, and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has recognized Brigade Electronics for noise management innovation. The cities of New York and Seattle have given the product a push with noise restrictions on construction work. Seattle’s noise variance requires trucks and mobile plants to have either a spotter or a broadband backup alarm for nighttime operations. And New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection’s list of alarms that meet its new noise regulations includes the Brigade bbs-tek as the only alarm that covers any job site in the city, including such sensitive areas as schools, hospitals, parks, and places of worship.

According to Cal Berkeley, NIOSH’s accident reports also indicate that although workers killed in backing accidents were wearing reflective vests and hardhats when they were hit, the drivers of the backing vehicles didn’t see them. To improve rear visibility for all kinds of commercial vehicles, Intec Video Systems Inc. has been marketing commercial rear-vision video cameras for 30 years. The bad news, says John DeFazio, sales and market development specialist for mining and construction, is the construction industry has been slow to pick up on the value of cameras, for safety and productivity alike. The fact is, says DeFarzio, a wide-angle camera or set of cameras mounted on the rear of a vehicle with a monitor on the dashboard in the cab are easy to install, basically maintenance free, and do an excellent job of protecting both the equipment operator and job-site personnel from the operator’s blind spots.

Monitors come in black-and-white and color and typically include automatic ambient light sensors to provide a high-quality picture in any lighting conditions. Many Intec monitors also include onscreen distance grids to provide a reference for checking clearances. The company’s XL series features military-specific moisture protection and is built for high durability in harsh environmental conditions.

It’s important for contractors to differentiate between cameras made for motor homes, buses, and those kinds of applications with the kind we build for construction, mining, and severe service applications,” says Dan Pinney, Intec’s eastern regional sales manager. “The other factor is that contractors can get stuck on the initial cost of equipping all their vehicles, but Intec’s experience in the solid waste industry, for example, where cameras are specified across entire fleets, is that they provide both an economic and safety benefit with a certainty of a return on investment.”

Which equipment should get the cameras first? “Highway contractors should install them first on dump trucks,” says DeFazio, “because they do a lot of backing and there’s a high incident rate involving laborers and other people in the work zone. Next would be loaders and then scrapers and graders, then surface hauling vehicles. We also see them on very large shovels.”

“A lot of lives are needlessly lost in construction work-site accidents,” says Pinney. “This can be prevented by installing cameras, particularly on dump trucks and graders. At Intec, we’re not just selling boxes. We’re on a mission of saving lives.”

In a noisy workplace, ear protection can be critical but must be worn correctly to be effective.

Safety lighting is another critical aspect of vehicle safety contractors are not always up to speed on. “There is a direct link between liability and visibility,” says Randy Hudson, national sales manager for Code 3, which manufactures emergency and safety lights for vehicles. “Historically, the private sector has put a $50 strobe beacon on top of their trucks and thinks everything is fine and dandy. But if a construction worker gets hit, and the lighting wasn’t sufficient to protect him, it’s Katy bar the door.

“What we like to see contractors use is Society of Automotive Engineers’ Class One lights or lights that meet California Title 13 standards, which is a little bit brighter and overall will have a little better angle. Currently, Mississippi, Texas, and Nebraska spec California Title 13, and Illinois is considering it. Grading and excavation contractors have been used to buying those $50 beacons and $100 minibars, but one of the critical liabilities here is you have to keep the vehicle running or the power draw will kill the battery in a couple of hours. And a rotator in an off-road environment? Absolutely not. It might literally last two or three hours.

“Whenever anybody asks me what kind of lights they need, I tell them to call their state highway patrol. But for job-site safety at the very minimum, spend the money and put on at least a Class Two light that’s dependable and protect yourself legally. If you really wanted to keep it simple for vehicles such as pickups and dump trucks, you want to have highway rated lights in the rear, the 4-inch rounds and especially the 6-inch ovals, and then a couple of strong minibars on the front, either mounted on a top rack or a West Coast mirror mount on the outside of the door.”

Although Hudson says contractors are beginning to put lights on job-site equipment, too many times they don’t take the critical next step: light-emitting diode illumination, or LED. Not so for Mark Owens at Trafficade Work Zone Services in Phoenix. The company has 160 employees and 100 vehicles on the road on any given day, and Owens says they could count on at least one rear-end accident per month. “Our trucks will go out at five o’clock in the morning and come in at four-thirty in the afternoon, when they do a hot swap, switching between day shift and swing shift drivers. The only time the truck is shut down is for fueling and vehicle inspection. The lights run about 80% of the time when they’re on the road.

“Two years ago we tested about 25 different lights, from the little incandescent rotator beacons to strobe lights, and we were pretty much at our wits’ end. Then Randy suggested we try Code 3’s DuoBeam, which is an LED mini-light bar, about 12 inches wide. We put one on each side of 10 vehicles, and we were shocked when we discovered that none of these vehicles had been rear-ended. The units we equipped with these lights also had zero maintenance. We were changing the bulbs on the small rotator beacons we originally had on these trucks about once a month, which meant the truck was down for at least an hour so the mechanic could climb up, take the dome off and change the light bulb—and we were doing this on 100 vehicles. The strobe lights lasted a little longer. We were only changing a bulb every six months, but it was a more expensive bulb—$14 instead of $1.98.

“It costs me about $1,200 to put the two DuoBeam lights on a truck. But in just the first year, with the fleet maintenance guys doing zero maintenance, I’ve saved about $900 of that $1,200 in servicing. In addition, we found that with all the vehicles we put the new LED beacons on, I have not had to replace any alternators or batteries. Compare this with a truck with incandescent or strobe lights, where I’m replacing an alternator once a year and two sets of batteries.

“These lights save us a lot of money. But I don’t look at it in dollars and cents. I look at it that I’ve had nobody hurt.”

Wes Hoffman at ePlanIt in Frisco, TX, thinks employers can miss the safety boat because they lack what he calls situational awareness, meaning they don’t have real-time information about what’s going on at their job sites. “Low-cost personal GPS trackers enable fleets to track their vehicles and companies to track their employees,” he says. “These systems use either GPS-enabled phones or custom hardware to track workers’ locations so the exact times they enter and exit a job site are transmitted to a central server that logs their hours. Workers locations can also be viewed in real time via an internet application.”

Hoffman thinks that keeping workers safe is a matter of knowing where they are and what they’re doing. ePlanIt’s LPS system combines labor-tracking devices with cameras and the capacity for project managers to pull up a complete job-site overview on their computers, including a map of all employees working on the site. Typically, onsite camera systems have required a fixed location, electrical cables, and an Internet connection or tape recorder. What ePlanIt features is a self-contained, solar-powered, wireless Web camera that can be moved quickly and doesn’t require any external connections. “We originally thought the cameras would be primarily used for surveillance and security monitoring,” says Hoffman, “but they have a lot more application with supervisors who want to monitor projects from one spot. If you have eight projects running, you can get a big plasma TV and put the camera feeds in your office. If a project manager is watching and sees something that’s unsafe, he can call up that job site and instantly tell the onsite supervisor they’re doing something wrong or getting into an unsafe situation.

“Most of our customers are excavation and utility and concrete companies who are onsite before there’s any power or Internet connection. We can install one of our solar-powered cameras and light up the site with Internet so they have instant access. From our standpoint, labor tracking has two purposes. First it’s an electronic time sheet so you can see when your workers are on and off projects, but just as important, when you have workers in remote locations working by themselves, if an incident occurs, you can use their GPS on the phone to locate them. You can also set it up so that every time a worker enters a job site, they get prompted with a safety message that tells them to wear their safety hats and their vests and goggles. And you can set it up to do this every day.

“Combining the three different technologies allows information sharing at a much faster pace and a high level. The information is readily available to everybody working on a project, which just inherently makes things safer.”

As one Dallas-based utility and excavation contractor put it, “Instead of making 20 phone calls and sending 20 e-mails to stay informed, I have a complete picture of the current status of all my projects, in real-time directly from my computer.”

According to John Poplawski, product development manager at William Frick & Co., radio-frequency identification (RFID) can take labor tracking another step, not only to identify employee location but also whether the right (trained and qualified, perhaps tested and screened) employee is on the job at the right time, operating the right piece of equipment. “Each employee is equipped with an RFID badge and passes through a job site portal that reads the badge. This allows a supervisor to view who’s where and what they’re doing via computer. The system also allows management to identify employees who enter a job site on a particular day, so should a catastrophic event take place, such as the collapse of the crane that occurred recently in New York City, they can do a head count. The entryway portal identifies who is on the site, who’s left for lunch, and who’s been there but is physically no longer on the premises.”

Frick & Co. specializes in RFID systems for harsh industrial environments, whether they’re used to track people or pieces of equipment. And while RFID might not be an idea whose time has come on some construction sites, Frick has a number of other safety-oriented products that help re-enforce Bennett’s concept of a coordinated safety program.

“We’ve done safety campaigns that have utilized custom posters of accidents which have occurred on a customer’s site. Blown up large, these high-impact graphics use actual photos of accidents involving a company’s employees to drive the messages home. We’ve added tabletop safety reminders for lunchrooms and labels that adhere in a truck to remind drivers to do their triple check. We coordinated personal pocket cards, which are the size of a credit card, that include important safety reminders, the kind of things that are easy to forget in an emergency when you don’t always think clearly. One of our most popular products is a label that’s curved to fit inside a hardhat where employees write their blood type and any medical conditions they feel are important. The field people like them because they feel management truly cares about what happens to them in emergency situations.

“The idea,” says Bennett, “is not to have one poster hanging up as the workers walk into their staging area but to have the message available in multiple areas as you would in an advertising or marketing campaign. And what you say also has to communicate personally with field personnel in a form that’s easy for them to access.”

When it comes to safety, says Reilly, “the bottom line is workman’s comp—the number of accidents a company has. No one’s going to hire a subcontractor that has a history of accidents, and a general contractor with a history of accidents and fatalities just won’t get the job. So it’s important to communicate safety to employees. Safety equipment manufacturers are always willing to come out and meet about what products are best for a site. If you have a school of safety near you, they’re always looking for places for students to intern. They’ll analyze your problems and design solutions. It’s a great way to put a safety program together.

“We see a lot of construction companies going back to what we used to call tailgate safety meetings, where a supervisor talks to his crew about a specific subject. The idea is to get people in touch with where they are. You rush to work, you rush to get on the job site, but in your mind, you’re still in that argument you had before you left the house that morning or the date you had last night. So the idea is to stop everyone and say, ‘Let’s think about how you’re going to make it through the day and get home safely to your family.’”

Owens agrees. “We do safety meetings three times a week with our people. The first thing we talk about is awareness—‘Be aware of what’s going on around you all the time.’ All our employees, from the comptroller down to office staff, have to attend at least one safety meeting a month and at least one tailgate meeting a week. You’ve also got to stay on them to make sure they wear their safety shoes and glasses. We hammer every day on the safety vest, the personal protection equipment. But the most important thing is we watch out for each other. If somebody sees one of the guys doing something stupid, they say something. Because they know they’re going to get hurt.”