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Mortality rates on construction sites have remained stable for a decade. Industry mantras claim that the only acceptable number of injuries and fatalities is zero, but there has been no reduction in fatalities.

sector Fatal injury rate fixed About 10 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. To help move the needle, security leaders began looking for new ways to measure success in security. Established, they say current measurements are flawed.

So some leading contractors are now recording and analyzing safety data differently. Instead of trying to eliminate all jobsite injuries, some have turned their focus to the most serious hazards: the things that can kill you.

For example, Paul Levin, Sundt’s senior vice president of health, safety and environment, recognized that even when the contractor successfully met safety goals, existing methods for measuring success in safety were not preventive or accurate enough.

“That’s what most of us in the construction safety field think: You do that compliance stuff, you do those other best practices,” he said. “And it enabled development. But at Sundt, by 2019 and reaching our business goal of a 0.50 recordable injury rate, our total number of incidents was not decreasing.”

Based on construction industry fatality data and the hours of work to which Sundt was exposed, Levin reasoned that the company could “expect” a death approximately every four years and 61 days. This was unacceptable.

In 2019, Sundt began experimenting with a new metric called STCKY, or “Stuff That Can Kill You.” (Sometimes Levin doesn’t say “thing” but instead uses language more commonly heard on the construction site.)

Last year, Sundt’s Stop STCKY program won the United General Contractors of America award Innovation Award. The program better shows when workers avoid danger through direct controls and protections or through luck; so Sundt can take action to ensure these protections are enforced more frequently.

After measuring the data, Levin said, Sundt professionals conducted “STCKY Walks,” where workers stop working when they encounter hazards with inadequate protection.

Sundt also educated its workforce and trading partners about deadly dangers. The STCKY program emphasizes that: 8 deadly dangers more than three categories:

• STCKY Success: No serious injury or death occurs when direct controls and protection measures are implemented.
• STCKY Chance: No serious injuries or deaths, no direct controls and protections available.
• STCKY Injury: Serious injury or death has occurred.

While compliance with all hazards remains essential regardless of severity, a new focus on the precursors to the deadliest and most dangerous exposures may be a better way to not only measure success but also ensure workers are better protected from hazards. no one gets hurt.

Problems with existing measurements

Construction experts largely agree that current metrics for measuring safety (such as total recordable injury rates) do not reflect how safe a construction site truly is.

“Today, someone can put their hand on a door and that could result in stitches, and that’s a recordable event,” said Phil Clarke, director of safety and risk management for California-based oil and gas contractor KS Industries. The same thing will happen tomorrow and this will cause the finger to bruise.”

In fact, a 2020 study by the Construction Safety Research Alliance, using 17 years of data and 3.2 trillion work hours, invalidated the measurement because it found no discernible relationship between the measurements. Total recordable injury rates and deaths.

TRIR is the rate at which a company encounters one OSHA recordable incident per 200,000 worker hours. A recordable incident is a work-related injury that involves loss of consciousness or requires medical treatment beyond first aid, requiring days away from work, limited work, or transfer to another job.

TRIR is established and institutionalized in accordance with OSHA recordkeeping requirements. TRIR has been used for 50 years to compare industries, companies and projects and is sometimes used as a measure of success, CSRA said. Insurance companies also use TRIR to set workers’ compensation insurance premiums, CSRA said.

Experts say TRIR’s flaw stems from its name: It captures only recordable events, not injury severity and near misses.

“A cut, a broken leg and death are all considered the same,” Levin said.

For example, industry leaders have largely moved away from advocating a specific threshold of injury-free days.

“When you celebrate milestones like this, you’re not celebrating a hazard-free workplace; can be recorded It’s an injury-free workplace,” said Chris Trahan Cain, managing director of Silver Spring, Maryland-based CPWR – Center for Construction Research and Training.

Emphasizing injury-free days sometimes leads to masking of smaller injuries, which he calls “bloody pocket syndrome.” Rather than tending to a seemingly minor wound, a worker may hide it and attend to it in his truck or restroom.

“No one wants to be the person who ruins Friday’s pizza party or next week’s truck giveaway,” Cain said.

To avoid this problem, safety experts look for recordable and non-recordable situations (serious injuries, fatalities, near misses, or SIF potentials).

Stopping STCKY

Sundt’s Levin wanted to find situations in which workers faced potentially fatal hazards to determine how often appropriate protections (direct controls and safety measures) were implemented and how often workers luckily escaped unharmed.

By looking at recordable injuries and conducting STCKY Walks, Levin found that 608 (or 88%) of 684 incidents in fiscal year 2019 were unlikely to result in SIF.

This meant that although providing adequate protection could help keep workers healthy and safe, nine out of 10 injuries were not a concern. This narrowed Levin’s focus.

From there, he looked at the remaining 76 events that were more likely to result in SIF, or 12%. Adequate protection was applied on four of these voyages; This meant that when faced with Real Things That Can Kill You, Sundt employees had a 94% “STCKY Chance” in 2019.

The hard numbers were alarming, but they also provided Sundt with a road map. Six years later, shifting focus and resources, Levin said the team has recorded a 65% STCKY success rate; This means adequate protections are in place for approximately two-thirds of the time a SIF could occur in fiscal year 2024.

Levin knows this still leaves a lot of room for improvement, because they were still one-third lucky. But this is very different from the four cases where workers were safe from a potential SIF once the process began.

Determination of factors

Bart Wilder, vice president of safety for Birmingham, Alabama-based Hoar Construction, said the company is trying to determine the causal factors of SIFs on the job. Texas-based insurance company ACIG has partnered with Richardson. According to ACIG, daily events such as employee fatigue, stress, lack of equipment or running behind schedule can increase the likelihood of serious injury.

Wilder and his team identified their own causal factors for SIFs, including working in a rush, not having the right equipment, or a change in schedule. After nearly 12 months of research, Wilder said they found the biggest risk factor for workplace injury.

“What it showed us was that our biggest challenge is the utility strikes,” he said. “We had done a lot to support our safety program, but we were seeing (workers hitting power lines).”

Knowing that excavation work around buried electrical or gas lines has proven to have the highest risk of SIF allowed Hoar to plan more thoroughly to better protect workers — such as ensuring they knew the locations of buried utilities in advance, Wilder said. Looking for other antecedents and causal factors allowed the company to refine its data further.

Simply put, focusing on the most dangerous activities—those most likely to lead to SIF as opposed to a “blood pocket” injury—allows contractors to be more aware of safety planning and prevention.

“It seems so obvious after the fact. There are all kinds of clichés in the industry: Plan your business, work to plan, failure to plan is planning to fail,” Wilder said.

Clarke said KSI did something similar. Identifying the most common and most dangerous hazards led the company to adopt a checklist for its riskiest tasks. This is as specific as an observer making checks via the app before, during, and after another worker enters a confined space to weld, and then making the same checks before, during, and after exiting the confined space.

He said it is a great opportunity to learn from a mistake in which no one was hurt and to ensure that no one is subjected to this mistake again.

“The biggest challenge is getting SIF potentials to understand that these are not bad things, they are actually gifts,” said Clarke.