It should be the goal of every owner and construction company to return employees home for dinner safely every day. In addition to being the right thing to do, workers who are injured, or worse, don’t show up for work the next day. Safety is and should be one of those symbiotic relationships that all parts of the construction community can work on together.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently launched a “Construction Incident Prevention Initiative” campaign in an effort to curb fatalities on construction projects. Increased inspection and compliance efforts,
particularly out of the Wilmington, Delaware office, will be part of the program. OSHA hopes that the increased compliance efforts will decrease fatalities in particular.
The primary focus of the initiative is to identify and eliminate safety and health hazards from the four leading causes of accidents: falls, crushing events, electrocutions, and caught-in-between events. In terms of health hazards, the compliance efforts will target silica, lead, and hexavalent chromium. Given the high heat conditions this summer, special efforts will be undertaken to address heat illness for those working outside too.
te visits will include on-site outreach to educate and encourage employers to continue good practices, as well as inspections by field officers when unsafe working conditions are observed and reported. The stated goal is to reduce the 111 Region III fatalities in fiscal years 2013 and 2014, 16 of which were attributed to falls.
For more information, go to OSHA’s website of “most frequently cited OSHA violations” and heat educational materials.
