Safety risk management in construction sites

Building construction sites are some of the most dangerous places to work in where unfortunately roughly 60.000 people lose their life every year around the globe due to the high number of objects, heavy machineries, equipment, tools, moving trucks and so on. Nevertheless, a huge responsibility is placed upon the project manager to ensure that all the potential risks workers might encounter are eliminated and, if not possible, they must be minimized.

Before digging into the concepts, it is relevant to understand what a risk is; according to Macquarie Dictionary, risk is the chance of an adverse event depending on the circumstances and its impact can be measured as the likelihood of a specific unwanted event and its unwanted consequences or loss and it can be identified mathematically as follows $RI=LxC$.

There are multiple types of risks in a typical construction site that could affect the safety of the workers, such as: vibrations, noises, respiratory, handling of heavy materials, electrocutions and many more. These risks may lead to different types of immediate consequences, from a small injury to even death; however, some complications caused by the constant exposure to one of the risks mentioned above, such as noises, could manifest in months or even years, known as professional illnesses.

Given the importance of such topic, there are a few steps explained in this article that can be followed to guarantee the safety of everybody working in the construction site. The points are the following: identification, assessment, treatment, inspections/maintenance and prevention. It must be said that, regardless of how thorough and accurate the safety risk management may be, some incidents can not be avoided due multiple factors, for instance their unpredictability or also, in certain circumstances, the low level of attention or carelessness of the workers themselves. This process is meant to find the sources of the risks and eliminate or minimize them, but it can not fully solve the issue.

Overview of safety risks

A construction site can be a rather chaotic place with plenty of risks that can pose a threat to the health and safety of the workers. Some of the most common risks workers can face in a construction site are :

- Falls from different heights that can involve workers or objects falling onto workers which can cause small injuries, permanent physical disabilities or even death in the worst cases. A few important points to take into consideration are the slipperiness of the floor where workers are operating, the type of shoes they are wearing and also the protection elements around them that could prevent them from falling, for instance the horizontal bars on a scaffolding

- Vibrations, typically caused by construction tools workers have to handle and vehicles. This type of risk does not immediately evolve into an accident, however it can cause professional illnesses in the long run depending on the level of exposure

- Noises, similarly to vibrations, they can be caused by tools and machineries. If not minimized, it can cause issues to the hearing system and in the worst cases, even permanent hearing loss

- Respiratory, this risk depends usually on: the environment in which workers are operating, such as in not well-ventilated closed rooms or the sewer system, the type of products they are using which could be toxic if inhaled, for example spray paints, and also the type on material they are operating on that could pose a threat to their respiratory system, like asbestos

- Handling of heavy materials, this could generate issues to muscles and especially bones such as the spine depending on the methods used to handle the materials and the number of times a worker needs to lift an object

- Electrocution, which can occur when utilizing certain electric tools and can generate fires or even explosions.

Management of safety risks

In this section, the whole process regarding the management of the risks potentially present in a construction site will be explained. This is a process meant to identify and try to eliminate or mitigate as much as possible all the risks that might harm the workers.

Here are the fundamental steps to follow.

Identification

This is a critical part of the process since it lays the foundation for the further steps of risk management. It is a rather complicated topic since it is done before the work begins and therefore it is based on the ability of the project manager to figure out where the risks may arise and in what circumstances.

The project manager or whoever is responsible for the safety of the workers should gather as much information as possible regarding similar projects and the accidents and risks that were identified. This is a great way to use past databases that can help spot the sources of risk in today’s construction sites.

Furthermore, communication is vital in many areas, including risk identification; it is suggested to talk to other engineers, project managers or even the workers to see if the can contribute to the process of identifying the risks also replying on their experience in past works. Since many accidents are caused by equipment or tools, it could be useful to verify the instructions of everything the workers will have to use in order to assess the hazards they might encounter.

Overall, this firs phase of the safety risk management process replies on the knowledge and experience of the project manager who has to identify the risks or third party individuals who might be involved like the manufacturers of tools or the workers themselves.

Assessment

This is the step in which the risks identified in the previous phase are evaluated and prioritized based on their probability of occurring and the negative effect they might have on the labor force employed in the construction site.

Although there are multiple ways to complete this part, two main groups can be defined to assess the risks:

- Qualitative, it is a simple way which consists in evaluating how likely it is that a risk can cause an accident and its potential impact through interviews, brainstorming and checklists; afterwards, the risks are placed in a matrix called risk assessment matrix that illustrates all the risks ranked based on their severity and probability (low, serious/medium and high) as it can be seen in figure 1.

Figure 1: Risk assessment matrix,

- Quantitative, this is a more complex method that aims at estimating how often a risk can impact the workers and its gravity. There are different ways to assess risks by using method, such as the tree analysis or the Monte Carlo simulation. It is worth mentioning that nowadays around the world there are companies that offer software that can simplify the lives of project managers, such as CerTus that not only after a few inputs can easily generate accurate risk management models, but also automatically fill out mandatory paperwork regarding health and safety of workers that must be submitted to the local municipality before beginning the construction.

Treatment/prevention

As already mentioned, after having identified and evaluated the risks, it is vital to eliminate them in order to make the environment as safe as possible. However, quite often many sources of risks can not be eradicated, therefore they must be minimized through different ways.

One of the most effective ways to treat risks is by adopting PPE personal protective equipment, this is probably the one of the most effective steps in guaranteeing safety in a construction site. Workers are in general obligated to wear PPE, however there are times when they need to wear a specific type of equipment only when necessary, such as protective goggles and masks when spray painting or when slicing wood or materials that release harmful particles which might end up in the eyes or be inhaled. Nevertheless, when working on strategies to protect workers, collective protective strategies should always be prioritized over individual ones, such as PPE, since they tend to be passive, meaning that there is no human action required.

Here are a few collective details that should be taken into account:

- Limit the number of workers who could be exposed to a risk

- Limit the chemical products workers might be exposed to

- Making sure the workplace is as safe as possible

- Try to minimize the amount of time workers are exposed to risks

- Evacuation plans and measures in case of an emergency

- Installing safety signs in places where a risk is not completely eliminated.

An aspect that is even more important than treating the risks is prevention, which focusses on preventing a risk from causing an accident in the first place.

Something fundamental when it comes to prevention is to inform the workers about the risks they might encounter in the construction site and prepare/train them on how to behave and tackle them; this can be done thought courses and workshops supervised by the employer.

Furthermore, all workers should frequently be checked by a professional doctor to make sure they are in good health condition to work efficiently and, if for instance they are not due to long exposure to noises, they should be treated properly and rest until it is necessary.

Inspections/Maintenance

A fundamental aspect of this whole process is related to inspecting and conducting maintenance on all the PPE and other protective equipment or measures taken because if they malfunction or fail to fulfill their purpose, they could put some workers at risk. If some PPEs are defective or broken, they should immediately be fixed and, if it is not possible, they should be replaced with new ones by the employer.

It is the safety manager’s responsibility to ensure that the measures put in place are effective and continue to be effective during the construction process by inspecting and monitoring the risks constantly.

Limits of the safety risk management process

The process described is quite effective and in theory it should eliminate or mitigate all the risks present in a construction site. However, nothing is flawless or perfect and there are always elements that are overlooked or neglected that end up causing accidents, sometime lethal, as it is illustrated in the table 1 below.

This process requires filling out a lot of paperwork, depending on the law and documents required by each country, and therefore it used to be very slow and time consuming; nevertheless, thanks to new software such as CerTus and many more, it has gotten faster and more efficient to complete. It must be said though that it requires an experienced and knowledgeable manager who can successfully identify and assess all the risks to find a way to reduce them, but unfortunately some people argue that it is not easy to find this type of expert and that the educational system should put more emphasis on the topic of safety risk management in order to have more professional engineers able to conduct a thorough analysis of risks.

Overall, the process meets its goal of eliminating and minimizing the residual risks, the reason why there are still accidents and deaths occurring on a daily basis is not entirely because of the process itself, but rather because of unidentified risks, design flaws, lack of training and precaution when working.

Overall, as much as we try to predict the risks in the design phase or attempt to find them in the construction site, there will always be unknows, elements that we are not aware of.

Conclusion

Construction sites are dangerous workplaces with numerous sources of risk, therefore it is vital to find them and eliminate them or at least minimize them.

As mentioned, this process is effective but not flawless and it requires a lot of experience and a lot of communication between who assesses the risks and who needs to face those risks.

Not always we can predict or identify the risks thanks to experience and knowledge, which is why workers always need to be trained and taught to be on constant alert and how to behave when facing a risk; preventing is better than curing.

Overall, safety risk management is a fundamental part of the construction phase since lives can potentially be put at risk and it is the duty of the manager or engineers who assess the risks to ensure that nobody gets injured or worse.

Annotated bibliography

1) Matej Mihić (2020). "Classification of construction hazards for a universal hazard identification methodology". Research gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339107995_Classification_of_construction_hazards_for_a_universal_hazard_identification_methodology

2) Anthony Mills (2001). “A systematic approach to risk management for construction”. Emerald Insight. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/02630800110412615/full/html?casa_token=jWz-aT1-efAAAAAA:lmJT0vBRzG_Bq9cGElDnvDB5tVEFMtXJgCZHgv3brjA2U24WqKFpqg4GM3JlMkTS3E-s5hs8zD1wgcbXzeOrQ0J3wf1_q70KR6agbCkPaowsRJPNQw