ConstructConnect Blog

Regardless of how detailed your construction company’s safety plan is, and despite how in-depth and meticulous your training program is, accidents involving injuries can still occur. When a worker suffers an injury it is vital to have a first aid program in place. Because no two construction sites are exactly the same, you should design a jobsite specific first aid program so that your workers can receive the best possible care should they suffer an injury. Procedures for developing a jobsite specific first aid program should be a part of you overall safety plan. Each first aid program should be written down and copies should be kept on hand for reference, review and revision.

Welcome to the first article in an ongoing, monthly series tackling aspects of construction law for the construction industry. This new monthly series is authored by J. Norman Stark, an Attorney-at-Law and Architect Emeritus, (AIA, NCARB) with over 40 years of experience in construction and consulting expertise in construction accidents and disputes.

Most people probably don’t give much thought to advancements in building materials. The oldest known bricks date back to around 7500 B.C. Concrete-like substances were in use as far back as 6500 BC and the ancient Romans mixed lime and a volcanic ash, pozzolan, to make concrete which was used to build structures like the Coliseum and the Pantheon.

I first came across the Solar Roadways project back in 2014 from an article in “Fast Company.” The basic premise of the project is that if all the roads in the country were “paved” with solar panels they would produce more energy than the country consumes in a year. The article also discussed some of the features of the solar panels like embedded LED lights for dividing lines, heaters to keep the panels free of snow and ice, and tempered glass that could support a 250,000-pound vehicle and textured to provide traction. The article also mentioned that the owners of the company developing the project were currently trying to raise $1 million on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo in order to hire additional engineers in order to perfect their product. (Solar Roadways went on to raise over $2.2 million during their Indiegogo campaign.)

Imagine walking onto a construction site to find a fleet of bulldozers, graders, and excavators doing site prep without any operators behind the controls. Upon closer inspection, you notice some of the equipment is cab-less with no manual controls. The operators might be standing at a safe distance operating the machine remotely. Maybe the equipment is operating itself while someone monitors the work from the jobsite trailer or even back at the office 50 miles away. Autonomous and semi-autonomous construction equipment are the future and we’ll see it lead to safer jobsites with the work being done more efficiently and accurately than today.

Worker misclassification is a serious problem in the construction industry that often goes unchecked and unpunished. Penalties for misclassifying employees as independent contractors can be severe, but unfortunately, the risk of getting caught has historically been minimal. The payoff for unscrupulous business owners who purposely misclassify workers can be enormous. It’s a classic risk vs. reward scenario where, for the most part, the rewards for purposely misclassifying workers as independent contractors far outweighed the risks of getting caught.

The construction industry continues to hold the top spot on a list that it isn’t proud of—total annual worker deaths. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ revised Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, there 4,821 fatal occupational injuries in the U.S. in 2014. (Note: This is the most recent year for which data is available.) In the construction industry there were 899 worker deaths, which is about 18.65% of total fatal work injuries. This is the largest number of construction worker deaths since 2008.

Is your construction company still not using Building Information Modeling (BIM)? If your firm hasn’t adopted BIM yet I’m sure there’s a valid reason. Perhaps you think it’s too expensive or you don’t have the resources to implement adoption. Maybe your estimators love spending countless hours doing manual takeoffs from plans and specs when preparing bids. It could be you enjoy doing costly rework that eats away at your profits.

Most of the focus on applying 3D printing technology to the construction industry revolves around building structures. The world’s first 3D printed office building opened this week in Dubai which has set a goal of 3D printing 25% of all buildings in the city by 2030. Taking just 17 days to print and two days to assemble, the 2,700-square-foot building was printed by WinSun Decoration Design Engineering. Back in 2014, WinSun printed 10 single-room buildings in a span of 24 hours. They followed that up last year by 3D printing a five-story apartment building and a nearly 12,000-square-foot villa.

Earlier this month, Gilbane Building Co. proposed that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) should require construction workers to wear safety harnesses whenever they are working at a height of 6 feet or more above a lower level. This requirement is part of Gilbane’s safety program, which they claim has prevented 20 potential fatalities since 2011. It’s hard to argue with a company that has won multiple industry safety awards with a safety program that has resulted in 95% of projects completed having zero lost time injuries and 80% of projects finished with zero recordable injuries in 2015.