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Dive brief:
- America’s largest contractor by revenue is working to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of high heat on the health of construction workers.
- This month, Turner Construction will study 200 construction workers in a confidential project in the Midwest to measure the impact of heat. Their core temperatures, heart rate and other vitals will be monitored as they go about their day.
- New York City-based Turner and his research team hope the data will paint a better picture of which heat mitigation techniques work and guide the potential development of other measures to promote site health of work
Diving knowledge:
The research team consists of Turner Construction and its foundation; Flatiron Construction, based in Broomfield, Colo.; the insurance companies Liberty Mutual and Chubb; and the non-profit health research La Isla Network.
last summer, Turner conducted a pilot study for three days to analyze the effects of heat on workers’ body temperature, also with Alpharetta, Georgia-based La Isla Network. The workers swallowed a pill-sized data collection device that remained in their bodies for 24 hours and allowed researchers to continuously monitor their internal body temperature.
The study found that 43 percent of the 33 workers had core temperatures above 100.4 degrees, even in cooler-than-typical summer conditions. It confirmed the importance of hydrating in the morning and throughout the day, regardless of temperature or work activity, Turner resilience program director Mónika Serrano said in the release.
The current study will be much larger than last summer’s, and the results should come with more recommendations for beating the heat, Chris McFadden, Turner’s vice president of communications and marketing, told Construction Dive.
Steve Spaulding, vice president and director of environmental health and safety at Turner, detailed this thermal safety plans of the company for the construction dive earlier this summer.
“Every contract, every job that we have, the weather is taken into account when we’re building that job,” Spaulding told Construction Dive. These plans include hydration stations and shade to cool off, but the contractor has also employed other creative techniques, such as one in bathrooms at a San Diego job site.
“It sounds fun to talk about, but it had a chart of urine colors. So it was posted where you were looking,” Spaulding said, so workers could compare and see if they needed to hydrate.
