This audio is automatically generated. Please let us know if you have any comments.
Brian Kleiner is the director of Virginia Tech’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction. The opinions are the author’s own.
On May 18, two construction workers were killed in an accident involving a tractor-trailer driving into an active work zone in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Those workers who left behind families, friends and co-workers, whose lives are now permanently changed. They died while working to improve the safety of the highway that served their community, because a driver drove into their workplace.
I believe we have a responsibility not only to mourn these losses, but to respond to them with urgency.
In 2024 in the US, there were 850 Total fatalities in the work zoneaccording to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is unacceptable.
In partnership with industry, academia must accelerate our research, innovation, and knowledge transfer to practice and commit to zero-death construction in the U.S. For too long, the construction industry has accepted fatality risk as an unfortunate reality of everyday life, but this is not a global assumption.
Change thinking towards prevention
In the US, despite improvements in regulations through voluntary standards, training, planning, technology and management systems, workers continue to die.
We have to change our thinking.
Brian Kleiner
Permission granted by Brian Kleiner
Our energy and resources are mostly devoted to personal protective equipment. Helmets and vests with sensors that collect data and alert workers to impending danger are valuable tools, but they do not guarantee that their wearers can stay safe from harm.
To move the needle, we need to focus on eliminating hazards completely. The mortality-free construction forces us to ask a more difficult question: Why is the worker exposed to the hazard in the first place?
Researchers, engineers, and designers have made progress with advances in controls that physically separate workers from hazards, such as improved barriers, redesigned guards on equipment, and reduced exposure through technology.
These efforts must continue, but they do not yet address the most effective level of security: complete elimination of all hazards.
Zero-kill construction won’t happen just by giving workers better protection. We need to identify tasks, conditions, and systems that are too dangerous for humans to perform, and then redesign or automate those tasks so that humans are not at risk of harm. This includes designing ways in which a collision caused by a driver entering a road work zone becomes impossible.
Risk review and automation exploration
From my first-hand observations as a human factors engineer, there are many opportunities to use automation to eliminate hazards in both horizontal and vertical construction. Accidents that cause injury or death do not occur because a worker intended to make a mistake, but because some of the existing systems are so risky that they are bound to fail.
Rather than focusing on worker behavior, we must examine the full system of decisions, pressures, designs, schedules, contracts, technologies, leadership practices, and cultures that shape risk before a worker enters a workplace.
Our responsibility is to change the system, including reassigning workers to less dangerous tasks. We need to accelerate the work of determining which tasks should be automated to extinction.
This will require rigorous task analyses. It will require us to identify where human presence is still essential, where human judgment must be supported, and where human exposure must be eliminated altogether.
Workers can be retrained and jobs can be redesigned. Workers can specialize in the operation of automated or semi-automated equipment that will keep them out of harm’s way.
Research to achieve these priorities should be accessible, usable and deployable across the industry. This transformation will not happen without the courage to challenge long-held assumptions, to question whether our current approaches are sufficient, and to insist that the lives of construction workers are not expendable.
