With more than 50 years in construction, Anthony F. Leketa notes several “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities. One involved leading a team of 750 from Parsons to rescue the $2.3 billion project to design, build and operate a nuclear waste processing facility for the Department of Energy at the Savannah River site in Aiken, SC. The team completed 1 million hours of work. without any lost time incidents and was recognized for its safety performance.
Now, a few years into retirement, Leketa finds himself leading a different kind of team effort: enriching the construction safety culture by fostering new college-level safety courses in engineering and construction programs. Specifically, Leketa is the 2024-25 chair of the National Academy of Construction Safety Committee, where years of work by leading safety advocates produced college safety symposia that have inspired educators. While Leketa led the development of an event at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, others took the message to the University of Kansas, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin/Texas A&M and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Passion for safety
Leketa’s passion for safety began during his 35-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which included overseeing contractor activities in the construction of a new base army at Fort Drum and years in the Corps’ senior executive service. “I thought nothing could beat my experience” in body safety, he says. But when he joined Parsons, the emphasis on security “was tremendous.” In the program reviews for senior executives, “If you couldn’t tell the number of near misses in your group, CEO Chuck Harrington let you know you weren’t doing your job.”
The NAC’s safety committee was looking for an area where “we could make a difference,” says Ken Arnold, a former safety committee chairman. Arnold and Wayne Crew, a former NAC executive director, realized a missing link was educating undergraduates in safety culture concepts. The result—the cycle of symposia, which was attended by representatives of 45 universities and 90 companies in the sector—has yielded results.
The events inspired Brian Kleiner, director of the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction, to augment existing safety courses so students can now major in safety, he says. They will learn how to deal with hazards and study the interaction of safety and technology, including the use of virtual reality to explore future hazards. Another symposium beneficiary was Samuel C. Lieber, associate professor and acting professor in the School of Applied Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He stepped up his school’s safety offerings last year, now including a minor in safety engineering and a course where students learn to take input from hazard analysis and safety requirements and “make iterative design and engineering work.”
The full report of the five symposia offered advice on curriculum building, where the topic of safety necessarily competes with other important engineering subjects for resources. The report helped Leketa and the team develop their 2025 strategy for more programs (in Southern California, Oregon State, North Carolina State and Purdue) and a startup program on February 27 in Washington, DC, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. .
After long efforts by ASCE to change its recommended criteria for civil engineering education, ABET (formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) changed its program criteria to read: “The plan of studies for civil engineers must include … professional attitudes and responsibilities of an engineer … including licensure and safety.”
Symposia and policy change work together. “NAC is committed to safety culture,” says Leketa. “We believe it!”
