Things That Can Kill You: Contractors are moving to new ways to track jobsite safety

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Fatality rates on construction sites have been stagnant for a decade. Industry mantras have stated that the only acceptable number of injuries and deaths is zero, but fatalities have not budged.

The industry the rate of fatal injuries has leveled off around 10 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. To help move the needle, security leaders have begun looking for new methods to measure security success. They say established and existing metrics are flawed.

Therefore, some leading contractors now record and analyze security data differently. Instead of trying to deny all workplace injuries, some have focused on the more serious hazards: the things that can kill you.

For example, Paul Levin, Sundt’s senior vice president of health, safety and environment, realized that existing methods for measuring safety success were not sufficiently proactive or accurate, even when the contractor was successfully meeting safety goals.

“That’s what a lot of us think about in construction safety: You do these compliance things, you do these other best practices,” he said. “And it drove improvement. But when we got to 2019 here at Sundt and exceeded our business goal of a recordable injury rate of 0.50, our total number of incidents didn’t go down.”

Levin reasoned that based on construction industry fatality data and Sundt’s hours of occupational exposure, the company could “expect” a death approximately every four years and 61 days. This was unacceptable.

Sundt began testing a new measure in 2019 called STCKY, or “Stuff That Can Kill You.” (Sometimes Levin doesn’t say “things” but instead uses language more commonly heard in the workplace.)

Last year, Sundt’s Stop the STCKY program won the Associated General Contractors of America Innovation Award. The program better indicates when workers avoided danger because of direct controls and safeguards or by luck, so Sundt could act to make sure those protections were in place more often.

After measuring the data, Sundt professionals conduct “STCKY Walks,” Levin said, where they stop work when workers encounter hazards with inadequate protection.

Sundt also educated his workforce and business partners about its deadly dangers. Their STCKY program stands out the 8 fatal dangers in three categories:

• STCKY Success: No serious injuries or fatalities with direct controls and safeguards in place.
• STCKY luck: No serious injuries or deaths, direct controls and safeguards not in place.
• STCKY Injury: Serious injury or death occurred.

While compliance with all hazards, regardless of severity, remains key, a new focus on precursors to the most deadly and dangerous exposures could be a better way to not only measure success, but also to ensure that workers are better protected from hazards, even when no one gets hurt.

Problems with existing measures

Construction experts largely agree that current metrics for measuring safety, such as total recordable injury rates, do not capture the true safety of a workplace.

“Somebody could close their hand on a door today and that results in stitches, and that’s a recordable incident,” said Phil Clarke, director of safety and risk management for oil and gas contractor KS Industries in Bakersfield, California. “Another might do it. the same tomorrow and it results in a bruised finger.”

In fact, a 2020 study by the Construction Safety Research Alliance that used 17 years of data and 3.2 billion worker hours discredited the measure, finding no discernible association between total recordable injury and fatality rates.

TRIR is the rate at which a company experiences an OSHA recordable incident for every 200,000 worker hours. A recordable incident is a work-related injury that involves loss of consciousness or requires medical treatment beyond first aid, days off work, restricted work, or transfer to another job.

TRIR was created and institutionalized by OSHA’s recordkeeping requirements. For 50 years, TRIR has been used to compare industries, companies and projects, and is sometimes used as a benchmark for success, CSRA said. Insurance companies also use TRIR to determine workers’ compensation insurance premiums, CSRA said.

Experts say TRIR’s flaw is in its name: it only captures recordable events, not injury severity and near misses.

“A single point cut, a broken leg and a death all count the same,” Levin said.

For example, industry leaders have largely moved away from advocating for a certain threshold of injury-free days.

“When you celebrate these milestones, you’re not celebrating a risk-free workplace, you’re celebrating one recordable injury-free workplace,” said Chris Trahan Cain, executive director of Silver Spring, Md.-based CPWR’s Construction Research and Training Center.

The emphasis on injury-free days sometimes leads to masking smaller injuries in what she called “bleeding pocket syndrome.” Instead of addressing a seemingly minor wound, a worker may hide it and treat it in their truck or toilet.

“No one wants to be the one who dropped Friday’s pizza, or next week’s truck giveaway,” Cain said.

To avoid this problem, safety experts are researching what can and cannot be recorded: serious injuries and fatalities and near misses or potential SIFs.

Stopping the STCKY

Levin de Sundt wanted to find the situations where workers faced life-threatening hazards to determine how often adequate protections (direct controls and safeguards) were in place and how often employees escaped unharmed by chance.

Looking at recordable injuries and conducting STCKY walks, Levin found that of the 684 incidents in fiscal year 2019, 608, or 88 percent, were not likely to result in a SIF.

This meant that while ensuring adequate protection could still help keep workers healthy and safe, nine out of 10 injuries were less of a concern. This narrowed Levin’s focus.

From there, it looked at the remaining 76 incidents, or 12%, that were most likely to result in a SIF. Four of those times there were adequate protections in place, which meant that when faced with real things that can kill you, Sundt’s workers achieved “STCKY luck” 94% of the time in 2019.

The hard numbers were alarming, but they also provided Sundt with a road map. Six years later, after changing focus and resources, Levin said the team recorded a 65 percent STCKY success rate, meaning about two-thirds of the time a SIF could having occurred in fiscal year 2024, adequate protections were in place.

That still leaves a lot of room for improvement, Levin knows, since they were still lucky about a third of the time. But it’s a far cry from the four times workers were safe from a potential SIF when the process began.

Identifying factors

Bart Wilder, vice president of safety for Birmingham, Ala.-based Hoar Construction, said the company was investigating identifying causal factors for SIFs on the job. He partnered with ACIG Insurance Company of Richardson, Texas. Everyday things like worker fatigue, stress, lack of equipment or running late can increase the likelihood of a serious injury, according to ACIG.

Wilder and his team identified their own causal factors for SIFs, such as working in a hurry, not having the right equipment, or a change in schedule. After about 12 months of research, Wilder said they found the biggest thing that could cause an injury on the job.

“What it showed us was that our biggest challenge had been the utility strikes,” he said. “We’ve done a lot to support our safety program, but we saw that [workers hit utility lines].”

Knowing that excavation work around buried power or gas lines proved to have the highest risk of a SIF allowed Hoar to plan in more detail, such as making sure they knew the locations of utilities buried in advance, to better protect workers, Wilder said. The search for other precursors and causal factors allowed the company to gain more granularity with its data.

Simply put, focusing on the most dangerous activities—those that can lead to a SIF rather than a “bloody pocket” injury—allows contractors to be more deliberate with safety planning and prevention.

“It seems very obvious after the fact. There are all the industry clichés: plan your work, work to plan, a failure to plan is a plan to fail,” Wilder said.

Clarke said KSI has done something similar. Identifying the most common and most dangerous hazards has led the company to adopt a checklist for its riskiest tasks. It gets as specific as an observer logging through the app before, during and after another worker has entered a confined space to do some welding, and then doing the same checks before, during and after exiting of the confined space.

Learning from a mistake where no one was hurt is a great opportunity to make sure no one is exposed to that mistake again, he said.

“The biggest challenge is getting potential SIFs to realize that they’re not bad things, they’re actually gifts,” Clarke said.