Ladder Safety Rules 101: A Comprehensive Approach to Working Safely at Heights

Falls are one of the leading causes of serious injury and death in the workplace, and OSHA is serious about preventing them. Four of the agency’s 10 most cited standards in 2023 were related to fall prevention, including the rules for ladder safety.

Graphic of construction workers on a ladder while constructing a building.

In 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 161 fatal work injuries from which ladders were the primary source. While this is a 5.8 percent decline from 171 deaths in 2019, it could be related to pandemic shutdowns and might not represent real progress.

Meanwhile, there were 22,710 nonfatal injuries related to ladder safety in 2020, which was a 1.7 percent increase from 22,330 injuries in 2019. These nonfatal ladder injuries resulted in at least one day away from work. Workers in installation, maintenance and repair occupations faced the highest number of ladder-related injuries, followed by construction and extraction occupations.

Ladder Safety MonthRead more...

Women in Construction and the Problem of PPE

A graphic of a woman working at a construction site.

Women in construction have a difficult relationship with personal protective equipment (PPE). On the one hand, PPE is critical for protecting them against chemical, physical, mechanical and other workplace hazards. On the other hand, PPE that doesn’t properly fit women’s bodies can be so uncomfortable or ineffective as to increase the risk of injury or death.

This article will examine the difficulties women have with PPE in construction, as well as ways in which to make positive changes for women in the industry.

PPE and the Hierarchy of Controls

In the hierarchy of controls for eliminating or reducing workplace hazards, PPE is the least effective control. It is the last line of defense in environments in which elimination or other controls aren’t feasible or don’t provide sufficient protection. Table 1 shows the standard hierarchy of controls.

A table of the hierarchy of controls

PPE is a critical component of construction safety. Construction sites are dynamic environments with … Read more...

Building a Safer Tomorrow: Challenges and Solutions in Construction Site Safety

Graphic of two construction workers reviewing construction safety software on a tablet

On the afternoon of August 24, 2020, a construction worker employed by an electrical contractor was preparing to install a new power line between two utility poles at a Tennessee construction site. The worker threw the guide twine, pulled the cable toward the next pole, but it arched higher than intended and contacted the distribution power lines. Flowing through those lines were 2,700 volts of electric current, which traveled down the guide twine to the worker, who was electrocuted.

Just a few weeks earlier a UK construction worker was crushed underneath concrete after a partial wall and roof collapsed during demolition work on a site. He was pronounced dead on the scene.

Sadly, this kind of day is often the rule rather than the exception in the construction industry, both in the U.S. and around the world, with workers routinely suffering fatal and life-altering injuries while working to build the … Read more...

Stand Down for Fall Safety

This week is the National Safety Stand-Down in the United States, which raises fall hazard awareness across the country in an effort to stop fall fatalities and injuries.

The National Safety Stand-Down to Prevent Falls in Construction on May 3-7 is led by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to reduce injuries and fatalities from falls.

Each year, OSHA publishes a top 10 list of the most frequently cited violations it has recorded. The list for 2020 is largely unchanged from 2019, suggesting that little progress has been made addressing the most common workplace incidents, four of which are related to fall protection: fall protection (general requirements), ladders, scaffolding and fall protection (training requirements). OSHA logged nearly 12,000 violations for these four standards.

Fatalities caused by falls from elevation continue to be a leading cause of death for construction employees, accounting for 401 of the 1,061 construction fatalities … Read more...

Intelex Experts Examine How the Construction Industry Is Flexing its Technology Muscle

The construction industry has been engaging more and more in technology solutions for challenges such as regulatory compliance, safety analytics, training tracking and more. Join our panel of experts for our latest Expert Connect session, “Construction Builds Technology Muscle” on Wednesday, May 5, 2021, from 10am-10:45am EDT

Chuck Pettinger, Ph.D., Process Change Leader – Implementation for Predictive Solutions Corp., will be our moderator. Chuck has over 30 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating culture step-change initiatives. His major interests include developing large-scale corporate behavior change initiatives, assessing industrial safety cultures, using advanced predictive analytics to develop leading indicators and conducting organizational leadership workshops.

Chuck will guide our experts through a discussion about some of the technologies being used by world-class companies in the construction industry to protect workers and the business. Existing challenges like compliance and safety have been compounded by new challenges brought about by economic … Read more...

The culture of denial, workplace injuries and lessons learned

Try to imagine this workplace injury scenario: A construction worker is seriously hurt on the job. It’s a very minor injury. Years later, under similar circumstances, a worker is killed from a similar incident. Why didn’t the company learn from the first incident?

Recent research in the International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics suggests three barriers to learning from previous workplace injuries and how companies can overcome them. In Workplace accidents as a source of knowledge: opportunities and obstacles, author Hernani Neto of the Univeresity of Porto, Portugal, suggests workplace injuries and other safety incidents must be understood as a source of knowledge.

However, here is another point that companies need to understand: Safety incidents don’t automatically become an effective source of knowledge. Companies have to work at it. Just because a company suffered a close call or an incident with an employee suffering only minor injuries doesn’t mean … Read more...