Spot safety inspections alone will not dramatically improve the safety on New York City construction ... [+]
As New York City experiences its biggest surge in construction in years, reports have surfaced of ballooning number of injuries on the city’s thousands of construction sites. Attempts to heighten city supervision of the sites has led to launch of a program of unannounced visits by city inspectors to perform spot safety checks.
Among those taking note of the initiative is Niran Shrestha, co-founder and CEO of New York City-based Kwant.ai, which produces visual scheduling and risk analytics software enabling construction teams to track progress in real time, predict delays and take proactive action. Another is Ardalan Khosrowpour of OnSiteIQ, a tech-enabled construction visual documentation and risk assessment service.
Khosrowpour reported based on OnSiteIQ data over the past 12 months, there were an average 10.5 safety violations per 100,000 square feet of New York City construction sites. Of the risks observed, 30.1% were fall protection violations, 13.8% fire hazards and 8.4% personal protection of bodily injury-related hazards. Fall protection issues like missing toe boards, hole covers and guard rails, and slips, trips and falls from heights were the most commonly observed and repeated safety violations.
Reactive, not proactive
According to Shrestha, there currently exist 38 inspectors, who have examined 10,256 New York City sites over the past 18 months, about 25 percent of all construction sites active during that period. He believes the surprise inspections can help in reducing the number of accidents and make the working environment safer. “But these measures are reactive in nature, and so do not tackle the root cause of the problems, which is the culture of safety in the construction industry that enables unsafe behavior,” he adds.
That culture is all the more troubling given that today’s job sites feature environments that are continually changing. “When you look at it from a safety perspective, a job site that is safe today doesn’t guarantee it is safe tomorrow,” he observes.
For his part, Khosrowpour notes New York City is invariably among the leading cities nationwide for development and construction. Although inability to scale based on finite financial resources will be a limiting factor, simply making construction companies aware unannounced spot inspections could occur should enhance safety, he believes.
“Due to the lack of resources with regards to manpower, every job site in the city could not possibly be inspected during the same week, let along on the same day,” he says.
But by creating an awareness for general contractors that there is an imminent possibility of inspection there should be an uptick in the safety awareness on these sites, he says, noting industry-wide conversations around the nature of job-site safety should benefit everyone involved.
“The strategy will suffer from the Hawthorne effect unless it’s sustained over time, meaning each site receives multiple random inspections throughout the year,” he says.
The Hawthorne effect is a phenomenon in which people alter their behavior based on the perception they are being observed.
Everyone wins
When New York City construction sites are made safe for every worker and other people and property nearby, all stakeholders win, Khosrowpour says. “Workers get to go home to their families and contractors will be able to deliver projects on time and on budget without costly litigation and delays,” he reports.
“When it comes to large scale construction and development it is important to remember the overall impact on a community. And those who are constructing that community need to be safe in the process. Change will only come through the adoption of technology industry wide, which will take innovators and early adopters to see and create the value for years to come.”
