Contractors Shift to New Methods for Tracking Site Safety: Focusing on 'Fatal Risks'

Construction site fatality rates have remained stagnant for a decade. Industry slogans proclaim that the acceptable number of casualties is zero, yet the number of deaths has not declined. The industry's fatal injury rate has stabilized at around 10 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. To drive change, safety leaders have begun exploring new methods of measuring safety effectiveness, believing that existing traditional metrics are flawed.

As a result, some leading contractors have started recording and analyzing safety data differently. Instead of trying to eliminate all site injuries, they have shifted their focus to the most serious dangers: those risks that could be fatal.

For example, Paul Levin, Senior Vice President of Health, Safety, and Environment at Sundt, realized that even when contractors successfully meet safety goals, existing safety measurement methods are not preventive enough and not accurate enough. He said, "This is what many of us in construction safety think: you do these compliance tasks and other best practices, and they do drive improvement. But when we met and exceeded our business goal of a 0.50 recordable incident rate in 2019, our total number of incidents did not go down."

Levin reasoned that based on construction industry fatality data and Sundt's work-hour exposure, the company could "expect" one fatality approximately every four years and 61 days. That was unacceptable.

Sundt began experimenting in 2019 with a new measurement method called STCKY (which stands for "Stuff That Can Kill You") (sometimes Levin uses a more common construction-site expletive in place of "stuff"). Last year, Sundt's "Stop STCKY" program won an innovation award from the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). The program better indicates when workers avoid danger only because direct controls and safety guards are in place, or purely by luck, enabling Sundt to take action to ensure those guards are in place more often.

Levin said that after measuring the data, Sundt professionals conduct "STCKY walkthroughs," and when workers encounter hazards without adequate protection, they stop work.

Sundt also trained its employees and subcontractor partners on fatal hazards. Its STCKY program emphasizes the "Fatal Eight" hazards, divided into three categories:

• STCKY Success: No serious injury or fatality occurred with direct controls and safety guards in place.
• STCKY Luck: No serious injury or fatality occurred, but direct controls and safety guards were not in place.
• STCKY Injury: A serious injury or fatality did occur.

Although compliance for all hazards (regardless of severity) remains critical, focusing on the precursors of the most fatal and dangerous exposures may not only be a better way to measure success but also ensure workers are better protected from hazards even when no one is injured.

Problems with Existing Measurement Methods

Experts in the construction industry generally agree that current safety metrics, such as the total recordable incident rate, do not truly reflect how safe a site is.

"Someone closes a door on their hand today and needs stitches; that's a recordable event. Another person does the same thing tomorrow and might just have a bruised finger," said Phil Clarke, Director of Safety and Risk Management at KS Industries, an oil and gas contractor based in Bakersfield, California. In fact, a 2020 study by the Construction Safety Research Alliance (CSRA), using 17 years of data and 3.2 trillion work hours, debunked this metric, as the study found no clear association between total recordable incident rates and fatalities.

TRIR is the rate of OSHA-recordable incidents per 200,000 work hours at a company. A recordable incident is a work-related injury that results in loss of consciousness, requires medical treatment beyond first aid, causes days away from work, restricted work, or job transfer.

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 added.

Experts point out that TRIR's flaw is in its name: it only captures recordable incidents, does not reflect the severity of injuries, and does not include near misses. Levin said, "A one-stitch cut, a broken leg, and a fatality are all counted equally."

For example, industry leaders have largely stopped touting a certain number of injury-free days. Chris Trahan Cain, Executive Director of CPWR (The Center for Construction Research and Training) in Silver Spring, Maryland, said, "When you celebrate a milestone like that, you're not celebrating a hazard-free site; you're celebrating a site with no recordable injuries." She noted that emphasizing injury-free days can sometimes lead to the "bloody pocket syndrome"—workers may hide minor injuries, treating them in their trucks or restrooms rather than reporting them. Cain said, "Nobody wants to be the one who ruins Friday's pizza party or next week's truck raffle."

To avoid this problem, safety experts are studying recordable and non-recordable events—serious injuries and fatalities as well as near misses, which are SIF potential events.

Stop STCKY

Sundt's Levin wanted to identify situations where workers faced potentially fatal hazards to determine how often appropriate protections (direct controls and safety guards) were in place, and how many times workers escaped by luck. By reviewing recordable incidents and conducting STCKY walkthroughs, Levin found that of 684 incidents in fiscal year 2019, 608 (88%) were unlikely to lead to a SIF. This meant that while ensuring adequate protection still helps keep workers healthy and safe, nine out of ten incidents were less concerning. This narrowed Levin's focus.

He then studied the remaining 76 incidents (12%) that were more likely to lead to a SIF. Of those, four had adequate protection in place, meaning that when facing a true "Stuff That Can Kill You" risk, Sundt workers achieved "STCKY Luck" 94% of the time in 2019. These alarming numbers were a wake-up call, but they also provided Sundt with a roadmap. Six years later, in fiscal year 2024, Levin said the team recorded a STCKY success rate of 65%—meaning that in situations where a SIF could occur, adequate protection was in place about two-thirds of the time. Levin knows there is still significant room for improvement, as they are still relying on luck about one-third of the time. But compared to the beginning, when workers were protected from potential SIFs only four times, it is a world of difference.

Identifying Factors

Bart Wilder, Vice President of Safety at Hoar Construction, based in Birmingham, Alabama, said the company is working to identify causal factors of SIFs on its sites. They are partnering with ACIG, an insurance company based in Richardson, Texas. According to ACIG, everyday factors such as worker fatigue, stress, inadequate equipment, or being behind schedule can increase the likelihood of serious injuries.

Wilder and his team identified SIF's own causal factors, including rushing, improper equipment, or schedule changes. After about 12 months of research, Wilder said they found the factors most likely to cause injuries in their work. He said, "The results showed that our biggest challenge was underground utility strikes. We do a lot for our safety program, but we still see workers striking lines." Knowing that excavation work near buried electrical or gas lines carries the highest SIF risk has enabled Hoar to plan in more detail—such as ensuring the location of underground utilities is known in advance—to better protect workers, Wilder said. Looking for other precursors and causal factors allows companies to analyze data more granularly.

In short, focusing on the most dangerous activities (those that could lead to a SIF rather than a "bloody pocket" injury) allows contractors to plan and prevent safety issues more thoroughly. Wilder said, "In hindsight, it's obvious. There are all sorts of clichés in the industry: plan your work, work your plan, failing to plan is planning to fail." Clarke said KSI has done something similar. Identifying the most common and most dangerous hazards prompted the company to adopt checklists for its highest-risk tasks. Specifically, observers conduct checks before, during, and after workers enter confined spaces for welding, and perform the same checks before and after they exit the confined space. He said learning from mistakes where no one was injured is an excellent opportunity to ensure no one is ever exposed to that mistake again. Clarke said, "The biggest challenge is getting the people involved in SIF potential events to recognize that these are not bad things; they are actually gifts."