Construction Industry Safety and Health

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Vidal Sanchez fell to his death at a Brooklyn work site on April 1, 2015. It should not have happened. The 51-year-old laborer, who worked for Brooklyn-based J&M Metro General Contracting Corp., fell while raking freshly poured concrete at the unprotected 6th floor edge of a building under construction at 360 Neptune Ave. in Brighton Beach.

Nanotechnology is transforming many industries, including construction. Nanomaterials are incredibly small - between 1 to 100 nanometers or about a million times smaller than the length of an ant. At this size, materials can take on new properties.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) today released a report on heavy equipment thefts in 2014. This report, co-produced with the National Equipment Register (NER), examines heavy equipment theft data submitted by law enforcement to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and profiles that data according to theft state, theft city, theft month, equipment manufacturer, equipment style (type) and year of manufacture.

A subcontractor and general contractor were cited for safety violations by OSHA after a worker plunged to his death from a four floor apartment complex in in New Braunfels, Texas.

A study of work-related injuries involving a hand or fingers among union carpenters in Washington state, 1989 to 2008, found that hand injuries accounted for 21.1% of reported injuries and 9.5% of paid lost-time injuries.

A complaint that an employee had been partially buried when an excavation collapsed brought OSHA enforcement officers to a Glennco Excavating, Inc. construction site in Missoula, Montana.

Working at a construction site is loud, dirty, and often dangerous. Roadside construction workers deal with the added risk of being struck by car or truck as it passes through a work zone, its driver unaware or ignoring flags, cones, or other warnings.

“One of the greatest challenges in occupational safety and health is ensuring that promising research findings become safer practices on the jobsite,” according to Pete Stafford, Executive Director of the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR).

Lessard Roofing and Siding Inc. and Lessard Brothers Construction Inc., both located in Greene, Maine, were cited by the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration for safety violations 11 times at 11 different work sites in Maine between 2000 and 2011.