Amnesty International recently aired the latest of several reports on alarming levels of labor abuse and injury linked to Qatar’s World Cup development, as reported in the magazine The Nation.
Failure to slow down in construction zones contributed to two major accidents on Interstate 70 in Illinois in recent weeks, according to an article in the Effingham Daily News in Illinois.
Eight people have died in construction-related accidents in 2015 thus far, according to the city’s Buildings Department, as many as in all of 2014; the year before, three died. Not since 2008, during the height of the last building boom, has the number of construction accidents been so high, when a rash of episodes, including two falling cranes, claimed 19 lives, according to an article in The New York Times.
Although hardhats are a fixture in construction work and are intended to keep construction workers safe, they do not always prevent accidents that lead to traumatic brain injury (TBI) on construction sites, according to the Brain Injury Society.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the most common construction site injuries suffered by workers include: Burns and scarring – Burns are one of the most common construction site injuries around, mainly because of the likelihood of fires and explosions on build sites. Exposed wiring, dangerous chemicals, leaking pipes, and other items all pose a potential risk for fires, which if not handled properly, could endanger nearby workers.
A 32-mile stretch of interstate where construction began in June, 2014 to repair the interstate and widen it from two lanes to three lanes in each direction (a $261 million project) has gone hand in hand with a significant increase in crashes during the last year, according to local police, according to an article in the Toledo Blade.
OSHA inspectors who observed some employees working on a roof without fall protection opened an investigation at the site, which led to fines and citations for New Homes Construction, Inc. of Burlington, New Jersey.
In the past five years, 59 people have been struck by falling debris from New York City construction sites, according to the New York Post. And the numbers are on the rise: 27 percent of those pedestrians were victimized between January and September in 2014.
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