Modern Steel Construction, July 1, 2021
In recent years, construction has become a much safer profession, both on job sites and in facilities like fabrication shops.
The average total recordable incident rate for construction declined 42% from 2007 to 2017, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Despite this improvement, construction still accounted for just over one in five of all on-the-job deaths in the U.S. in 2017, indicating that we still have a long way to go before we reach that elusive goal of zero incidents.
The construction industry has a huge opportunity to further reduce recordable incidents and ensure that more of our colleagues and friends go home safely each day. Technologies such as analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) can do far more than simply tell us what happened in the past, which is what behavior-based safety (BBS) initiatives tend to do. But by incorporating these technologies and enabling a more proactive mindset, in the form of predictive-based safety (PBS), we can predict where the next accident is likely to occur and take action to prevent it. Some early adopters of this new safety methodology have seen their incident rates drop by more than 50% over a twelve-month period, and they continue to see improvement.
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