In order to keep cars humming along side streets and highways, road workers have to put in long hours to fix, fill, and smooth the road surfaces. Keeping these workers safe while cars are zooming by can be a major logistical challenge, though. However, in order to prevent major problems with the project, it’s vital that you find ways to protect your workers using any means possible.
Easy-to-Read Signs
While most road signs are fairly easy to ignore, the bright orange color of construction signs is hard to miss. Therefore, to keep your workers safe, it’s important to use ample signage to alert motorists of the nearby workers. You’ll want to put the signs far enough away from the construction site that motorists are able to properly prepare themselves to use extra caution while they’re driving through the site.
Traffic Control
For construction sites where you can’t maintain a normal flow of traffic, traffic control services are an absolute must. Rather than asking your construction workers to look out entirely for their own safety, traffic control services take care of that job so that your workers can focus on finishing the construction work. Plus, the flashing lights on a traffic control car are excellent at grabbing the attention of passing motorists.
Make Safe Spaces
As workers are walking around a construction site, they will sometimes need to walk in areas that are close to passing cars. To help them navigate more safely, it’s important to mark off safe spaces that have plenty of margin for error so that passing cars aren’t right next to the workers. Otherwise, any mistake on the part of the passing drivers could result in a major disaster for your workers.
Outline Potential Safety Risks
To help keep all of your workers on the same page, it’s a good idea to have a team meeting at the start of every shift. During this meeting, you can outline potential safety risks that might present themselves throughout the shift. For example, if rain is expected during the shift, workers will need to use caution to watch for motorists who may lose control as a result of the wet roads.
Make Safety Everyone’s Responsibility
Above all, it’s important that everyone who works on the construction site makes safety their personal responsibility. Rather than leaving safety in the hands of the site foreman or the traffic control personnel, each person who works on a road construction project needs to understand that their safety is largely in their hands. If they truly grasp this, they will take safety much more seriously, greatly reducing the risk of an accident.
