Brian Kleiner is the director of Virginia Tech’s Myers-Lawson School of Construction. Opinions are the author’s own.
On May 18, two construction workers were killed in a crash caused by a tractor-trailer driving into an active work zone in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Those workers left behind families, friends and coworkers, whose lives are now permanently changed. They died while working to improve the safety of the highway that served their community, because a driver entered their place of business.
I believe we have a responsibility not only to mourn those losses, but to respond to them with urgency.
In 2024 in the U.S., there were 850 total work zone fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is unacceptable.
In partnership with industry, we in academia must expedite our research, innovation and transfer of knowledge into practice and commit to achieving fatality-free construction in the U.S. For too long, the construction industry has accepted fatality risk as an unfortunate, day-to-day reality, but this is not a globally held assumption.
Shift thinking toward prevention
In the U.S., despite improvements to regulations through voluntary standards, training, planning, technology and management systems, workers continue to die.
We must shift our thinking.
Our energy and resources are mostly spent focused on personal protective equipment. Helmets and vests with sensors that collect data and alert workers of impending danger are valuable tools, but they do not guarantee their wearers can stay safe from harm.
To move the needle, we need to focus on removing hazards entirely. Fatality free construction requires us to ask a more difficult question: Why is the worker exposed to the hazard in the first place?
Researchers, engineers and designers have made progress advancing controls that physically separate workers from hazards, such as improved barriers, redesigned guards on equipment and reducing exposure through technology.
These efforts must continue, but they still do not address the level of safety that’s most effective: Complete elimination of all hazards.
Fatality-free construction won’t come about through only giving workers better protection. We must identify the tasks, conditions and systems that are too dangerous for humans to perform, then redesign or automate those tasks so that humans have no risk of harm. This includes designing ways in which a collision caused by a driver entering a highway work zone becomes impossible.
Examination of risk and exploring automation
Based on my first-hand observations as a human factors engineer, there are many opportunities to use automation to eliminate hazards in both horizontal and vertical construction. Accidents that cause injury or death come about not because a worker intends to make a mistake, but because some of the systems in place are so risky that they are bound to eventually fail.
Instead of focusing on worker behavior, we must examine the full system of decisions, pressures, designs, schedules, contracts, technologies, leadership practices and cultures that shape risk before a worker ever steps onto a jobsite.
Our responsibility is to change the system, including reassigning workers to less hazardous tasks. We must accelerate the work of determining which tasks must be automated to extinction.
This will require rigorous task analyses. It will require us to identify where human presence is still essential, where human judgement must be supported and where human exposure must be eliminated altogether.
Workers can be retrained and jobs can be redesigned. Workers can become specialized in operating the automated or semi-automated equipment that will keep them out of harm’s way.
Research in pursuit of these priorities should be accessible, useable and deployable throughout the industry. This transformation won’t come about without the courage to challenge long-held assumptions, to question whether our current approaches are enough and to insist that the lives of construction workers are not expendable.
