Dive Brief:

• A growing number of construction industry safety experts are encouraging the use of building information modeling—or BIM—as a tool to prevent job-site deaths and injuries involving falls and burns.

• BIM is a process of creating digital models to provide information for planning construction. The safety experts told Building Design + Construction magazine that contractors could use the technology to assess risks on job sites and to plan ways to do more of the work off-site so that crews would spend less time on ladders, scaffolding, and roofs.

• Four safety directors quoted in the article have used BIM to create 4-dimensional simulations of their planned work sites to forecast everything from worker exposure, to open elevator shafts, to the protections that will be needed for pedestrians passing by the job site.

Dive Insight:

Use of BIM could prevent more than just on-the-job accidents; it could save contractors tens of thousands of dollars of unnecessary spending on scaffolding and staging on a project, the safety directors told the magazine. Plus, one director noted: "There’s no arguing about who is responsible for executing the work. It just gets done.”