By Ross Weber
I am Ross Weber and I
am the Hutchinson Branch Manager for APAC-Kansas, Inc. Shears Division.
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| Ross Weber |
We spend a lot of
time making our work zones safe. It is planned for in our pre-bid evaluations
and followed up on throughout the project. We analyze how we can protect our
employees from the public as well as how we can protect the public from us.
When we see something in our plan isn’t working, we make changes to the
situation.
Work zones are a
change to the normal traffic pattern. We train our employees constantly about
avoiding distractions while in the work zone. We have no training with the
public.
We spend a lot of
time in training discussing the distractions we see occurring with drivers in
our work zone. A lot of people are looking at their phones or talking on their
phones. I followed a man through a work zone last year that was watching a
movie on his I-Pad. We see people that are asleep, others that are drunk. Imagine
someone driving through your workplace watching a movie at 70 mph.
While construction
workers are occasionally injured or even killed in work zone accidents, the
vast majority of the serious injuries and all of the deaths I have witnessed in
31 years of construction involved the public.
It is devastating to
us when our co-workers are injured at work or anywhere else. We work hard to
prevent it. We have become adept at avoiding distracted drivers, we know they
are there every day. Some of us have known each other and our families for
years - it is personal when one of us is injured.
Equally devastating
are the accidents involving the public; construction workers are the first
responders at work zone accidents. We witness the destruction to vehicles and
people that occur when people run into our equipment and each other. All too
often we are the ones that administer first aid and comfort until EMS arrives.
These accidents take a toll on us emotionally. While most of the time we don’t
know the victims of the accidents, we know that like us, they have people
expecting them to come home.
If people driving
through our work zones could see what construction workers see, they would put
down the phones, the I-Pads, the computers, hairbrushes, razors, cheeseburgers
and anything else that distracts them and just drive their car.
