Stuff that can kill you: Contractors pivot to new ways of tracking jobsite safety


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Construction jobsite death rates have remained stagnant for a decade. Industry mantras have claimed the only acceptable number of injuries and deaths is zero, yet fatalities haven’t budged.

The industry’s fatal injury rate has plateaued at around 10 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. To help move the needle, safety leaders have begun pursuing new methods to measure success in safety. They say established, existing metrics are flawed.

So, some leading contractors now record and analyze safety data differently. Rather than attempting to negate all jobsite injuries, some have turned their focus to the most severe hazards: the stuff that can kill you.

For example, Paul Levin, senior vice president of health, safety and environmental for Sundt, realized existing methods of measuring success in safety weren’t preventative or accurate enough, even when the contractor successfully reached safety goals.

“That’s what many of us in construction safety think: You do these compliance things, you do these other best practices,” he said. “And it did drive improvement. But when we hit 2019 here at Sundt and we beat our business target of a 0.50 recordable injury rate, our total number of incidents was not going down.”

Headshot of Paul Levin.

Paul Levin

Permission granted by Sundt

 

Levin reasoned that based on construction industry fatality data and Sundt’s work hours of exposure, the company could “expect” a fatality roughly every four years and 61 days. That was unacceptable. 

Sundt began trying out a new measurement in 2019 called STCKY, or “Stuff That Can Kill You.” (Sometimes, Levin doesn’t say “stuff,” instead using language more commonly heard on the jobsite.)

Last year, Sundt’s Stop the STCKY program won the Associated General Contractors of America Innovation Award. The program better indicates when workers avoided danger because of direct controls and safeguards or because of luck, so Sundt could act to ensure that those protections were in place more often.

After measuring data, Sundt professionals conduct “STCKY Walks,” Levin said, where they stop work when workers encounter hazards with inadequate protection.

Sundt also educated its workforce and trade partners on their fatal hazards. Its STCKY program emphasizes the Fatal 8 hazards over three categories:

  • STCKY Success: No serious injury or fatality with direct controls and safeguards in place.
  • STCKY Luck: No serious injury or fatality, direct controls and safeguards not in place.
  • STCKY Injury: Serious injury or fatality did occur.

Though compliance for all hazards, regardless of severity, remains key, a new focus on precursors to the most fatal and most dangerous exposures could be a better way not only of measuring success, but also ensuring that workers are better protected from hazards, even when no one gets hurt.

Problems with existing measurements

Construction experts largely agree that current metrics for measuring safety — such as total recordable injury rates — don’t capture how truly safe a jobsite is.

“Someone could close their hand in a door today and that results in stitches, and that’s a recordable incident,” said Phil Clarke, director of safety and risk management for Bakersfield, California-based oil and gas contractor KS Industries. “Another could do the same thing tomorrow and it results in a bruise to the finger.”

Indeed, a 2020 study by the Construction Safety Research Alliance using 17 years of data and 3.2 trillion worker hours discredited the measurement, as it found no discernible association between total recordable injury rates and fatalities

TRIR is the rate at which a company experiences an OSHA-recordable incident, per 200,000 worker-hours. A recordable incident is a work-related injury that involves loss of consciousness or one that requires medical treatment beyond first aid, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to other work.

Construction had more deaths than any other industry in 2022

Number of workplace fatalities in the U.S. in 2022, the most recently available data.

TRIR was created and institutionalized by OSHA recordkeeping requirements. For 50 years, TRIR has been used to compare industries, companies and projects, and it is sometimes used as a benchmark of success, CSRA said. Insurance firms also use TRIR to determine worker compensation insurance premiums, CSRA said.

Experts say the flaw with TRIR is in its name: It solely captures recordable events, not the severity of the injury and not near misses.

“A one-stitch cut, a broken leg and a fatality all count the same,” Levin said. 

For example, industry leaders have largely gotten away from championing a certain threshold of days without injury. 



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