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Fall or tumble is one of the most common accidents in bridge construction. Failing to implement safety management and training effectively may result in serious occupational accidents. Current site safety management relies mostly on checklist evaluation; however, its effectiveness is limited by the experience and the abilities of the evaluators, which may not consistently achieve the goal of thorough assessment. Recently, several systematic safety risk assessment approaches, such as Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Failure Mode and Effect Criticality Analysis (FMECA), have been used to evaluate safety risks at bridge projects. However, these traditional methods ineffectively address dependencies among safety factors at various levels that fail to provide early warnings to prevent occupational accidents. In order to overcome the limitations of the traditional approach, in this paper a fall risk assessment model for bridge construction projects is developed by establishing a Bayesian network (BN) based on Fault Tree (FT) transformation. The model was found to provide much better site safety management ability by enabling better understanding of the probability of fall risks through the analysis of fall causes and their relationships in a BN. The system has been used to analyze and verify safety practices at five cantilever bridge construction projects currently under construction in Taiwan. It was found that BN analysis is consistent with the conventional safety performance assessment. In practice, based upon the BN analysis by inputting prior information about the site safety management, the probabilities of fall risks and their sensitive factors can be effectively assessed. Proper preventive safety management strategies could then be established to reduce the occurrences of fall accidents at the bridge construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The purpose of this present study is to investigate the characteristic factors responsible for occupational accident occurrence for small construction enterprises in Taiwan, using methodologies of descriptive statistics, correlation coefficient analysis as well as ANOVA. The data used in this study was collected from the Council of Labor Affairs of Taiwan Central Government between years 2000 and 2007. From the results of this study, it was found that the factors influencing occupational accident development for small construction enterprises included the health and safety management skills, employers’ values on the health and safety practices, and the degree of compliance with labor safety laws and regulations. The results also indicated that occupational accidents tend to occur (1) during the worker’s first day at the workplace, (2) when the construction project has an excessively low health and safety management, (3) when employer did not provide personal protection equipments to the workers, (4) when personal protection equipment was not correctly used, and (5) when workers failed to adopt safeguards or ignored hazard warning signs in the workplace. To reduce the overall occurring rate of occupational accidents per 1000 persons in the construction industry, it is important to implement required health and safety practices and training effectively to ensure that all workers acknowledge and follow these requirements regulations when working. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Most models of the incidence of occupational accidents in the construction industry are composed of multiple factors. Although statistical techniques can be used to infer cause-and-effect relationships among these factors, the large number of factors involved and the complexity of the relationships among them make it difficult for managers to identify potential hazards in construction projects and thus develop effective safety procedures. This study addresses this problem by using the association-rule method of data mining in performing an analysis of 1347 accidents in the Taiwan construction industry during the period 2000–2007. The association-rule method enables potential cause-and-effect relationships to be identified among the many factors that play a role in occupational accidents in the construction industry. The study finds that such accidents tend to occur when certain combinations of hazards are present – especially working in high places without protective measures, loss of balance when in motion, failure to use protective equipment, insufficient experience, and injurious contact with unstable structures. These hazards are especially evident in small enterprises with less than 10 persons. The results can help management to formulate effective safety policies with regard to management shortcomings and staff training. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]