A Midwest View

Contractors, Agencies
Make Highway Safety First

by Elaine Schmidt

Nationwide, 100 to 130 construction workers die annually in roadway construction zones, according to the American Road & Transportation Association.

But since October 2004, there has been one death of a worker in a construction zone on the Illinois Tollway.

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Other than the one fatality, the otherwise successful results are attributable in part to Operation Hard Hat, a program of stricter traffic-law enforcement in Tollway work zones to prevent serious crashes and construction-worker injuries. One element is to put a state trooper on the site in hard hat and construction attire to monitor the speed of passing traffic with a LIDAR gun. LIDAR, a laser version of RADAR, does not trip RADAR detectors.

The officer, virtually invisible to passing motorists, radios information on speeders ahead to waiting “catch cars,” which pull the speeders over outside the work zone and issue a citation carrying a minimum $375 fine.

“We implemented a series of enhancements to our work zone safety in 2004,” adds Jeff Dailey, chief engineer for the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.

No statistics are yet available to measure the program’s effectiveness, Tollway officials say.

Highway construction sites are only as safe as the motorists who drive through them. As a result, ideas are being implemented across the Midwest to ensure greater safety.

“Contractors are doing everything they can,” says Marvelene Feucht, underwriting director for Chicago-based CNA, the insurance carrier endorsed by the American Road & Transportation Association.

ARTBA statistics show that 1,000 to 1,100 deaths occur annually in roadway construction zones, including the 100 to 130 who are construction workers. The largest number of victims are motorists and pedestrians.

No current figures on deaths in construction zones from government agencies in the Midwest where Midwest Construction circulates are available on deaths in roadway construction zones, sources say.

Slow Down!

“Speed is always the main reason for the accident,” Dailey says.

Excessive speed is so widely acknowledged as the No. 1 safety issue on roadway construction sites that construction industry/law enforcement partnerships are becoming increasingly commonplace in and around the work zones.

Creative, stepped-up law enforcement is combined with rigorous safety programs on the Illinois Tollway, where high traffic volume and a growing urban population necessitate nearly constant maintenance work and ongoing expansions.

“We have got quarterly, high-level meetings to review training requirements,” Dailey says. Safety expectations and requirements are reinforced among employees working in and around traffic, including toll collectors, who have to cross lanes of traffic to get to workstations.

In addition to the undercover officer with LIDAR gun, another initiative of Operation Hard Hat is an unmanned “photo enforcement van” on the Tollway.

“We put drivers on notice that there’s a photo enforcement van parked in the area,” he says. “The unmanned van takes pictures of people speeding and then we send them a ticket.”

Brad Sant, vice president of safety for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, says that Illinois is the only state that allows photo ticketing in work zones.

“A lot of states and contractors want it, but privacy laws make it difficult,” Sant adds.

Operation Hard Hat also includes funds for motorcycles to be used by law enforcement officers in and around the construction zones.

“With the motorcycles they can respond more quickly to accidents—they can squeeze between cars—which makes for few secondary accidents,” Dailey says.

Safety and Indiana’s ‘Major Moves’

In Indiana, a program dubbed “Major Moves: Creating a Top-Tier Economy through Top-Tier Transportation” has initiated a record-breaking amount of highway construction that will continue through 2015.

“The state of Indiana will be doing more highway work in the next eight years than it has in the last eight decades,” says Andrew Dietrich, communications director for the Indiana Department of Transportation. “Safety will be the focus for our agency and our partners, the contractors.”

To protect the lives of the individuals working on those projects, the General Assembly passed House Bill 1623 this year, which enacts a new law providing stiff penalties for those speeding and driving recklessly in work zones.

Under the new law, a first-time speeding ticket in a work zone means a $300 fine. Second and third offenses in a three-year period rise to $500 and $1,000, respectively. Driving recklessly or aggressively through a work zone earns fines of up to $5,000.

A motorist who injures or kills a highway worker in Indiana can be fined up to $10,000 or sentenced to up to eight years in jail. Funds collected from the new, tiered fine system will be used to fund additional law enforcement coverage of work zones.

Signs of the Times

Driver confusion is also a concern for highway contractors, Dailey says. Informing drivers of what is ahead on the road is imperative in maintaining traffic flow and safe conditions.

On the Illinois Tollway “we work with portable and dynamic signs and put notices of upcoming changes on the news,” Dailey says. He adds that the Tollway has integrated the communications department into the engineering department to expedite handling of signage issues, which has the added benefit of bringing fresh eyes to the messages the engineers want to put up.

“Sometimes they see things and tell us that they just don’t make sense,” he says. These include temporary lane-shift markings, closed ramps and detours.

Dailey says that despite best planning, marking and signage efforts, “It never fails that we have to tweak something in the first week” of work that impacts traffic flow.

Other Safety Issues

Coexistence with moving traffic is the element of highway construction that sets it apart from other types of construction work, but it’s not the main source of injury on roadway sites.

“Our biggest safety focus is falls,” says Gary Kaas, safety director for Lunda Construction of Black River Falls, Wis. Lunda is part of the Marquette Constructors joint venture that is doing work on the $850 million Marquette Interchange reconstruction project in Milwaukee.

Safety harnesses are critical for high-altitude work, though these are not the majority of falls. If a worker trips over rebar on the ground and sprains his or her wrist, it counts as a fall injury.

“We try to retain employees and build them into the safety culture,” he adds. “It’s critical to a safety program to have people come back season after season and to keep crews together.”

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