In recent years, the construction industry has moved toward relying more on off-site fabrication, reducing build times by prefabricated components and bringing them to the project site for installation. He said so far no one working on the project is known to have been infected with the virus. “There were some instances where we had to work around and maybe do some night and weekend work in order to keep the schedule within some type of framework,” Mason said. Still, the team is trying to keep the project on track as much as possible given the situation. Mason said the new safety measures, while necessary, are having a material impact on the project’s schedule, slowing productivity to some extent and pushing out the projected timetable for completion. “It’s been challenging, but we’re working through it,” Mason said. What’s more, each worker is getting their temperature taken before the start of each workday. As the crisis continues to unfold, many experts predict the industry adapting similar measures globally.Įugene Mason, a project superintendent for Chicago-based Power Construction, said that his team has had to reduce manpower and practice social distancing on a current hospital expansion project he’s leading. One method of reducing contact-already being implemented with success on construction sites throughout Australia-is to extend working hours to reduce the number of workers on sites at any given time. “Instead of having everybody work on the same floor,” Ghosh continued, “maybe we think about splitting the workforce into multiple floors if it’s a multi-story building or working within different zones on a horizontal project.” “It can be done by increasing total work hours so that people work in multiple shifts, or by taking a hard look at the way we used to schedule.” Ghosh said that the industry will have to reduce physical contact between workers on each site to reduce the risk of transmission. This constant flow of workers from different trade specialty areas makes it especially critical to reduce on-site exposure to decrease the risk of transmission between jobsites. “It’s not a question of the flow of workers within one workplace, but multiple workplaces where these individuals are traveling.” “Especially when the project gets toward completion, there is an influx of workers in different trades that come in during the finishing stages,” Ghosh said. Gibbs College of Architecture and a construction safety expert, this isolation isn’t practical in construction.
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Somik Ghosh, professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Christopher C. In many critical industries, workers have been able to continue their tasks in isolation, in some extreme cases even quarantining in their workspaces until a critical task is done.īut according to Dr.
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One of the things that makes ensuring the safety of a construction site so difficult is the constant flow of specialty workers between different areas of a jobsite. Like nearly every other industry, construction is undergoing rapid changes as new details about protecting against the virus emerge and industry groups move to ensure the safety of workers. Still, just because construction has continued in many places doesn’t mean that it’s business as usual. Furthermore, as the crisis exposes vulnerabilities in countries’ healthcare and infrastructure systems, critical new projects will be needed. It may also be dangerous to pause an uncompleted project if it’s at a critical stage. Various factors make it impossible for the industry to go on hold like other segments of the economy.
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As an “essential” business in many states, construction sites have by and large remained operational as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds.