If you’re a building company getting ready to engage in road maintenance or construction, then you’ll be putting your workforce into a fairly risky situation. If you have experience in this arena, which you likely do, then you will have active safety measures in place to ensure all workers and road users are safe.
You could use the following tips as an extra checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything.
1. Ensure Proper Traffic Control
The first thing you need to do is to find a no-fuss TMP traffic management services in Melbourne. They will help you draw up plans that are acceptable to the city and will guarantee that everyone involved is protected to the full extent state and federal law requires. Choosing a company with the right experience, equipment and ability to make plans and gain permits is absolutely critical. This will likely be one of the first steps you take to ensure greater safety on the site.
It takes more than just well-placed cones, barriers and signs to ensure good traffic control. It’s a fine and balanced science that is best left to those who know the industry well.
2. Designate Distinct Working Areas
A road construction area is a busy place, and it’s easy for it to fall into chaotic conditions. It’s not exactly a purpose-built environment for construction like a new-build construction site. Therefore, it’s a good idea to create separated areas for different tasks and jobs. For instance, you could corden off an area for material storage, and another for where your heavy equipment will be operating that day.
Such delineation gives workers a greater sense of security and order in an otherwise chaotic and intimidating environment. When everyone knows where they stand, work can proceed at a better pace, and more safely.
3. Ensure You Have Proper Safety Gear
Providing the right kind of high-visibility work clothes, hard hats, steel-toed boots and whatnot is one thing, but you also need to be able to impress on your workforce how to properly use them and why they are necessary. Personal protective equipment (PPE) often means the difference between life and death, so these are not arbitrary matters. Conduct training and refresher courses with your workers, regardless of their current experience. They show the airline safety video to frequent fliers as well as first-timers for a reason — the information is never not important.
4. Ensure Work is Supervised by Most Competent and Experienced Team Members
Road construction work will happen in shifts, and you need to ensure that every shift is properly supervised by the right people. Who are the right people? Primarily, it involves first being able to identify, prevent and deal with emergence of any hazardous or risky working conditions, and/or when people are violating laws and regulations. Secondly, it involves knowing immediately what to do if and when things do go wrong at the site. This combination of experience and responsibility has to be ever-present at your site, with no gaps in the schedule.
5. Start Each Shift with an Update Meeting
Each day and/or shift when you have the team members there, assemble everyone for a pre-work meeting to update everyone on the current status of the site. Work zones might have changed, incidents might have happened or nearly happened, and all this information should be relayed to the team so everyone is on the same page. A road construction site works safely when it is well-coordinated.
That pre-shift meeting is also the perfect opportunity for your supervisors to inspect everyone’s PPE and ensure it’s being used correctly and appropriately.