Staying Safe When Working On The Roads
Road work construction is a dangerous profession. With vehicles flying past at close quarters, most of the time in the darkness of night, the men and women that work on the roads put themselves at risk every time they do their job. Procedures can be put in place, though, to ensure the safety of road construction workers. To see just what you should be doing, below are three tips for staying safe.
Draw up plans before you head out to work
If you want to stay safe during your hours spent working on the road, then you need to head out there with a plan. You need to have a transportation management plan in place, first and foremost, that provides temporary traffic control, as doing so will stop oncoming vehicles from venturing into your work zone and it will stop a build-up of traffic surrounding it. What’s more, you should specify where certain pieces of equipment and vehicles are kept, when they should be kept in place and who should be checking on them to ensure they are where they need to be.
Clearly separate your working areas
When roads need fixing, they need a lot doing to them, meaning numerous different activities and jobs can take place at any one time in road construction areas. It means that work zones need to be separated, and to save your fellow workers walking into one that they are neither trained in or physically prepared for, you should make sure these zones are clearly separated. This means using cones, barriers, and lights to explicitly indicate where one area begins, and where others finish.
Make sure you can be seen
Making sure that oncoming traffic can see you is the most important safety procedure you can put in place when you work on the road. If you don’t, a car, having been previously unaware of your workspace, could come racing through it at any minute, causing untold amounts of damage and injury when it does.
To ensure that you can be seen, make sure you and your crew can be seen for miles. This means attaching mini light bars to various areas of your workspace, as well as to the vehicles that sit in it. It also means wearing fluorescent clothing that will reflect light and make you visible at night.
What you should also do is, if you can afford to, avoid pitching up in areas that are blind spots in the road. Roads are full of bumps, twists, and turns, meaning blind spots are always going to appear in them, and you should not be working in these areas if you can help it.
More and more people will be out on the roads in the coming months as they head on their summer vacations, meaning the dangers posed to road construction workers are now set to increase tenfold. Just remember to put the safety procedures above into place, and remember to be aware of everything, at all times, when you are in your working zone.