The hottest year officially on record was 2023, based on a global temperature report conducted by NASA. The first month to set a global record in 2023 was June, then it did every month after that until the year ended in December. This raises concerns for the well-being of those construction sectors which are predominantly based in outdoor settings, such as highways, streets and bridges.
“The earth’s average surface temperature is now about 2° Fahrenheit hotter than it was in the late 1800s, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program last year,” says Monika Serrano, Resilience Project Manager at Turner Construction.
Construction workers specializing in roadways, highways and bridges must face this natural threat as an obstacle to safety and productivity. According to United Nations News, worker performance can drop up to 50 percent in physically demanding jobs as a result of heat exhaustion and/or heat stress. This isn’t only worrisome for the workers themselves but considering that the quality of a road or bridge itself could come into question due to a reduced level of productivity, this concept becomes even more concerning. Could the steadily rising heat of the earth be correlated with the decreasing productivity and output since 2020 and onward?
According to the OSHA Heat Stress guide, heat stress occurs when a worker’s deep core temperature exceeds 100.4 degrees. However, based on a study by Turner Construction in New York City, even on “cooler than typical summer conditions” with an average peak temperature of 88 degrees, almost half of the 33 participants had their core temperature exceed this threshold. Nearly all of participants were dehydrated even at the start of the day when arriving at the jobsite. This was measured by each participant swallowing a pill-sized data-collection device which stayed in their systems for 24 hours.
Heat isn’t the only threat to construction productivity in the roads and bridges sector. Taylor & Francis Online lists several other examples, such as, “project size and type, geographical location, site conditions, terrain type, influence of the learning curve, urban or rural setting, worksite constraints, skills of the construction crew, equipment efficiency and workability condition of materials, competency in supervision, completeness of working drawings, communication between construction parties, change orders, late payments, management (poor or exemplary),” just to name a few. The list shows us why measuring productivity can be such a challenging task: There’s not just one single variable to focus on. There are several variables that can dynamically change and even influence one another.
But of course, there’s positive advancements to productivity from a technological point of view that could help offset some of these hazards. Drone technology, for instance, can assist with road and bridge projects by allowing aerial analysis and topographical mapping. This would lessen the chance of a high-risk incident by physically removing the worker from a potentially hazardous scenario. Using modern software and utilizing so-called Building Information Model takes the guesswork and helps reduce errors before they even occur.
In conclusion, while the road and bridge sectors continue to face an uphill battle against the ever-evolving extremities of nature, humans continue to balance the scales of productivity by inventively reassessing the expectations of the human role in construction. With outdoor construction becoming more of a safety risk to the individuals making up this industry, the “work smarter, not harder” mentality needs to be zealously embraced as we follow the highway of life further into the future.
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