Work Zone Intrusion Leaves Six Workers Dead, shows Almost Is Not Good Enough
APRIL 2023:
Six roadway workers were killed in a single crash along a busy highway near Baltimore, Maryland, when two cars collided and one vehicle was forced into a work zone. It’s one of the deadliest crashes we’ve ever seen in a work zone and led to national headlines.
“When the safety and health of workers is at stake, every decision matters,” says LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan. “There’s no ‘pretty close’ when it comes to safety on the job. Almost safe means something needs to be corrected immediately before someone gets hurt or killed.”
Every work zone intrusion is different in some way – the road conditions, how the work zone is set up, driver behavior and other factors all play a role. And yet taking a look at this incident in more detail shows many of the same problems that the LHSFNA and other roadway safety advocates have been calling out for years.
Missing or Ineffective Positive Protection
Video of the incident shows that temporary concrete barriers were in place to separate highway traffic from the work zone. These barriers are a form of positive protection and are designed to deflect cars away from the work zone and protect drivers when incidents do occur. Unfortunately, in this incident, there was a large gap in the concrete barrier, which allowed the intruding car to enter the work zone.
The video also shows a large construction vehicle nearby, slightly upstream of where workers were positioned. Similar to truck-mounted attenuators (TMAs), vehicles like these are often used to shadow workers and provide another barrier between an intruding car and workers on foot. In this incident, the construction vehicle was too far away to provide cover during the intrusion.
Until a complete investigation by Maryland DOT and OSHA is finished, we’ll be left with many unanswered questions. Was the gap in the concrete barrier there temporarily as a construction vehicle access area? Was the construction vehicle on site to act as a TMA? If so, why wasn’t it positioned in front of the gap in the concrete barrier? What was the plan for protecting workers in that gap area? It’s hard to understand a safety plan that includes those workers being allowed there, adjacent to a highway full of speeding cars with no protection.
Based on the comments following the crash, it’s clear at least one worker didn’t feel safe on this site. “The thing I can’t get over is she was terrified of that jobsite,” said George Durm, the husband of Sybil Dimaggio, one of the workers killed in this incident.
Unsafe Speeds and Driver Behavior
The video also shows a white car speeding down the highway much faster than the rest of traffic. It appears that excessive speed doesn’t give either driver enough time to react safely when the second car changes lanes, causing the collision that led to the intrusion.
Every year, National Work Zone Awareness Week – held this year April 17-21 – asks drivers to slow down, put down the distractions and watch for workers in highway work zones. Unsafe speeds, combined with distracted driving or impairment, are a factor in a significant number of work zone intrusions.
The LHSFNA and industry partners such as the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) and the National Asphalt Pavement Association (NAPA) support reducing driver speed through work zones. It’s fairly standard to see a reduction of 10 mph (e.g., from 65 mph to 55 mph) in work zones, but the Fund advocates for a 45 mph limit when workers are present. Speeds can be reduced in several ways: through signage, advanced warning, police presence and automated enforcement.
A work zone study conducted by the New York State Laborers’ Health & Safety Trust Fund found that 20 percent of cars traveled through work zones going 10-20 mph above the speed limit, with many cars topping 80-90 mph. That data helped get work zone speed camera legislation passed in New York state. Other states are following suit, most recently in Washington state, where SB 5272 will authorize the use of speed cameras in highway work zones.
Creating Safe Work Zones for Highway Workers
We’ve previously covered how one of the challenges around work zone safety is getting states to require enough funding for effective safety measures in the bidding process and expanding reimbursement for the use of positive protection. What makes this particular incident even more tragic is that positive protection was present on this site, yet it appears that it simply wasn’t deployed correctly. It seems at least some pre-planning steps had been taken to protect workers’ safety, and yet through some combination of poor management decisions or human error, six workers lost their lives.
With all the potential hazards in work zones, there is very little room for error. Construction contractors, especially those operating on highway jobs, must have the attitude that there is safe and then there is everything else. We can’t afford any in between when it comes to protecting the lives of workers.
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Author: Nick Fox
VIEW FROM THE TOP
Bill Mudge, Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California
OCTOBER 2022:
Bill Mudge has been at the helm of the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California for 11 years as president and CEO, after spending nearly three decades in the insurance industry, mostly in leadership roles. Based in Oakland, California, Mr. Mudge spoke with Business Insurance Assistant Editor Louise Esola about workers compensation in the largest state economy in the nation and the future of the business. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: Much of your career was spent working for insurers. What pulled you toward working on the data side?
A: I spent 27 years in the California workers compensation market on the insurance company side, beginning in 1984. It’s been quite a journey — once as an observer and participant and now a data researcher. I’ve seen nearly 40 years of California workers comp and all of its ups, downs and sideways. I came here at the request of the WCIRB board, having been CEO of two insurance companies, including one I started from scratch in the mid-2000s, CompWest Insurance Co. California is the largest workers comp market in the world, certainly in the country, making up about 20% of the market in the U.S. It was an opportunity to get my hands on all of the industry’s data, not just the data that I had available to me from the insurance companies that I ran but my competitors. And now they’re all our members. And so working collaboratively with them as members in this industry has been really just a joy for me, rather than competing with them on the playing field.
Q: In the comp industry, the state of business in California is followed closely nationwide. Why is that?
A: The pure size of the California economy and the California workers comp system. It is the biggest. If you’re an insurer and you focus on writing workers comp, it’s hard not to have a big portfolio in California. So it has a lot of attention from that standpoint. Also, I think people look at California as a bit of a bellwether on the changing nature of comp, as trends could move across the country.
Q: What are some of the top issues right now?
A: Number one is COVID. It’s not going away. We’re almost now at 300,000 reported claims; two-thirds of them have been accepted into the claim system. We have more COVID claims reported in 2022 with the variants than we had in all of 2021. Long COVID is represented in one of five cases overall and probably the iceberg under the waterline that we’re worried about. I think the medical community is struggling with trying to define what is long COVID and what are the symptoms related to that. Certainly we’re starting to see long COVID-related cases in the data. What does that mean to potential things like permanent disability when people can’t go back to work? I don’t know. The medical community is keeping their eyes on trying to understand what that means.
The second issue is the economy. We were humming along pre-pandemic and then everybody went home, lots of people lost their jobs, and then job switching started to occur, too. People that came back to work said, “I’m not going to work doing that anymore. I’m going to do something else.” And so we’re seeing — and not surprising because we saw it coming out of the Great Recession — there’s a real correlation between economic recovery and increasing claims frequency. We’re seeing that across California. We’re also seeing less-experienced workers versus experienced workers. And less-experienced workers that are not as trained, not as skilled, early on have a higher propensity to become injured on the job.
The increase in cumulative trauma claims, medical inflation and rising medical-legal costs are also issues.
Q: The workers comp market has been stable for years. Do you see this continuing?
A: I don’t think it is stable now for all the reasons I mentioned. In fact, it’s a bit unstable at the moment and costs are rising. Even in a competitive market, at some point, you have to price for the underlying costs. I think the golden days are probably behind us right now.
Q: What can be done?
A: The silver lining in all this is that workers are getting paid a lot more money, and higher wages equate to higher premiums, at least on the insurance side, and higher premiums can cover a lot of costs without rate increases. But I think probably we’ll need both of those to start to stabilize the combined ratio in this system. And safety. I think it’s got to be forefront for employers, whether it’s all these COVID safety protocols we’ve all come to learn or whether it’s good old-fashioned training workers. I think it’s back to the ABCs of how to run a safe place to work, and if the claim doesn’t happen, that’s a good thing.
Q: Everybody’s involved with data right now in the workers comp industry. They’re embracing it. What are some of your thoughts about the place of data in this industry?
A: It’s really a data-driven business, and whether you’re on the claim side or whether you’re on the underwriting side we have a lot of tools for members to help them with benchmarking and insights and all of that. And we provide data to both insurers and agents and brokers to help take some of the transactional friction out of the system and streamline the process of transacting insurance in California. It’s just going to intensify — trying to get a view of what’s going on in the system now, not what was going on in the system when a policy and its data came into us after it was final audited some 20 months or so from policy inception. We are really trying to understand what’s going on now. Data is going to be more and more important in a dynamic system like we’re living in right now.
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Credit: Business Insurance magazine