Manuel Suárez-Cebador

Severity of electrical accidents in the construction industry in Spain

PROBLEM This paper analyzes the severity of workplace accidents involving electricity in the Spanish construction sector comprising 2,776 accidents from 2003 to 2008. METHOD The investigation considered the impact of 13 variables, classified into 5 categories: Personal, Business, Temporal, Material, and Spatial. RESULTS The findings showed that electrical accidents are almost five times more likely to have serious consequences than the average accident in the sector and it also showed how the variables of age, occupation, company size, length of service, preventive measures, time of day, days of absence, physical activity, material agent, type of injury, body part injured, accident location, and type of location are related to the severity of the electrical accidents under consideration. SUMMARY The present situation makes it clear that greater effort needs to be made in training, monitoring, and signage to guarantee a safe working environment in relation to electrical hazards. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS This research enables safety technicians, companies, and government officials to identify priorities and to design training strategies to minimize the serious consequences of electrical accidents for construction workers.

Consideration of stakeholder interests in the planning of sustainable waste management programmes

Those responsible for developing sustainable solid waste management programmes must consider the impacts of programme elements on everyone involved. This paper focuses on identifying the effects of waste management activities and assessing their overall impact on stakeholders. Collaborating with four focus groups and 36 experts, 19 effects were identified and nine questionnaires were designed to evaluate them, one for each stakeholder group. All told, 1805 people took part in the survey. The results show that the effects most important to the survey participants are: (a) recycling solid urban waste, (b) pollution and (c) corporate social responsibility.

A decade of occupational accidents due to direct or indirect electrical contact in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors in Spain (2003–2012)

Occupational accidents caused by electrical contact are a major concern worldwide due to their severe consequences. The study conducted is based on an analysis of the evolution of incidence rates and dependence between variables for 14,022 electrical accidents occurring in Spain between 2003 and 2012. The results show that electrical accidents as a whole are 3.6 times more likely to have severe consequences than the rest of the accidents in the country. This proportion is even nine times greater in the case of fatal accidents. They also confirm a significant relationship between the severity of this type of accidents and the economic sector in which they occur. On the other hand, there is a positive trend in the reduction of the incidence rate, especially in relation to direct contact, although unexpectedly the rate of accidents due to indirect contact is on the rise. Thus, preventing electrical occupational accidents requires efforts to guarantee adequate training adapted to the needs of workers in the various economic sectors. Furthermore, those responsible for safety should work to implement mechanisms to monitor and control compliance with efficient protective measures against electrical contact.

Resilience Engineering: Concepts of the New Paradigm

Resilience Engineering is a new safety paradigm that considers that the way duties are normally performed is something that is subject to variability, and since change is necessary to achieve success it should not be restricted. People in this complex context are continuously making adjustments to the original design, enabling them to achieve success, but occasionally accidents also arise due to an incomplete analysis of the current conditions. Thus, linear, simple or complex causation models do not reflect the ongoing reality, which is essentially non-linear, besides being complex. The accident “emerges” from normality, due to concurrent events that “resonate”, and are not “caused” by a simple chain of errors. Therefore, new tools are required to analyse accidents and indicators to monitor processes, even though most simple incidents continue to be dealt with in the usual manner.

Drivers’ Perception of the Major Advantages of Electric Vehicles

Governments support the use of electric. These vehicles have environmental, economic and technical advantages. However, drivers of electric vehicles perceive the environmental benefits as most important advantages.

Effectiveness of Construction Safety Programme Elements

Occupational health and safety levels in construction continue to be an international cause of concern because of high accident rates in the sector. In order to reduce negative incident rates in the industry, construction companies implement safety programmes that include different elements. In current research, an expert panel of 8 members was selected with the aim to quantify the effectiveness of the essential safety program elements using staticized groups methodology. Results showed that effectiveness of Job hazard analyses and communication, and upper management support as safety program elements, obtained the best scores by the experts. These results can be used to prioritize the most effective safety elements for construction projects in order to control construction safety risk.