Unfortunately, the road is one of the most dangerous places to be. If this is the primary work location of you and your employees, you can’t be too careful when it comes to taking safety precautions. To avoid hazards that could cause accidents, remember to do these three things while doing road work!
Train Your Employees
One of the best ways to avoid safety hazards is to teach best practices to your employees for avoiding them. Train your employees to be cautious when approaching vehicles, understand communication signals, and overall be observant to all of their surroundings. Make sure they understand safest practices when it comes to directing traffic control, like that it's important to warn those in motor vehicles of upcoming traffic zones a ways before the actual site where employees are working with things like signs and cones.
Use Barricades
When trying to protect your workers, it’s important to use the right tools to direct pedestrians and cars. Barricades are collapsible or easily moveable traffic barricades that significantly help control the flow of traffic for things such as construction work. There are actually three different types of barricades. Type III barricades are the safest for traffic control to protect your workers because they are larger and have three reflective panels instead of one or two. This makes them much more visually effective. Placing them a ways beyond the actual construction site also gives vehicle users more time to respond and avoid accidents.
Wear Safety Equipment
In the end, human error is impossible to avoid—but your workers will always be much safer equipped in the correct gear and safety equipment. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is designed to minimize hazards in any workplace using or being around large moving equipment, and includes hard hats, hearing and eye protection, and of course a type of high visibility garment. The latter is especially crucial along roads and at nighttime, sometimes even required. Make sure your employees are following the correct regulations for high visibility garments, and are also keeping them clean so that they’re easily seen!
Your employees are doing hard work in a tough environment as it is, so making sure that environment has as many safety precautions as possible is essential. Though you can’t control everything, your actions play a big part in how prepared and equipped employees are to avoid hazards. Consider the things you can implement now to stay accident-free down the road.
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