Effects of Poor Site Safety on Cost of a Mega Construction Project

Abstract

Safety at a construction site has always been a daunting task worldwide. At a construction site due to repetition of activities, hectic work routine, dangerous and life-threatening activities, accidents are highly likely to occur. According to statistics of ILO-18 there are about 340 million reported occupational accidents occur annually and among such accidents 38% is contributed by the construction industry. From this it can be envisaged that how drastic the safety situation is in this industry. In-case of Pakistan the safety situation is more critical as the reporting mechanism for the site accidents is not satisfactory. In order to determine the current site safety situation and their effects on the cost and economy of a project we took the case study of and ongoing mega project of rapid transit which is Orange Line Metro Train, Lahore. At the start of this study approximately 60% of the project was done. By the help of surveys conducted, on the sites of orange line Lahore we executed on site interviews and filled questionnaires to collect the data regarding the details of any site accident, victims of that accident, direct cost incurred in such accident and recovery provided etc. Those 116 questionnaires containing the data were transferred to the soft form using the Microsoft excel and SPSS. The data gathered, was then analysed for getting results. Results from the data enabled us to determine the root causes for the poor site safety situation by the help of classification of such accidents. The results were then used to build a Risk chart which basically consisted of probability of the accident and severity of the accident in terms of cost (where cost is directly proportional to the human loss) and their product as Risk. By using the Risk chart, we ranked each class and cause of site accident. After making the Risk chart we made a Sun burst chart in which each class of accident was further corelated with its causes and with its prevalent remedies to cater such type of accidents. The developed ranking would help out the authorities and managers to invest in such field/classes of safety in order to avoid such type of site accidents in such type of rapid transit projects so that it can be made sure that there would be no losses of lives and finance in such project due to safety issues.