Chapter 24 — Quiz

B. Construction consistently accounts for roughly one in five U.S. workplace fatalities against roughly one in twenty of employment. Treat both as magnitudes, not this year's figures — get the current numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. The gap between those two ratios is the subject of the entire chapter.

C. Elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative, PPE. The ranking is not aesthetic: it tracks how much each control depends on a human being doing something correctly, every time, forever, under fatigue and time pressure — and whether it fails silently.

C. 17.5 feet. Free fall 6.0 + deceleration 3.5 + harness stretch and D-ring shift 1.0 + worker height below the D-ring 5.0 + safety margin 2.0 = 17.5 ft. Which is why a 12-foot anchor point does not work: 17.5 required against 12.0 available is a 5.5-foot shortfall, and he strikes the ground inside a working system. Device values vary — read the label.

B. Four different numbers on the same job site on the same day: 4 ft general industry (1910), 6 ft most construction (Subpart M), 10 ft scaffolds (Subpart L), 15 ft steel erection with narrower rules for connectors and controlled decking zones (Subpart R). State-plan states may set lower triggers.

C. Controlling employer, held to a standard of reasonable care — a real inspection regime, real diligence in identifying and correcting hazards, and a functioning system for making other employers comply. Not perfection. But "we didn't know" only works if you had a system that reasonably should have found it, and you can prove it. Note that application has varied across circuits and that state plans may differ.

B. Near-misses are common on every construction site in the world. A near-zero reported count is far more likely to reflect a collapse in willingness to report than an absence of near-misses. Reports = (occurrences) × (willingness to report), and you can only observe the product. Ask the second question: what happens to a worker who reports one?

C. EMR is a workers' compensation rating factor calculated by a rating bureau, comparing actual to expected losses over a three-year experience period. The formula splits each claim at a defined point and weights the primary (first) portion far more heavily, so frequency drives it more than severity — ten small claims hurt more than one catastrophic one. It is a company number: a loss on one project raises the insurance cost embedded in every other project's bid for three years. It has nothing to do with OSHA.

C. 2.43. TRIR = (5 × 200,000) ÷ 412,000 = 1,000,000 ÷ 412,000 = 2.43 recordable cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers per year. (A, 0.49, would be the DART rate if one of the five involved days away or restriction.)

C. Signatures prove attendance at a signing, not participation. A template proves procurement. Corporate review proves review. But a crew that can articulate the hazards in their own words participated in producing the document, and a revision history proves the document describes work as it is actually being done. A JHA on Rev. 0 after four months describes work that changed three months ago.

B. Laborers, operators, carpenters, painters, and roofers contacting energy they did not know was there — an aluminum ladder into an overhead line, a crane boom, a dump body, a length of conduit on a shoulder, a damaged cord. Treat this as a widely reported pattern rather than a precise statistic, and let it change who your orientation is aimed at.

C. The program pays for the absence of a recorded injury, and a worker has far more control over whether an injury is recorded than over whether it occurs. The peer-enforcement mechanism is the damaging part: a worker who wants to report costs everyone on his crew the bonus, so the pressure is not from management. OSHA has taken the position in guidance under the recordkeeping rule's anti-retaliation provisions that such programs can run afoul of the law; check current guidance, because it has shifted across rulemakings.

B. Option C — the second crew stacked into an occupied floor — was $88,000 as priced against $186,000 for the second shift. Once the required controls were priced ($85,000 of overhead protection, barricades, spotters, cleanup, and temporary power), it reached $173,000 and the time-separation control reduced actual recovery to 7–8 of the 11 days. It was cheap because the controls were missing from the price. That is the most common failure in acceleration estimating.

True. A near-miss report hands you the location of a hazard and identifies a person who will tell you the truth. Discipline buys one instance of compliance and forfeits every future report from that person and everyone who hears about it. The rare case of deliberate, repeated, knowing endangerment is handled on its own facts — and the fact that the person reported it makes discipline less likely, not more.

False. The regulation is the floor, not the program. Standards address hazards that are already known and codified; your job will produce hazards nobody has codified — most of them at the interfaces between trades, which is exactly where no single standard applies cleanly. That is what the General Duty Clause exists for, and it is why the systems work in this chapter sits on top of compliance rather than instead of it.

False. The definition has two halves: capable of identifying hazards and having authorization to take prompt corrective measures. Without the authority half they are a knowledgeable observer with a paper designation. The diagnostic question is: "Can this person stop the work and spend money to fix it, today, on their own signature?"

False. "Free from" is not "warned about." Signage is an administrative control — level four of five — and it is not abatement. It has a role, but it does not discharge the duty where a feasible means of abatement exists.

False, usually the reverse. Occurrence is roughly stable and unobservable; reports equal occurrence times willingness to report. A rising count during a period when you are improving reporting culture is evidence the improvement worked. The alarming pattern is a falling count during rising schedule pressure, which means people have stopped talking exactly when you most need the information.

False. They cluster around very short "quick" tasks — thirty seconds in an unprotected trench to knock a pipe loose — and around rescue attempts by coworkers. Secondary victims are horribly common, which is why the orientation instruction has to be explicit: if it collapses, you do not go in.

Safety is a property of the production system, not a rulebook. Hazards are produced by decisions — about schedule, sequence, staffing, procurement, and pressure — made weeks earlier by people who were not thinking about safety at all. Fix the system that produced the hazard, not just the hazard, or you have merely reset the clock on the next one.

The practical test is the substitution test: if a different, competent, well-intentioned person had been standing in that spot, would this still have happened? If yes, you have a system problem, and a corrective action aimed at the individual will accomplish nothing. If no, ask why this person was placed where their particular limitation mattered — and you will usually find a system problem behind that too.

The eight: (1) what changes about who works where and when; (2) how many trades occupy the same zone simultaneously, before and after; (3) what work will now happen above other work; (4) what hours, for how many consecutive weeks; (5) what temporary protections are needed longer or removed sooner; (6) which activities go out of sequence and what completed condition each assumes; (7) what controls are required, what do they cost, and who buys them; (8) what will we watch weekly to know this is going wrong.

What makes it work: first, the cost of the controls goes into the acceleration price — price the controls with the option or you have not priced the option. Second, the safety director signs before the directive issues, not after; a review of a decision already made is a formality and everyone in the room knows it.

Proximate findings describe conditions present at the moment of the event. Finding 1 — no current competent-person inspection tag, two days stale — is proximate. Finding 2 — a scaffold modified by a trade that did not erect it, with no re-inspection — is contributory: the mechanism that created the condition.

Systemic findings describe what made the proximate conditions likely. Finding 3 — a crew running behind after the steel acceleration, under unwritten pressure to make it up — is systemic. It explains why a competent electrical crew found modifying someone else's scaffold at 9 p.m. to be the path of least resistance.

Findings 1 and 2 prevent this failure mode. Finding 3 prevents the class of failures of which this was one instance. The test of an investigation is how many corrective actions are aimed at the decision rather than at the person, the tool, or the condition.

Replace it with the same money — or more — paid on leading indicators the crews control and cannot improve by hiding an injury: near-miss reports submitted and closed, pre-task plan completion rate, hazards identified and corrected by that crew, corrective actions closed within 14 days.

The test: does the measure get better or worse when someone tells the truth? Every item above improves with honesty. "Zero recordables" gets worse with honesty, which is why it buys silence.

The analysis: complete a safety impact review on both. The stacked option creates overhead work above occupied work, congestion in corridors sized for one crew, competition for shared temporary systems (the mechanism that produced the plank on the north elevation), and degraded housekeeping. Price its required controls — overhead protection, barricades, a floor coordinator, revised JHAs, doubled cleanup, additional lighting and power — and add them to the $71,000. Then note that the zone-by-zone time separation the controls require eats part of the recovery, so it likely delivers 6–7 of the 9 days, not 9.

The two persuasive numbers: the difference between the all-in totals expressed (a) as a percentage of the fee, and (b) as a percentage of the contract value. On Northgate a $65,000 delta is 3.6% of the fee and 0.14% of the GMP. Those two percentages take ten seconds to compute and they reframe the decision from "an extra $65,000" to "a rounding error against the contract."

The honest counterargument you must raise yourself: a second shift has a real, independent hazard profile — lighting, thin supervision, circadian fatigue, degraded emergency response — and it is only the better option if the lighting, supervision, and scope restriction are actually funded and enforced. An underfunded second shift is worse than a well-run compressed workweek. Say that out loud, because it converts the control budget from an add-on into a condition of the recommendation.

Four seconds: stop the pour. No debate, no negotiation, no "let's have a look while we keep going." A pump line separation under pressure is a killing event and the hose whips with enough force that "stand clear" is not a control. The cost is irrelevant at this moment and the decision has to be visibly instant, because forty people are watching how long you take.

The next hour: get the clamp inspected by someone qualified. Turn back the trucks, take the short-load charges, send the finishers home on the show-up guarantee, and reschedule. Document the stop, the reason, and the finding — including if it turns out he was wrong, because a wrong stop made in good faith must be recorded as correct behavior.

The next week: the part that determines whether stop-work authority is real. Buy the crew lunch. Have him tell the story at the all-hands, in his own words. Tell everyone what it cost, out loud, and say you would spend it again tomorrow.

What you are buying: reporting. On Northgate, near-miss reports went from about 3 a week to about 11 a week over the following month. If you are not willing to pay $9,700 cheerfully and publicly the first time, take stop-work authority out of your orientation, because a promise broken once is worse than a promise never made.