Applications of Resilience Systems in Construction Safety

Before asking if construction safety is outside the realm of resilience systems, we should ask if accidents and injuries are indicators of resilient systems. In construction, as in all industries, no worker plans for an accident or to get injured. On the contrary, many major construction companies have zero injury safety planning and yet, the industry still has some of highest numbers of injuries and fatalities annually compared to all other industries. Resilience systems employ a systems-based approach to analyze and format responses to efficiently cope with future risks, shocks, and changes to an existing system in a timely manner. Accordingly, a resilience system for construction safety would be able to analyze the types of safety risks that the company deals with on all its projects and draft a potential response for each possible case depending on its impact and frequency. This research aims to aid construction companies in incorporating resilience processes into their safety plan in order to better address two issues: (1) how to respond to an accident or a shock that might impact the system, and (2) to improve the overall flexibility of the safety plan. For each of these goals, two resilience systems are introduced and applied retrospectively to an existing case from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation (FACE) program.