As New York City experiences its biggest surge in construction in years, reports have surfaced of ballooning number of injuries on the city’s thousands of construction sites. Attempts to heighten city supervision of the sites has led to launch of a program of unannounced visits by city inspectors to perform spot safety checks.

Among those taking note of the initiative is Niran Shrestha, co-founder and CEO of New York City-based Kwant.ai, which produces visual scheduling and risk analytics software enabling construction teams to track progress in real time, predict delays and take proactive action. Another is Ardalan Khosrowpour of OnSiteIQ, a tech-enabled construction visual documentation and risk assessment service.

Khosrowpour reported based on OnSiteIQ data over the past 12 months, there were an average 10.5 safety violations per 100,000 square feet of New York City construction sites. Of the risks observed, 30.1% were fall protection violations, 13.8% fire hazards and 8.4% personal protection of bodily injury-related hazards. Fall protection issues like missing toe boards, hole covers and guard rails, and slips, trips and falls from heights were the most commonly observed and repeated safety violations.

According to Shrestha, there currently exist 38 inspectors, who have examined 10,256 New York City sites over the past 18 months, about 25 percent of all construction sites active during that period. He believes the surprise inspections can help in reducing the number of accidents and make the working environment safer. “But these measures are reactive in nature, and so do not tackle the root cause of the problems, which is the culture of safety in the construction industry that enables unsafe behavior,” he adds.

That culture is all the more troubling given that today’s job sites feature environments that are continually changing. “When you look at it from a safety perspective, a job site that is safe today doesn’t guarantee it is safe tomorrow,” he observes.

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