“These guys have been working seven-day weeks,” Flick said. “They’ve been out here day and night, no matter the weather.”
Friday wrapped up the end of the 15th annual National Work Zone Safety Awareness Week, an event dedicated to increasing safety in road work zones across the country.
In 2010, according to federal data, more than 34,000 road construction workers were injured on the job. One hundred and six workers died.
As the safety manager for construction of an Interstate 69 section along SR 37, it is Flick’s job to make sure motorists and workers stay out of harm’s way for the project’s duration.
“Construction will be done in live traffic for the entire project,” Flick said. “We want to make sure people aren’t surprised.”
To many drivers, orange signs and barrels mean traffic and delays, not men working on the road. While the numbers of injuries and fatalities remain high, the problem used to be much worse. During the early 2000s, work zone deaths reached such a high level, it brought national attention to the problem.
“There were over a thousand work zone deaths in 1999,” said James Barron, communications director of the American Traffic Safety Services Association. “We got together in December of ’99 and decided to pause and focus on work zone safety.”
ATSSA functions as a national road safety organization, teaching its member companies and their employees the training and skills necessary to stay safe on the road, according to their website.
The pause that Barron described was a meeting between the Federal Highway Safety Transportation Agency and ATSSA to do something about the yearly four-digit death numbers in work zones on American highways and streets.
One of the results of that meeting, among many others, was National Work Zone Safety Awareness Week.
While Barron does not give all of the credit to the week, deaths have taken a steep decline since its beginning.
“Stats are below 600 deaths,” Barron said. “We almost cut it in half.”
A surprising fact about workplace accidents is not their occurrence, but who the victims of work zone fatalities often are.
“Four out of five deaths are motorists, not the workers themselves,” ?Barron said.
Since that meeting, every state in the nation now has awareness events for road safety, according to the ATSSA website.
RoadSafe Traffic Systems, a local ATSSA member, is conducting barricade operations on the I-69 construction work taking place on SR 37 and is one of the companies that brings the message of road safety to Indiana.
The Indianapolis-based company provides the bright orange barrels, road signs and barricades to mark construction zones out to drivers.
For the company and its employees, safety work goes beyond statistics and events.
“We lost a guy in 2012,” said Rick Smith, an ?estimator for RoadSafe.
Smith actively works with ATSSA to find ways to prevent workers and drivers from getting hurt in work zones.
The company helped put on a safety event at the statehouse in Indianapolis last week and works with other contractors and the Indiana Department of Transportation to find ways to prevent injuries on the contractor side, ?Smith said.
Possible solutions include moving more road work to nighttime, when there will be less traffic on the roads.
So how can drivers work to keep everyone safe on the road?
“No distractions in work zones,” Smith said. “If you see orange, pay attention.”
Possible distractions include texting, talking on the phone, driving while tired or driving while ?inebriated.
The most common causes of accidents in work zones for drivers include following other cars too closely, improperly changing lanes and failing to yield to other vehicles, according to the Indiana Department of ?Transportation.
As traffic and construction becomes commonplace on SR 37 between Bloomington and Indianapolis, Hoosier drivers have the tools they need to help keep themselves and workers safe.
Above all, the final goal of the safety work is clear.
“Zero deaths in the work zone,” Smith said.
