New industrial design and construction typically focuses on specific elements from reduction of manufacturing costs to the ability to maintain competitiveness within the marketplace. While these core elements can be applied to virtually any industry or manufacturer, there’s another element that shouldn’t be overlooked: industrial safety.

Safety Starts Before Construction Begins

Decisions made by designers, engineers and architects during the industrial design process can have a direct effect on the inherent safety of future operations. According to the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP), Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) experts have recognized that safe design is one of the best ways to prevent and reduce occupational injuries.

Mike Carroll, CSP,  a Grainger Safety Consultant in the West Coast Region, said that this investment is really a matter of perspective.

“You’re throwing money into safety either way,” he said. “Do you want to do it up front or do you want to do it forever? That’s what we’re talking about.”

Investing the time and effort to conduct a thorough pre-startup safety inspection can minimize the need for safety retrofits down the road. Carroll referenced one specific project to illustrate the point.

“They’re building data centers all over the country and their standard parapet wall is 24 inches,” he said. “They’re building them today, knowing that employees are going to go up there for air conditioning and ducts. Now we’re working on installing guardrail systems to ensure that they have what they need to follow the standard and keep people from falling on the roof. It would have been a lot easier for the engineers to say, ‘Build those parapet walls based on the width of the parapet.'”

It's not as if the issue is being ignored. In the U.S., the voluntary national consensus standard, ANSI/ASSE Z590.3-2011 (R2016), incorporates key elements for implementing Prevention through Design (PTD). The design industry has taken this a step further in creating Design for Construction Safety (DfCS) guidelines which are a PTD subspecialty.

A similar concept is expressed in different terms globally. In the U.K., researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University worked with the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to improve awareness of how design influences occupational safety and health management. Australia’s Work Health and Safety Act identifies and outlines duties that apply to safe design. The Netherlands, as well as academia, has recognized need through the Safety-by-Design (SbD) concept, a cross-disciplinary approach that promotes an emphasis on identifying anticipated risks in innovation and technology that align with societal needs and public values. While SbD’s overarching goal is worker safety, and it encompasses design within broader goals.

Safety Retrofits Can Cause Challenges, Costs

Companies with existing facilities are finding that safety shortfalls can be problematic, and in hindsight, could have possibly been avoided through better communication.

“I have a couple of organizations right now going through some capital process upgrades,” said Kenneth Baas, CSP, Grainger Safety Consultant for the Southeast Region. “And I’m hearing from their safety managers that they didn’t do a good job on the front end to design safety in. So now they’re scrambling and coming up with all these challenges that they’re facing because of engineering that took place outside of their four walls. Maybe they’re in silos and not communicating well with the site prior to the project execution?”

In effect, the communication that needed to happen prior to the project start is happening after the fact, when the cost to retrofit can be more than if it was completed as part of the initial design and construction project.

“So again, they’re going to have to go in through and engineer or change an exorbitant amount of cost, post installation, as opposed to doing it on the front end,” he said. “I don’t know what the ratio of that is – if it’s 70/30, with 70 percent being they’re not doing a good job communicating on the front end of a project versus 30 percent, that’s not where it needs to be for sure.”

The Safety Responsibility

One of the biggest challenges in addressing this issue is who ultimately owns, or even shares, responsibility. The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) has taken the position that “occupational safety risk should be borne by the owner – the party best able to control the risk – so long as the design professional performs in accordance with the standard of care and applicable codes.”

ACEC noted that designers who follow DfCS guidelines could reallocate safety risk, even when standard contracts are used. These contracts are used by “pure design” firms rather than those who provide design services as part of a construction contract, such as design-build and Engineering, Procurement, Construction (EPC) firms.

Pure design firms traditionally and contractually disclaim safety risk, allocating it fully it to the construction contractor. Research confirms that there’s a simple reason for this. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), while hundreds of colleges and universities offer engineering and design degrees, few include safety topics as part of the required curriculum. In fact, many of these programs are under pressure to cut the existing required curriculum hours and are not looking to add additional safety coursework because there is simply no room for it. This means that many designers and engineers lack the training and awareness to adequately address safety in their design approach.

Finally, if safety concerns are added to the designer’s process, this could result in greater design and construction expenses, increasing the total cost of the construction project, or a project that does not ultimately align with the client’s needs, budget, or goals.

The Case for Safety by Design

Carroll said that fundamentally, the case for improved safety in new construction needs to be built around resources.

“So, how do you get the resources?” he asked. “You build yourself a really good business case. You start talking about ROI, you start figuring out how long it takes you to erect a scaffold or to have an employee grab that ladder, erect that ladder, figure it out and tie it off.”

He then said that the case moves into the cost of prevention.

“And then you start coming into the more gray area of, well, what are we hoping to prevent? And what’s the cost of that?” he asked.

Because incidents and those related costs are all projections and what-ifs, Carroll said it can be difficult to obtain the necessary buy-in and budget from facility managers. But ASSP outlines a range of ways to identify that return on a safety investment beyond raw dollars, such as improved employee satisfaction, better operational efficiency and a public relations boost.

Building permanent industrial safety features into new and retrofit construction, following a thorough safety design review and utilizing PTD principles, may help prevent occupational injuries and fatalities while realizing these related benefits.