Rarely is it an option to shut down a road while crews work on it. This means that you will have your crews out working while people are driving by. As your crews break up the road surface, they can create hazards for motorists, but motorists also create a hazard to your workers as they drive by. To keep everyone safe, you need to make sure that you properly use the safety equipment that you have available. 

Proper Sign Placement

There are typically two types of signs that you will have to place on a construction site:

1. For starters, you will need to place signs to warn motorists about hazards in the roadway. For example, you might have a bump where the pavement ends, you could have a sharp shoulder, or you could have some other hazard. In order to keep motorists safe, you need to place the sign warning of a hazard far enough away from the hazard itself so that motorists have time to react appropriately. 

2. You will also have signs to warn motorists about the need to stop. You need to make sure that your signs that warn people about an upcoming stop are visible before motorists might run into a line of stopped cars. Giving people time to react before a stop will help to avoid collisions.

Proper Placement of Lights

When you have crews working at night, the number of cars on the road should be fewer than the number of cars you would have during the day, but you have to worry about visibility. In order for workers to do safe, quality work, you need to have bright floodlights that can bathe the work area in light. These lights will need to be mobile so that they can easily be repositioned as needed. 

Proper Clothing Regulations

Just because you issue a reflective vest or other safety clothing to your workers doesn't mean that they will work in it. Maybe a worker gets hot in his vest, or he feels like the vest restricts his movement, or—there are dozens of reasons why workers take off their safety gear. In order to keep your workers safe, you should have foremen in place who will regularly check to make sure that workers are wearing the right clothing. 

Safety on a road construction site should be the highest priority. Crippling injury or death is not something that you can fix with a little overtime, so even if taking necessary precautions slows you down, don't skimp when it comes to keeping your workers safe. Talk to people like MS Unlimited for more information.