A report from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) out of Austin, TX, showed that people killed in accidents in road construction zones increased 33% over 2020.

In an industry with high injury and accident rates, many raise their eyebrows at new statistics that reveal rising use of cocaine and marijuana. Moreover, drug tests uncover illicit substance abuse after work-related accidents. Opiates and oxycodone also show up in drug screenings.

2020 data shows that the construction industry's suicide rate sits at 45.3 per 100,000 male workers, substantially above the national average of 27.4 per 100,000 male workers.

A study from the Boston University School of Medicine indicates that construction workers tend to bring home toxic metals; this impacts their families, especially young children. In addition, the study identified up to 30 toxic metal residues on clothing and skin.

Divers in Parkland, FL, from the Broward County Sheriff's Office and Coral Springs Fire Departments pulled a body from a Parkland canal, believed to be a construction worker who crashed into the channel. A short time later, tow trucks removed the dump truck from the murky depths.

For decades, strict laws have governed dangerous waste handling, including lead-based paint and asbestos. EPA guidelines leave no room for speculation regarding contractor disclosure and mitigation of hazardous materials.

Investigators and witnesses claim that an argument on December 28th over ownership of a piece of construction equipment culminated into a fatal shooting.

Although Disney keeps quiet about their construction projects—going so far as to own their own company to build in their resorts and theme parks—industry insiders suspect significant damage on the construction site of the upcoming Disney World "Guardians of the Galaxy" roller coaster.

Two factors caused a winter grassland fire to sweep through Colorado’s Front Range, says Johnathon Overpeck, professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan: parched weather and the encroachment of suburbs into grasslands.

Last week an underground parking garage in Lakewood, Ohio collapsed at Lakewood's Marine Towers Apartments. The structure came down just before 10:00 am on Thursday, December 23rd.

All buildings stand in potential disaster zones, be it tornadoes, hurricanes, or earthquakes, says Nadim Wehbe, the John M. Hanson Professorship of Structural and Construction Engineering and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at South Dakota State University in Brookings.

The Department of Transportation in Connecticut in conjunction with the state police plans to create a safer environment for road construction crews. In 2021, more than 900 accidents occurred in construction zones; this resulted in four fatalities.

On the evening of Saturday, December 4, scaffolding broke at the Hemisphere Condominium in Hallandale Beach, Florida, leaving two construction workers dangling by their safety harnesses and entangled in scaffolding debris.

A ferocious fire tore through a construction site and the surrounding buildings on December 1st, in Upland, a suburb of Los Angeles. Fire crews say "radiant heat and exposed lumber" sparked the blaze. They didn’t clarify the radiant heat source.

Fodor’s, a famed international travel guide, cites notorious construction phenomena. Whether by poor site selection, lousy building materials, or oversights in architectural design, each of the guide’s featured buildings manifests spectacular problems.

The Panama Canal, which has connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans since 1913, stands as one of the deadliest construction sites ever. An estimated 25,000 workers died; countless more experienced injuries. Now, 140 years after construction began in 1881, Panama remembers those accidents and the problems that caused them.

A report issued by Dodge Data & Analytics and The Blue Book Network cites movement in the construction industry toward data-driven safety and digital record keeping. However, the report also uncovers holes in the adoption of this technology.

At Expo Dubai, construction officials reported a 0.03 accident frequency rate (contrasted against 0.1, The United States latest numbers); this came amid adverse working condition reports. More than 25 million visitors have visited The Expo Dubai, a massive undertaking similar to the World's Fair. Construction for the Expo began more than six years ago.

Despite the rapidly growing population, the pandemic-driven boom in residential housing sales and the high demand for builders with large backlogs, construction in the Lone Star State looks dismal.

Construction workers commit suicide at three times the national average. Within the construction industry, already the most dangerous profession, more workers die from suicide than job injuries and accidents. Construction has the second-highest suicide rate of any sector in the United States.

The controversial 58-story Millennium Tower in San Francisco, CA, continues to sink. As of February 2020, the tower had sunk 17 inches since it first opened in 2009. Recent readings show that, despite construction efforts to reinforce the building, it has descended another inch.

According to the most recent data from OSHA, construction continues its poor streak as the most dangerous industry in the United States, accounting for one in five workplace deaths.

After the death of seven construction workers so far this year in New York City, including three in May, the city’s Department of Buildings plans to crack down on safety violations.

A preliminary report issued by the Norwegian company DNV and other international experts—prepared at the request of the Mexican government—found that at least six construction violations led to the collapse of the metro train last month that killed 26.

A blistering heatwave torments the western United States. The heat significantly affects people who work outside, such as construction and farm laborers. In the past week, authorities have put advisories in place for an area containing more than 50-million residents.

As the founders of Build Change claim, it’s not the earthquake that kills people; it’s the collapse of poorly built structures. With the release of their new Intelligence Supervision Assistant for Construction app, they hope to save lives with open-source artificial intelligence.

Californians face the increasing severity of wildfires at the beginning of fire season. The Los Angeles City Council seeks to slow fires with a new proposal: City Building Code Fire District 1 Expansion. This initiative expands fire safety measures in dangerous neighborhoods, such as Silver Lake and Pacific Palisades. The proposal severely limits the use of wood framing in large buildings (over 150,000 square feet).

Amid the rise of autonomous vehicles, some wonder how these cars will react to unexpected events. A car from the Waymo autonomous taxi service in Chandler, Arizona, experienced trouble handling interaction with road construction.

According to new data released from the Federal Highway Association (FHWA), in 2019 (the year with the most recently compiled data), 842 fatalities occurred in work-zone crashes, compared to 757 in 2018, representing an 11.2% increase; this means the highest number of deaths in work zones since 2004.

Nobody in the construction industry sees the material shortage as new news; lumber has climbed more than 300% since March of 2020. According to a survey from the Associated Building Contractors, lack of materials competes for top concern among contractors, alongside the labor shortage.

While many solutions to the pandemic appear easy—washing hands, wearing masks, and social distancing—much in urban design and architecture complicates strict guidelines adherence. How do you stay six feet apart if a sidewalk or a corridor is only four feet wide? What about pressing the button to cross the street or ride the elevator while trying to avoid high-touch areas?

On March 31, 2021, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that makes recreational marijuana legal in New York. Anyone over the age of 21 can possess up to 3 ounces of the drug. As far as construction crews, a simple solution seems obvious: make a rule that no one may work while impaired. But the problem's complexity requires a more involved solution.

Facing a new project in 2019, Keith Switzer of INTEC Group, found himself in a meeting about safety on a new four-story housing project, and he decided he was going to take this seriously. It began by making a list. The meeting turned into a brainstorming session where, as he puts it, they said “if you did this differently, this would be a safer way of doing XYZ.”

On February 12, exactly one year after the California-based company, Level 10 Construction, announced it had reached 6 million man-hours worked without a lost-time incident, they announced the next milestone: 7-million hours and seven straight years without a lost-time incident.

According to a new report from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), “Opioids have commonly been prescribed to construction workers to treat pain caused by these occupational injuries. Workers in the industry also have higher rates of opioid overdose death compared with other groups.”

According to a new study from the University of Texas (UT), construction workers are far more likely to be hospitalized for coronavirus than workers in other segments.

Jeffrey Mansfield, a design director who was born Deaf, is keenly aware of how some architecture serves to set the disabled free and some stifles and traps them. Influencing work at the MASS Design Group put him on course to enter a multi-year course of research exploring how deafness has shaped space (or been shaped by it). For his work, he was recently awarded the Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

In a year that has been fraught with wildfires burning across the west, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres, a new app is being piloted in Arizona to locate the source of fires by mapping hundreds of construction sites.

A study from McKinsey reported that a large majority of projects miss their deadlines by 40% or more, which causes all sorts of headaches—most of them financial. Some of the most common reasons for construction mistakes are:

On September 16th, two cranes at an Austin, TX, construction site collided. In the accident, 16 workers were injured and taken to local hospitals. None of the injuries are considered critical, but experts say that the incident highlights a significant lapse of workplace safety awareness.

A shooting at a Culver City, California, construction site this week shows how dangerous an already dangerous profession can be. Construction, which hosts a number of the most dangerous jobs in the workforce, including carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters, and more, has always been a risky business. The general laborer is the 17th most dangerous job in America, while roofers are at #4, heavy machine operators are at #8, and steelworkers at #9. (The most dangerous jobs remain in the logging industry.)

Construction workers got more than they bargained for this week while doing routine construction work on a park in Washington DC—they discovered an undetonated World War 2 era bomb.

We talk all the time about dangers on the jobsite—and there are many—but a new study from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) suggests that it may be during the off-the-clock time that construction workers are at more serious risk of injury or illness. And the behaviors don’t just apply to workers, but to construction management as well.

Construction workers in road construction are among the highest rated for danger or death, so one state is sending police undercover to try to save lives—by dressing as construction workers.

While damage control and preparation is becoming an increasingly important factor in planning our cities, certain extraordinary circumstances are something we can’t plan for but which require quick architectural responses that offer aid to those affected—and often the difference is life and death.

Low-skilled construction workers in the U.K., urged back to work by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have one of the highest rates of death from the virus.

The IT Network and security company Brash Concepts has begun adding thermal cameras to jobsites in New York City. The cameras measure the body temperature of workers to identify who may be running a fever (an early warning sign of COVID-19).

Businesses all over the globe are facing the ever-increasing challenge of keeping their employees safe and complying with safety guidelines to slow the spread of COVID-19.

The construction magazine Construction Dive took an in-depth look at what is coming down the pipeline for jobsites in a post-coronavirus world.

In 2006, in Tugela Ferry, South Africa, an extremely virulent, drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis raged through a hospital—and the building was partially to blame. The hospital was not designed for infection control. The transmission of the disease was through particles suspended in the air, inhaled by patients in a poorly ventilated building with overcrowded waiting areas.

While construction continues in many states, social distancing is remaining a rule on worksites, and it often makes things difficult for workers to move around the building—and especially difficult for site managers to patrol them and make sure they’re following the rules. And not following the rules could, in many areas, land them heavy fines.

With a third of the United States on lockdown, including the three largest cities (New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago), something is continuing unabated—construction. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom labeled construction as an “essential service” alongside things like healthcare and food service. And while some construction projects are easily labeled as essential—things like road repair, and maintenance of water and transit infrastructure, it may be hard to understand what is so essential about the construction of housing or commercial projects.

Italy has been the country hit the hardest by the coronavirus, seeing an almost 9% death rate (more than 8,000 deaths as of March 27th), and the country is struggling to handle the massive need for hospital space. That’s why the architecture firm Carlo Ratti Associati designed an intensive care unit that can be easily packaged and sent to areas in need.

Construction on a temporary field hospital started on Wednesday on a Shoreline soccer field near Seattle, Washington. As of March 19th, Washington had over 1300 cases of the virus, one of the hardest-hit states in the country.

All across the nation there has been a dramatic shortage in several essential items, but one in particular is protective masks. While hospitals have masks in storage for their needs, the coronavirus pandemic has all but depleted their stores of the precious safety equipment—and they haven’t been helped by the members of the panicked public who bought through Amazon, and other online retailers’, stocks in a matter of hours. This has left emergency workers scrambling to find masks, with some nurses and doctors resorting to using bandannas and strips of cloth.

Steve Lesser, the chair of Becker’s Construction law practice, says the key words right now are “Wait and see.”

Last week ConExpo went ahead as planned in Las Vegas, bringing in 130,000 attendees to the once-every-three-years event. The expo takes up 2.7 million square feet of space and is truly staggering in its scope. Taking place on March 10, before most travel bans and mass closures were instituted, the expo move forward on schedule.

Even though there have been very few cases of the coronavirus confirmed in the United States, it has already impacted the construction industry in several places and may spread to more.

Even as smartphones are breaking open the world of construction with new apps and technologies that are radically changing the face of the industry, there is a problem that is plaguing job sites and doesn’t seem to have any sign of stopping soon: the presence of mobile phones.

Construction zones on roadways have always been dangerous, and many strategies have been tried to deal with them, including increasing fines for speeding in those areas, increasing patrols by law enforcement, and giving construction workers the power to tag and report reckless drivers.

Expected to reach $54 billion by 2023, the wearable tech market offers to transform the construction industry through the ability to improve safety and efficiency.

Drones fulfill many roles in the construction sphere, everything from giving a basic overhead view of the jobsite to maintaining track of materials, machinery and people. Contractors use them for comparing as-planned construction projects to as-built projects, as well as optimizing the grade of the terrain and recording images and videos.

A new study from New York University shows that construction workers are more likely to overdose on opioids than people in any other profession. Much of this has to do with the risk of injury on the jobsite, as well as long working hours where workers may feel the need to take ‘just one more pill’ to get through the day.

Wearable tech has been part of construction jobsites over the last few years, but analysts predict you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

RK Construction, a 55-year-old construction company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, has become a model of what it means to confront mental health problems head on, according to a recent report on NPR.

New York City, which is a hotbed of construction, has a startling problem with worksite safety, and it’s only growing. In 2015, there were 472 construction-related injuries, but that number has jumped a staggering 61% to 761 last year. And the city is cracking down.

Everyone remembers Ellen Ripley donning the yellow construction exoskeleton and battling the mother alien, but did you know that construction exoskeletons are in use today?

While we try to keep you informed on construction news, there’s so much that we at PowerTools can’t cover. Here is a list of ten great construction-related podcasts that can help you keep abreast of everything newsworthy in the industry.

Construction suffers $11 billion in losses every year in damage due to fire, water, theft and—worst of all—worker deaths. Despite construction only accounting for 7% of the work force, 21% of workplace deaths occur at construction sites.

Construction is booming, and companies are trying to pack as much work into the summer months as possible, but a very real danger lurks out under the sun. According to a new study, construction workers sweltering in the heat are dying at an alarming—and increasing—rate.

A new law in the state of Minnesota allows construction workers to flag traffic violators who are driving unsafely in construction zones.

At a burning apartment complex in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a father had to lean out a window and drop his 2-month-old baby into the arms of a rescuing construction worker. The father was trapped on the second floor. Seconds later, the worker caught and saved a toddler as well.

Last week, after a particularly bad year for workplace accidents, 4000 construction workers took a break from their jobs to take a moment to reflect on safety. More than 50 companies and organizations joined in the second annual Construction Safety Stand-Down, a program hosted by the Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Safety Association

The United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data showing that, between 2012 and 2017, the construction and extraction industries have the highest suicide rates of any industry tracked, growing at a rate of 43.6 (per 100,000) in 2012 to 53.2 in 2017. This problem is not just centered in the USA, but is recognized globally.

Introducing Sidney Coleman, one of hh2 Cloud Services’ customer service specialists! Sidney is a part of the customer support team and has been at hh2 since April of 2018. Current customers may have had the opportunity...

Much has been written in the last two days about the fire at the London tragedy at Grenfell Tower, but The Telegraph, a British paper, has put together a scathing article outlining eight failures that led to such a...

Fallout from the Grenfell Tower, which killed 80 due in large part to the cladding, a form of exterior siding. The cladding allowed for a flammable, chimney-like structure that spread a fire at a catastrophic rate...

At least 17 people died, and at least 78 more were injured in London’s Grenfell Tower fire yesterday. And while many things affected the growth of the fire—a spark from a cigarette on an eighth-floor balcony, a gas...

When thinking of health protections in the construction industry, it may surprise many to learn that the industry is helping to lead the charge in mental health awareness and care. Safety concerns are not just...

My first day in the construction industry, back in 2003, a contractor, who was working on the roof of our warehouse, fell through a gap and died. He was not wearing a harness, despite it being required by both law and...