County road and bridge crews carry responsibility for keeping themselves, drivers safe / By Maria Sprow
Creating and maintaining a road isn’t the simplest of tasks, even when it involves good ol’ gravel. A quality road crew thinks about things like foreslopes and backslopes and the roadway’s width, pitch and crown, which must be adjusted for every railway crossing, intersection, bridge and curve.
An improper road slope can cause rainwater to stay on the roads, creating potholes and need for more maintenance. Even more significant, potholes and loose stones can cause damage to taxpayers’ vehicles, or cause a resident to lose control of their car.
It’s not easy, especially since it’s all done by utilizing the county’s most expensive and complex machinery, sometimes in areas where drivers whiz by at 40, 50 or 60 miles an hour. While working in the midst of oncoming traffic has its risks, though, most injuries to road and bridge crews happen as a result of operator errors and unsafe practices.
A free one-day workshop recently developed by the Texas Engineering Extension Office and the Texas Association of Counties sought to help train road and bridge crews to use their equipment more effectively and safely. The workshop focuses on the safe and effective use of motor graders, which are used to shape and maintain gravel roads and are some of the heaviest and most expensive pieces of equipment for which a county is liable.
Ernesto Galindo, a loss control specialist with the Texas Association of Counties who spoke at the workshop, said the two organizations decided to join forces to develop the training because many counties are or will be experiencing a turnover in the makeup of their road and bridge crew departments.
“A lot of the experienced equipment operators are about to retire, so counties are having to bring in new road hands, and some of them are not familiar with operation of the work equipment — which could in turn cause accidents,” Galindo said.
Even with an experienced workforce, road and bridge crew accidents happen across the state, and are often fatal, he added. The workplace fatalities have happened both while out on the worksite and back in the county garage while doing repairs, and involve both new and seasoned crew workers. Workers will get pinned between moving parts, crushed underneath a motor grader wheel, thrown from a cab.
“Run-overs and back-overs are our biggest problem, and that mainly happens at the hands of our own equipment,” said Jerry Teeler, the director of Safety and Health at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. “They aren’t wearing the right high-visibility clothing, the right vest, or their back up alarm wasn’t working. People just disregard safety, and I think as we are moving to more and more of this night work that people are doing, we’re going to get a lot more of it. The night work is the worse thing we can do for worker’s safety, because you have more impaired drivers Creating and maintaining a road isn’t the simplest of tasks, even when it involves good ol’ gravel. A quality road crew thinks about things like foreslopes and backslopes and the roadway’s width, pitch and crown, which must be adjusted for every railway crossing, intersection, bridge and curve.
An improper road slope can cause rainwater to stay on the roads, creating potholes and need for more maintenance. Even more significant, potholes and loose stones can cause damage to taxpayers’ vehicles, or cause a resident to lose control of their car.
It’s not easy, especially since it’s all done by utilizing the county’s most expensive and complex machinery, sometimes in areas where drivers whiz by at 40, 50 or 60 miles an hour. While working in the midst of oncoming traffic has its risks, though, most injuries to road and bridge crews happen as a result of operator errors and unsafe practices.
A free one-day workshop recently developed by the Texas Engineering Extension Office and the Texas Association of Counties sought to help train road and bridge crews to use their equipment more effectively and safely. The workshop focuses on the safe and effective use of motor graders, which are used to shape and maintain gravel roads and are some of the heaviest and most expensive pieces of equipment for which a county is liable.
Ernesto Galindo, a loss control specialist with the Texas Association of Counties who spoke at the workshop, said the two organizations decided to join forces to develop the training because many counties are or will be experiencing a turnover in the makeup of their road and bridge crew departments.
“A lot of the experienced equipment operators are about to retire, so counties are having to bring in new road hands, and some of them are not familiar with operation of the work equipment — which could in turn cause accidents,” Galindo said.
Even with an experienced workforce, road and bridge crew accidents happen across the state, and are often fatal, he added. The workplace fatalities have happened both while out on the worksite and back in the county garage while doing repairs, and involve both new and seasoned crew workers. Workers will get pinned between moving parts, crushed underneath a motor grader wheel, thrown from a cab.
“Run-overs and back-overs are our biggest problem, and that mainly happens at the hands of our own equipment,” said Jerry Teeler, the director of Safety and Health at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. “They aren’t wearing the right high-visibility clothing, the right vest, or their back up alarm wasn’t working. People just disregard safety, and I think as we are moving to more and more of this night work that people are doing, we’re going to get a lot more of it. The night work is the worse thing we can do for worker’s safety, because you have more impaired drivers on the road, worker’s minds aren’t working as well, so they are going to be doing dumb things.”
And often with road and bridge crews, non-fatal accidents still involve serious injuries. Many road and bridge crew injuries are selfcaused, particularly by employees who jump or fall from the vehicle’s cab and injure or break their knees, hips or shoulders.
So it’s sound to say a road and bridge crew’s duty to safety must come into play before, during and after they get into their equipment. Otherwise, they can inadvertently hurt themselves, a coworker or a family member driving down the road.
“The dangers exist, and that’s one of the reasons we want to raise awareness,” Galindo said. “We still see operators not wearing seatbelts, or jumping from the cab, or not posting construction signs.”
Safety is a primary focus of the special TEEX training, which is based on a program out of Oklahoma, said TEEX Transportation Training Director Howard McCann. The training makes use of several resources, including videos produced by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and John Deere and personalized advice from expert motor grader operators supplied by heavy equipment vendors.
“I went to an advisory meeting in Oklahoma and they talked about the great demand and success they have had with this motor grader training,” McCann said, adding that the demand is the same here in Texas. “No matter what kind of county you are, you have a motor grader. A county may not have any paved roads, but they will have gravel roads.”
TEEX held an initial set of one-day workshops in March at its Texas A & M University Riverside Campus facilities in College Station. It was offered to counties free-of-charge under the Local Technical Assistance Program and Federal Highway Program. All three sessions were heavily attended, both by heavy equipment operators and county commissioners.
Work shop attendees received expert advice on how to create and maintain safe roads, partly through a video created by the Local Technical Assistance Program and the Minnesota Department of Transportation. The video features Ken Skorseth, the field services manager with the South Dakota Local Technical Assistance Program, who discusses exactly how road and bridge crew workers contribute to public safety with each decision they make.
“I have a tremendous respect for skilled motor grader operators who can do a good job of shaping a gravel road. Chances are, you’ll never have a set of plans or stakes to guide you. It is just your skill to use the levers and operate the machine which produces the correct shape. It’s a tricky combination of art and science,” Skorseth says on the video, in between discussing crowns, pitches, superelevated curves, water drainage, potholes, washboarding, high shoulders and correct gravel blends. “Gravel roads will grow out of shape quickly, sometimes in as little as a week or sometimes, under heavy traffic, in an little as a day. It is a tremendous challenge to do a good job of gravel road maintenance.”
Since then, there has been interest from several counties to take the show on the road. McCann said he is looking for areas that have covered arenas with enough space to do a three-foot cut, so that the heavy equipment can be sufficiently demonstrated and operated even if it rains. He’s also working with heavy equipment vendors to ensure that expert operators are on-hand at the regional workshops. For the March workshops, Mustang Caterpillar, Volvo Construction Equipment Academy and John Deere each sent operators to College Station, generally courtesy of local vendors. The operators spent some time out in the field, allowing attendees hands-on lessons in how to make the correct cuts according to what a road demands. They also did walk around inspections of the equipment, to demonstrate what operators should look for before they go out to a worksite.
Russell Sharpe, an experienced motor grader operator from Ontario who flew to College Station to demonstrate Volvo courtesy of ROMCO Equipment Company, stressed the importance of always performing a walk-around inspection before heading out to a work site.
“You guys have got to think of yourself as professionals,” Sharpe told his students before inspecting his own machine at the TEEX training. “You guys working on the roads save lives every day.”
He then started with his vehicle’s cab and tested the entry steps for stability. Simple things like that help ensure that a person won’t slip or fall when getting on and off the equipment, as do always using what’s known as the threepoint rule: when entering or exiting the cab, a person should always have three points of contact with the stairs and guard rails. Trying to hold something in your hands like a drink or sandwich or another item causes accidents, Sharpe said.
“The most common accidents with a motor grader operator occur getting in and out of the grader,” he said, before moving along and checking other compartments and crevices for dirt, sticks and stones.
It’s important to realize that each aspect of a walk-around vehicle inspection could have repercussions if not done correctly or adequately, Charlie Cotten, an expert motor grader operator working for Mustang Cat, demonstrates how to utilize three Sharpe stressed.
“You don’t want stones or rocks bouncing along the highway if you have to travel along the highway to get to where you are working for the day. If you drop stones this size on the road, they are going to be picked up and thrown onto the windshield of your wife’s car. Smack. She freaks out, into the ditch. You don’t want those kinds of things happening,” he said, moving on to the equipment’s tires and rims, where he checked the bolts and tire pressure.
He moved on to the rest of the vehicle, checking to make sure the engine parts and battery were secure, that caps were loose or tight (according to operator manual specifications), and that nothing is leaking.
All motor grader operators should be familiar with safety symbols to prevent injuries during inspection and maintenance, he added. While the symbols are non-language dependent, some mean more than meets the eye: a sign that could mean “hot” may also mean that a substance can be injected under the skin when under pressure.
It’s also important to check the equipment’s safety features: if windows are clear or dirty, if mirrors are secure, if all the lights work, if the proper warning and caution signs are bright and attached where necessary.
For counties that do experience a road and bridge crew fatality, recovery follows a long road, Galindo said. The black mark a fatality can place on a county’s reputation doesn’t get cleaned away easily.
“The biggest impact is the loss of a fellow worker — the emotional distress it creates with the other workers in the department,” he said. “A lot of them, they are seasoned, experienced operators. A lot of times, because you are around the piece of equipment so often, you tend to drop your guard or get complacent, and it’s a lot easier for you to overlook a safety precaution and take unnecessary chances.”
Monetary impacts are secondary, but costly, especially when there is a wife and children connected to the deceased.
“The (county’s) workers’ compensation pool is going to adjust the benefits to take care of the wife and kids,” Galindo said. “It’s going to make payments to that wife and kids until the kids turn 18, and if they decide to go to college, they can receive payments until they are 21. … This can be very expensive for the county. There is never enough money to replace a loved one.”
Galindo said that oftentimes, a crew’s safety record and practices will improve immediately following a serious injury or fatality, but often times those improvements are only temporary, a sort of impulsive reaction to the tragedy. To keep the safety practices in place, or to integrate them into the department before something horrific happens, Galindo recommended keeping a detailed accident log that chronicles why injuries happened — or could have happened.
“Sometimes counties are not safe, but they are not having any accidents. Its just pure luck,” Galindo said. “If you have a guy who is never wearing his seatbelt, but he’s never been in an accident, is he being unsafe? You bet. If you’re being unsafe and you get into an accident, it’s a very serious matter that needs to be addressed.”