The Bakersfield Californian
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A new sign has been installed on 24th Street, welcoming drivers into downtown Bakersfield. The landscaping is part of the finishing touches the city is putting on the 24th Street widening project, one of the most visible undertakings during the Thomas Roads Improvement Program. Alex Horvath / The Californian
The Griffith Company shoots mulch in the median on 24th Street Thursday morning, putting the final touches on the 24th Street widening project. A ceremony will be held next Friday, commemorating the project's completion. Alex Horvath / The Californian
The Griffith Company installs irrigation lines in the median of 24th Street on Thursday morning. Completion of the 24th Street widening project is drawing to a close, and the city plans on commemorating the event with a ceremony next Friday. Alex Horvath / The Californian
The Griffith Company shoots mulch in the median on 24th Street Thursday morning, putting the final touches on the 24th Street widening project. A ceremony will be held next Friday, commemorating the project's completion. Alex Horvath / The Californian
The Griffith Company shoots mulch in the median on 24th Street Thursday morning, putting the final touches on the 24th Street widening project. A ceremony will be held next Friday, commemorating the project's completion. Alex Horvath / The Californian

City preps for completion of 24th Street widening project

Academic studies and local health authorities find more outbreaks in construction than commonly thought. Permission granted by Griffith Company
Author
Conventional wisdom suggests construction has done relatively well combating the spread of COVID-19 on U.S. jobsites. While there have been outbreaks at high-profile projects such as Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas  and as many as 13 San Francisco Bay Area jobsites , the industry as a whole hasn’t drawn attention for the debilitating scourges that have made news in healthcare, nursing homes and the meatpacking industry. “Our industry has not suffered the kind of widespread workplace outbreaks that have hobbled so many other sectors of the economy,” wrote Stephen Sandherr, CEO of the Associated General Contractors trade association in a letter to members earlier this month, encouraging firms to stay vigilant against COVID-19 amid a recent surge of more than 160,000 new daily cases across the country. But now, academic studies, an increasing amount of local public health data and anecdotal media reports are calling into question construction’s clean bill of health on COVID-19 mitigation. Consider:
Construction had 106 COVID-19 outbreaks in Washington state through Nov. 12, the third highest total for all settings, behind only restaurants and produce packing, according to the Washington State Department of Health. Construction and manufacturing had the third highest total  of all outbreak settings tracked by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services through Nov. 12, behind only long-term care facilities and schools. Construction sites account for the second highest number of COVID-19 clusters  in Nashville, Tennessee, behind only long-term care facilities and ahead of bars, according to the Metro Public Health Department. Construction workers in Texas are five times more likely to be hospitalized  with COVID-19 than workers in other industries, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. A CDC study that examined COVID-19 workplace outbreaks  in Utah found construction to have the second highest number of cases among all industries studied. Conflicting views
These data points contradict the widely held belief that the mitigation steps of screening, personal protective equipment and social distancing practices on jobsites have been effective in curbing workplace spread of the novel coronavirus in the construction industry. They also bring into question, given the lack of a national data clearinghouse of COVID-19 infections by occupation in the U.S., whether the construction industry, which has been deemed essential in most states and continued working, has done as well as it thinks it has in preventing workplace spread. “Outbreaks in construction sites may be very common,” said David Bui, epidemic intelligence service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and co-author of the study that found construction sites in Utah had the highest number of workplace outbreaks behind manufacturing. “Capturing data on workplace outbreaks has been challenging for a lot of health departments, so national level data is not available.”
"Our industry once again finds itself a simple stroke of the pen away from being forced to stop work.”
Stephen Sandherr
CEO, Associated General Contractors of America
The collective numbers have also emerged at a time when several states are walking back re-openings and even shutting down certain business sectors again as cases soar. Three states — Virginia, Michigan and Oregon — have implemented emergency rules in response to the pandemic, including protocols for screening of employees and visitors, physical distancing measures and the use of masks and face shields. The AGC’s Nov. 3 letter to its members urging continued diligence against COVID-19 was motivated by a concern of the initial worksite lockdowns of March returning to the sector. “Unfortunately, the number of confirmed cases has begun to grow at an alarming rate in many parts of the country,” Sandherr wrote in the letter. “It is safe to assume that any number of state and local officials will come under significant pressure to impose comparable new lockdown measures here during the next several weeks and months. In other words, our industry once again finds itself a simple stroke of the pen away from being forced to stop work.”
No national data
Part of the problem, multiple experts contacted for this article said, is that there is no single source for tracking COVID-19 infections across the construction industry on a national level. While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration tracks positive cases in the workplace via its Form 300 Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses, those are only tabulated annually. Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs and strategic initiatives at the AGC, said the association’s position that construction has curtailed widespread outbreaks thus far is grounded in an absence of media and company reports that have pinpointed them in other industries. “It's based on a lack of data,” Turmail said. “Many other sectors of the economy have had widespread shutdowns. Meanwhile, we haven't really heard from members of any kind of significant shutdown because of the coronavirus or spread of coronavirus on the jobsite.”
Construction Dived found news reports of more than 30 outbreaks of COVID-19 on construction sites in the U.S. and Canada. See our tracker here . "Some smaller sites just don't have the capability of having the resources to handle it.”
Remy Pasco
University of Texas researcher
But other industry watchers said there are almost certainly more cases of COVID-19 at construction sites than are being publicly tracked. “When you add it all up, there are outbreaks occurring that are just not getting reported,” said Russell Carr, president of Austin, Texas-based health and safety consultancy Berg Compliance Solutions. Part of the problem, he said, is construction’s “macho” attitude of working through illness, and that workers aren’t financially motivated to honestly report potential exposure, or even positive tests, because they know they’ll miss work if they do. “There’s every incentive to just ignore it and go to work, and no incentive to report it and stay home,” Carr said. “People are just continuing to go to work.”
Turmail said some contractors do offer paid sick leave for workers who test positive for COVID-19. Inconsistent mitigation practices
Remy Pasco, a graduate research assistant and one of the author’s of the University of Texas study, said part of the reason why construction workers are five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 is simply due to the fact that they have continued to go to jobsites during the pandemic, while those in other professions have been working remotely. “I should note that the rest of the population we compared these workers to is everyone not in the construction industry,” Pasco said. “There are some people in the other industries that were considered essential workers, and some that were probably working from home as well.”
Workers came onsite through entry screening turnstiles that helped mitigate outbreaks on the Allegiant Stadium site this year. Mortenson Construction
 
He said the study's comparison group, which was drawn from anonymized data of more than 2,200 COVID-19 patients admitted to Austin-area hospitals through Aug. 20, included individuals in the healthcare, farming, education and legal sectors, as well as retired and unemployed workers. He also said the researchers saw evidence of inconsistent mitigation practices from jobsite to jobsite, especially between large sites to small ones. “I don't want to generalize and say that all construction work sites are not doing enough, because we know that's not true,” Pasco said. “We have seen exemplary work sites, where people are wearing masks, they're washing their hands and they're trying to socially distance as much as possible. But then you go one block further and some smaller sites just don't have the capability of having the resources to handle it.”
The study, published in the American Medical Association’s peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open journal Oct. 29, set out to test a model that was developed to help the city of Austin determine what would happen if construction sites stayed open during the pandemic. With a high degree of accuracy, it proved the model’s predictions  that construction workers are four to five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. “It's not something we suspect anymore,” Pasco said. “It's something we've seen and established.”
But Pasco also acknowledged the study didn’t look at causality, and instead just observed data collected from COVID-19 patients who worked in numerous industries, including construction. In other words, the study didn’t analyze or conduct contact tracing to determine how those patients contracted the virus. Off-site exposure
Turmail pointed to a later report suggesting that the COVID-19 outbreaks among construction workers in Austin were due to socializing away from work , and not necessarily their actions on jobsites. A safety stand down in Austin, Texas, this spring helped to educate workers about the importance of social distancing and other jobsite measures. Austin AGC
 
“Really the challenge here is that there is sort of the unique demographics of the construction industry, particularly in Austin, and kind of living conditions and social settings are more of a factor than the lack of jobsite safety precautions,” Turmail said. “It doesn't change the fact that a higher percentage of people with coronavirus obviously still poses a higher risk for other workers, and that we've got to protect against that.”
Executives at large construction companies, including New York-based Plaza Construction, Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction and San Jose, California-based subcontractor Rosendin Electric said an increasing challenge across the industry has been policing workers’ behavior away from the job. “When we've had COVID infections on our projects and we've investigated those through contract tracing, the vast majority of those have been from outside of work activities,” said Derek Cunz, senior vice president at Mortenson, which was part of a joint venture with McCarthy to build Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, where at least 31 workers tested positive for COVID-19 in May. “We’ve been reminding people and communicating more now about making safe choices outside of work.”
Recent research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health suggests that construction workers have a higher prevalence for participating in the types of social and other behaviors that put them at risk for COVID-19 infection . The study found that six health risk behaviors were more common in the construction industry: smoking, smokeless tobacco use, binge drinking, no leisure-time physical activity, not always using a seatbelt and getting less than seven hours of sleep a day. Outdoor work
Several sources contacted for this article said that if COVID-19 numbers were significantly higher on construction sites than commonly thought, the public would have heard about that by now, even in the absence of a national data reporting framework. Take, for instance, the experience of Dr. Dan Carlin, CEO of New Hampshire-based JobSiteCare, which provides telemedicine services to remote construction sites. Since the onset of the pandemic, he has coordinated daily COVID-19 screenings of 10,500 workers for Florida-based Moss Construction. “Where before maybe work was bringing it home, now maybe it’s going to be more home bringing it to work." Brian Knudsen
Vice presdident, Andersen Construction
In that timeframe, he’s found just 171 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among those construction workers, or less than 1.6% of the entire workforce. And due to those daily screenings, which include a mandatory temperature check, Moss hasn’t had any shutdowns during that time. But while Carlin pointed to screening, social distancing and mask wearing as the holy grail of mitigation measures that has helped produce those results, as a doctor, he also knows many of construction’s underlying characteristics are on his side, too. Those include the industry’s practice of donning personal protective equipment as a job requirement in normal times, as well as many work sites essentially being located outdoors, which has proven to be one of the strongest deterrents to COVID-19 spread. “When this party started back in February, we thought it was a surface virus,” said Carlin, a former medical officer in the U.S. Navy who also oversaw the WNBA’s season bubble, which had zero COVID-19 positives, this year. “But what we’ve learned is the way the virus really knocks us out is when it gets in the air in a closed environment.”
Carlin said that if he was forced to choose between handwashing and wearing a mask to mitigate COVID-19 spread, he’d choose a mask, hands down. “Honestly, that's the most important thing, is you've got to limit atmospheric exposure,” Carlin said. “And the way to do that is work outside.”
Lack of comprehensive data
Brian Knudsen, vice president at Portland, Oregon-based Andersen Construction, learned that the hard way when a pre-construction meeting held indoors in October led to an outbreak at the company. In all, 16 cases have been linked to the meeting, including 13 employees and 3 close contacts,  according to the Jackson County Health Department. Knudsen said people were wearing masks during the meeting, but that sometimes workers take their masks off indoors, and instead choose to maintain social distance. “We’ve learned that this is a very contagious illness,” Knudsen said. Like others in the industry, he sees increased prevalence of workers’ activities off the jobsite contributing to increased risk on the job now. “It feels like it’s going to kind of flip around, where before maybe work was bringing it home, now maybe it’s going to be more home bringing it to work,” Knudsen said. The lack of comprehensive data on the number of outbreaks in construction nationally leaves the industry to practice a guessing game of where the numbers truly are, related to other sectors. “So, we’ve seen widespread outbreaks in other industries, but we haven’t seen them in construction,” said Jack Dennerlein, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston who studies occupational health and safety in construction. “But we don’t have a good surveillance system, either. "So what we might be seeing with these outbreaks in other industries may just be the tip of the iceberg, poking above the fray of our poor data system. Below the water, there might be some stuff going on in construction, and we just haven’t been able to measure it.”

Construction's COVID-19 record might be worse than you think

Permission granted by Griffith Company
Author
Construction resumed Monday in six San Francisco Bay Area counties and the city of Berkeley, California, under new protocols for safety and worker distancing, but jobsites won't look quite the same as they did before the coronavirus outbreak hit. The new guidelines are based on input from the Associated General Contractors of California covering social distancing, daily employee health assessments, jobsite signage, cleaning protocols and other precautions to mitigate the risks of the virus on construction sites. Here, Construction Dive talks with AGC of California CEO Peter Tateishi about the reopening of work and how jobsites will look going forward. CONSTRUCTION DIVE: What are some of the top new protocols being introduced? PETER TATEISHI: We’re seeing a standardization of new protocol on jobsites, including the following. Field crews and jobsite administrative positions are placed into teams so that they only work in small groups, limiting potential exposure to full workforces on jobsites.​
Peter Tateishi
 
Daily assessments and temperature checks are being implemented prior to entering a jobsite for the day. Carpooling is discouraged or eliminated; food trucks have been banned; and companies have set up outdoor areas for breaks and lunches that allow for proper social distancing protocols. Companies have increased mental health and wellness activities for employees who have been required to work from home. How have construction sites changed since the pandemic began? TATEISHI: Construction sites are taking on new life. Companies must work with owners to re-imagine “essential” onsite personnel, create shift teams on projects to limit exposure, and even structure the layout of the way work is performed in shifts differently. We’ve seen the biggest transformation in the way the industry has embraced the use of technology. We are seeing owners across the state using updated electronic bidding platforms, virtual inspections and online permitting. Throughout the pandemic, the construction industry has already started to embrace new technologies and systems, and we expect this to continue even after this is over. How about construction offices, do they have a different environment as well? TATEISHI: Both field offices and headquarters have been impacted. Before this crisis, the industry had shifted to more of a collaborate environment, housing all owner, design and construction teams for the same project within the same office with the goal of opening lines of communication to strengthen the team. However, with the social distancing requirements, that setting will need to be revisited in the future. TATEISHI: Are contractors concerned about being able to meet the new guidelines? The construction industry always has and always will keep safety the top priority. Like anything in business, it takes time and resources to ensure that all of the regulations are being met. However, our members who have been deemed essential from day one of these orders have been implementing the necessary safety guidelines to ensure the health and safety of their workforce. These new guidelines are best practices and for the most part, are attainable. There are still some valid concerns around the availability of third-party “Jobsite Safety Accountability Supervisors,” but we continue to work with our members and local governments to ensure both compliance and challenges our industry faces with this new requirement. It’s not always easy, but we know protecting the health of our crews and the public health is the number one priority. ​Do you anticipate that they will add time and costs to projects? TATEISHI: With additional personnel and regulations come additional costs. Our members have been able to hit critical path work on-schedule with project look-aheads and to anticipate workforce needs to reduce potential impacts.

Bay Area construction opens to new set of rules and guidance

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CLINTON TOWNSHIP — Two men are dead tonight after the pickup truck they were in collided with a freight train on Friday in Lycoming County . Officials on the scene near Montgomery said both were construction workers at the new gas power plant being built in Lycoming County. Griffith Company, a construction company based out of California, has confirmed that both men who died in the crash were working at the construction site where the new power plant is being built. Griffith Company said the two men were coming back to work after their lunch break when the truck was hit. A United Rental pickup truck is dented and upside down. It sits feet from the railroad crossing where it was hit by a train here on Brick Church Road in Clinton Township near Montgomery. Troopers said the truck was headed over the railroad crossing when it collided with a Norfolk Southern Train. The coroner said two men in the truck were killed. He has not yet released their names, but said they are from out of state. “I feel sorry that somebody lost their life,” said Bill Pewterbaugh from Clinton Township. Pewterbaugh lives right by the railroad crossing, he was inside his home when the crash happened. “Basic train noise and a thud,” said Pewterbaugh. Officials said the passenger died at the scene. A Life Flight helicopter was called in. Officials said the driver of the truck was taken to Muncy Hospital and later flown to Geisinger Medical Center near Danville where he died. Griffith Company representatives were also at the crash scene. They told Newswatch 16 both victims were working at the nearby construction site where a power plant is being built. The company says the men were coming back from lunch when the crash happened. Pewterbaugh says the trains passing through here are loud. He’s surprised the driver didn’t stop. “They lay on their horns a lot and they are extremely loud so you really can’t miss that. Unfortunately, it costs some lives, so,” said Pewterbaugh. State Police are still investigating what may have caused the crash in Clinton Township near Montgomery.


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